A New Era for .NET: .NET Core 5 Open Source

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnet/archive/2014/11/12/announcing-net-2015-preview-a-new-era-for-net.aspx

• .NET Core 5 is open source on GitHub
• Microsoft will support .NET Core 5 on Windows, Linux and Mac.
• Microsoft has contributed .NET Core 5 to the .NET Foundation
• .NET Framework 4.6 reference source now uses the MIT license
• Renewed collaboration with the Mono Project

What does it mean for Unity?

 

I just read about it here: http://www.wired.com/2014/11/microsoft-open-sources-net-says-will-run-linux-mac/ and ran back over to the forum

I'm curious to see how long it takes and the quality of the product that comes out on the other side - ie how well does stuff work on Linux and MacOS. Especially when it comes to things like Forms that have close ties to Windows.

Personally, I think it'd be great to use Unity backed by a truly cross-platform (and current!) .NET runtime.

 

And there goes 90% percent of the arguments againt C#. Soon-to-be truely cross-platorm as well as fully open source. This is so awesome! I really hope to see some performance improvements on the Mac and Linux side in the somewhat near future now that this is a thing.

 

Just read about this on winsupersite.com. Maybe I missed it, but do they mention the license?

Yeah. What does it mean for Unity 7.

 

Did I mention Visual Studio Community 2013? A free version of VS for small teams that supports extensions!

http://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-community-vs

 

What open source license is Microsoft using for .NET Core?

MIT.

What can you do with the software? Are there restrictions?

The MIT license plainly states that licensed software can be used “without restriction”.

 

So, at least now all the special loathing that Microsoft always seemed to get dissipates a little.

All monopolies are the same. From Microsoft to Google(AdSense) to PayPal. Once they see no meaningful competition they begin to treat their consumers like trash. I always thought some of this hatred directed at MS was irrational

 

I'm wondering more what it means for Mono? Who is going to pay for Mono license once .NET is built/ported by the community for linux/mac/mobile etc.?

 

Microsoft will always get hate, because its cool to hate Microsoft.
Google's motto is "Don't be evil."
How is that even possible for a corporation?

But back on topic.This is interesting, but unfortunately, we as the end users probably won't see any benefits from this in the near future. Unless UT have been working behind the scenes with Microsoft.

 

GG Microsoft. GG

Sadly it will still probably be years before Unity can get to that point, since it's still won't be as cross compatible as they will like/need.

You still need/want an IDE and debugger, so there should still be some room in that market.

 

Miguel de Icaza (Xamarin) was just on stage telling something about Mono and cross-platform developing with http://www.omnisharp.net/. Intellisense in Sublime on a Mac.


Rewind to somewhere around 3:32:00 in this livestream http://channel9.msdn.com/

 

Especially considering they have a native compiler in the works called Project N.

http://microsoft-news.com/microsoft...hat-will-improve-apps-performance-on-windows/

http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-show...ion-project-n-compiler-technology-7000023156/

 

*ahem* Don't forget open source compiler API:
http://roslyn.codeplex.com/

 

This news combined with IL2CPP tech could make some things very interesting.

I had someone ask me to answer a question on Quora, "What new improvements are in Unity 8"... was rather surprised, and then realized it was in reference to Ubuntu.

 

Aaaaand....... Preview for Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0
http://unityvs.com/news/

 

so, what does this mean for Unity?

 

Maybe sometime it will stop to be a pile of junk.

As far as I understand, now they can throw Mono completely and migrate to original .NET.
And use VS as the main IDE.
But that must be a long way.

 

Thanks.

 

Well in the short term it would mean better Mac and Linux support as everything could run on the .NET 5 core. However there is a caveat... the problem with Xamarin isn't the framework... it's the runtime. Xamarin is what enables .NET to run on iOS, Android, etc. So, either Android and iOS will have to decide to support .NET 5.0 Core as a development platform, or you'll still need something like Xamarin to AOT it and enable it to run.

The good news is that the culmination of the open technologies (.NET Core, Compiler, Roslyn API, etc) will make it far easier for people to create products to compete with Xamarin, and possibly even allow Unity to develop their own... although IL2CPP seems like it might be a better path for those platforms and may even be the way forward for Unity on other platforms.

To me, what is crucial is that Unity get their framework version updated... support better garbage collection... support new language features like await and async and some of the new concurrent collection goodness. This becomes much more feasible now. The opening of .NET Core and Microsoft supporting it to run on Mac and Linux means that Unity will be able to base the editor off of .NET rather than Mono still have it run on Mac and Linux and could lead to better support of a Linux editor even though that encapsulates a very tiny user base.

