Today Microsoft made a few big announcements at their Connect event that will open up their tools to a much wider audience than ever before. In the past, accessing the powerful .NET platform on non-Windows machines was only possible through third party projects, such as Mono (and Xamarin).  Building these applications is best done with Visual Studio, which has included free Express SKUs that provide a limited subset of functionality, but which did not support the plug-ins or an integrated experience.
Microsoft highlighted the overall success of their platform, including Azure, SQL Server, .NET, and Visual Studio on this slide:
MSNumbers
They have been shifting away from a focus on their own operating systems to an embrace of alternative platforms.  Examples of this include the great support for non-Windows operating systems in Windows Azure and free Office365 access on iOS devices.  Microsoft recognizes that the future (really, the present) is not a monoculture of PC devices, but includes a wide variety of devices and platforms.  Where Microsoft can continue to innovate and provide value to customers is by providing the tools and services to develop and maintain applications that can span many platforms.  Microsoft will continue to earn revenue from its traditional powerhouses of Windows and Office, but more and more it will also provide these same kinds of functionality as a service via Windows Azure an Office365.  These cloud-based offerings are not tied to PCs, but can be leveraged from any device, and as Microsoft competes with Amazon and Google and these spaces, it makes sense for them to maximize the number of users subscribing to these cloud-based offerings.

.NET Everywhere

Microsoft has always had a love-hate relationship with Mono.  In the early days of .NET, it represented a bit of a threat, since it allowed .NET applications to run on non-Windows hardware, which at the time provided no direct value to Microsoft. However, while they’ve not necessarily provided a great deal of support to the project, many Microsofties also recognized that increasing the reach of .NET was a good thing for Microsoft overall, as it increased the total number of Microsoft developers, which would in turn lead to more .NET applications and greater .NET adoption in many organizations.
Today, Microsoft announced that .NET will be completely open source, and they will work closely with Mono going forward to make .NET available on a wide variety of platforms in an official manner.  This includes official open-source distributions of .NET for Linux and Mac OS.

Free Visual Studio Community Edition

Another barrier to getting started using .NET is the cost of Visual Studio. While free Express offerings have been available for some time, their limitations and lack of integration (separate SKUs for Web, C#, etc. instead of a true Studio experience) limited their effectiveness in attracting new developers.  The new Visual Studio Community Edition is a free tool that has complete support for plug-ins (from free tools like Web Essentials to commercial offerings like ReSharper).  It supports all project types in one unified IDE. You can download it today, no strings attached.  You can download the new Visual Studio Community 2013 here.

Summary

Today’s announcements open up Microsoft’s most popular development platform and toolset to a huge number of developers who previously would not have considered using Microsoft for their applications.  As a long-time Microsoft developer, I’m excited to see these announcements, which will broaden the reach of my skills to platforms and devices that were previously unsupported. I’m also excited by the prospects of Xamarin for using C# to build applications for a variety of devices, and these announcements demonstrate Microsoft’s support for this approach as well.
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