It's a pretty historic day in Redmond as Microsoft has revealed intentions to make .NET, the software framework that primarily runs on Windows, a cross-platform product that'll work on both Mac OS X and Linux. Over the coming months, Microsoft will also be open sourcing the full server-side .NET Core stack.
It doesn't stop there, however, as Microsoft introduced a new free (and full-featured) edition of Visual Studio called Visual Studio Community 2013. It features access to the full Visual Studio extensibility ecosystem and support for targeting any platform.
In a blog post on the matter, Microsoft corporate vice president of the developer division, S. Somasegar, said they've been working closely with the Mono community to open source .NET.
Miguel de Icaza from Mono said it's an exciting time for .NET developers and they are going to blend the best technologies from .NET into Mono and the cross-platform capabilities of Mono into .NET to give C# developers the best of both worlds.
As you've no doubt noticed over the past several months, CEO Satya Nadella has a radically different idea of the type of company that Microsoft should be.
A few months after taking office in February, he announced plans to shed 18,000 jobs in order to become a leaner and more agile company. Those efforts wrapped up just a couple of weeks ago as the last 3,000 employees were sent packing.
Developers interested in the open source .NET project can get started over at GitHub.