 

I'm pretty sure it'll be better than Mono.

 

I'd have been happy with just Visual Studio Express supporting UnityVS in some manner, but this is so much better.

 

I quickly looked, but couldn't find an answer regarding plugins but it might be worth downloading http://www.visualstudio.com/news/vs2013-community-vs (new free VS2013 community edition) and see if it works with UnityVS.

 

Started running the web installer when I saw the news.

 

It will work with UnityVS just fine. It's just a renamed version of visual studio professional.

I'm actually going to install and fire up Visual Studio 2015 Preview tonight and Visual Studio Tools for Unity 2.0

 

I was holding off, but once I found out resharper already had support for it in version 9 I started the download.

 

If the .NET Native compiler also goes open source and cross platform, it's essentially game-over for IL2CPP.

 

more than past time to dump mono...

also thanks for the links to free vs and link to vs for unity

im going to try it and hopefully im done with mono editor!

lets hope unity moves to be done with mono runtime as well!

 

Good to know! I'm still on Resharper 8. Haven't had a need to purchase an upgrade license yet but I will once VS 2015 is released. Since I won't be using 2015 for production I won't need to worry about it.

 

Microsoft has always treated developers extremely well and had extremely good developer products.

It's all ballmer's genetics in their to believe that wrangling of developers is the most important thing ever. DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS

And rally it was, Windows sucked, people only used it because the windows only apps it had. MS Is trying to save some face here I think. But it's super smart. I think it will work. I hope it will. C# is a really good language.

 

Which is part of why I never understood the almost irrational aversion to Microsoft technology, especially in the Silicon Valley hive mind.

 

I'm in Omaha, NE which is in the heart of the silicon prairie. Lots of development on the Microsoft stack around here and far less of that west coast aversion. Actually, most of the devs around here consider themselves to be pretty technosexual. They may specialize, but aren't opposed to particular technologies (in general... there are still plenty of exceptions).

 

Eventually, but not just yet.

Until the open sourced .NET becomes available everywhere where Mono matters or where some specifics of Mono are used, Mono will continue to be used.
- http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2014/Nov-12.html

First, convergence.

Mono is an important part of the .NET ecosystem, particularly for client scenarios (ex: Xamarin). We will look for ways to collaborate with Mono developers and encourage them to take our code to improve Mono. We will also look for opportunities to improve .NET Core with MIT-licensed Mono code.
- https://github.com/Microsoft/dotnet

16:00 http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Visual-Studio/Connect-event-2014/017

 

all this just drives another nail in the mono coffin...

wow the free VS2013 community edition
http://www.visualstudio.com/news/vs2013-community-vs

is amazing, about to try it with vs for unity (keep fingers crossed)
http://unityvs.com

update 1...

its installing (aye, my mono develop nightmare is almost over)

update 2...

it installed! starting unity to see if i can edit and debug!

update 3...

ok it worked great! i can now use it fully, including debugging, instead of mono develop!

 

I think @movra has it right. This really could be the start of a new era.

I have a client project that's currently an ASP.Net web app that my client wants made into native apps for iOS and Android.

I love the idea of using Visual Studio to build those apps.

As far as Unity is concerned, the potential to replace mono for various platforms is just amazing.

 

Microsoft could have had a monopoly on developer tools if they had been more platform agnostic from the beginning, but they were too stubborn and refused to accept that other platforms had potential. I love that they're doing this though it feels a little too late for them to really change things up. We'll see though.

Using Visual Studio with Unity properly without spending $500 is one of my favorite reasons for this, but the other reason is amusing in its own right. It allows me to finally use custom theme extensions so Visual Studio is not so hideous.

Visual Studio 2013 Color Theme Editor

 

they should port .net / visual studio to like every major platform that would support it. apple/linux could use stuff like this. eclipsed would be eclipsed by it

 

I think most developers on that platforms would not switch, so it would be a waste of money for MS.
The VS debugger is not bad, but for most of the rest there are better alternatives available.
Each time I have to go back to VS for some Windows only code bases it drives me crazy, so many things are so 10 years ago...
For some issues there are plugins, but I don't want to buy plugin, VS should do all the basics (like Unity should).

[some issues: search field over all settings missing, recompiles all C++ sources on linker settings change, cannot handle projects on network mapped drives reasonably, Intellisense does not work for any a little more complex C++ code base, the C++ compiler is so much behind Clang (only a complete rewrite could fix that), and it is so slow]

 

Give me a solid C# alternative for OS X and I'll switch in a heartbeat.

 

So where can we find the license for the VS2013 Community Edition? I'm downloading the 6.9gb ISO, but if it's restricted for non-commercial use or something I may as well save the bandwidth...

 

Java. Much more widely available, much larger ecosystem, deployed where it matters,...

Just some numbers from a Dell R720xd dual-Xeon E5 v2 + 10 GbE:

http://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/#section=data-r9

Throughput:
Java: 831,515 responses per second vs .NET: 108,543 (and that is with a pure .NET http listener, you don't even want to know the numbers using normal .NET mechanisms)

Or Latency:
Java 0.4ms vs .NET http listener: 10.1ms


See, these are worlds apart.
[Edit: I was very fair to .NET, I took the fastest .NET variant but the standard Java ones. There are better Java ones. And I took the Json benchmark. E.g. in Cleartext benchmark it would be Java undertow 4.16M resp/sec vs .NET 110k resp/sec, that is 40 times less for .NET.
Of course the winner of the benchmarks is C++ (e.g. 6.7M resp/sec for Cleartext benchmark).]

 

Yes, they are "words apart", because for what I'm talking about Java doesn't get the job done. At all.

We were talking about the IDE, not the language. Telling me to switch to Java doesn't help me write software with Unity, and it doesn't help any of the many, many other developers who don't get to pick their language for any of a huge variety of reasons. It's not an alternative to Visual Studio for C#.

 

Sorry.

>> "Give me a solid C# alternative for OS X and I'll switch in a heartbeat."
I read "solid C# alternative" as alternative to C#.

 

Fair enough. My response there may have been a little heavier than it needed to be...

 

No problem.
You are right, IDEs for C# are rare. You have MS and Mono, nobody else seems to want to build one.

When I talked about devs on other platforms probably not wanting to switch to VS, I talked about VS for C++, because C# code is developed almost exclusively on Windows, besides a few strange exceptions like Unity gamplay code. And I don't think availability of VS for Linux/OSX would mean Linux/OSX devs would start using C#.

 

As long as you're not enterprise you're unrestricted. The licensing is on this page:
http://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-community-vs

Specifically:
Q: Who can use Visual Studio Community?
A: Here’s how individual developers can use Visual Studio Community:

• Any individual developer can use Visual Studio Community to create their own free or paid apps.

Here’s how Visual Studio Community can be used in organizations:

• An unlimited number of users within an organization can use Visual Studio Community for the following scenarios: in a classroom learning environment, for academic research, or for contributing to open source projects.
• For all other usage scenarios: In non-enterprise organizations, up to 5 users can use Visual Studio Community. In enterprise organizations (meaning those with >250 PCs or > $1MM in annual revenue), no use is permitted beyond the open source, academic research, and classroom learning environment scenarios described above.

 

Cool. I'd seen reference to "non-enterprise" but looking around I was having trouble finding out what that meant. Those figures seem good to me.

To be fair, the up to date one for Mono might be great. It's just the wierd one that comes bundled with Unity that's... less than ideal. I used to defend it and happily work with it, but since they started bundling 4+ some installs are virtually unusable, and it takes a lot for me to say that.

Many of my recent installs of MonoDevelop from Unity are so bad that it's actually more productive to use a normal text editor. It'll do things like mess up my formatting (rather than assisting with it) and changing identifiers that were correct to incorrect ones (ie: breaking my code and significantly slowing down its development).

Of 6 or so installs at least 3 exhibit such behaviour.

 

This is exciting. And yes, as everyone else has said, I wonder what it means for Unity. I'm thinking that this might mean that IL2CPP will soon be pointless, which might have all the devs who have spent months of their lives on it now banging their heads on the wall. Though I have to add a twinge of annoyance that MS is now up to .NET 5 and Unity is still stuck somewhere between .NET 2 and 3.5.

 

Where do people get the impression that IL2CPP may become pointless? From what I've read about this so far, it's just for the desktop platforms. Unity have used Mono or rolled their own Mono support for the other platforms. While IL2CPP does other cool stuff, the gap that it's primarily filling is getting Mono/.NET code running on platforms where support is otherwise more expensive to come by, which is still a problem that has to be solved.

 

Well, the .NET core and the new .NET native compiler, which does a similar thing to IL2CPP, are both going to be open source. So while there might not be iOS and Android support immediately, I think it's only a matter of time before the open source community gets it up and running. And, no offense to Unity, but I would much rather have the core and compiler written by MS with oversight from a large open source foundation than a closed source one by Unity.

 

Also, I remember a while ago when I said there was no way MS would buy out Mono because they were basically backing them to do open source .NET and other platform support for them. Well, now I am ready to eat my words, because with this series of announcements, it sounds like MS might indeed decide to absorb Mono.