Open Source Dot-Net is 4 years old and going strong!

It seems like just a couple of years ago that Microsoft, the evil empire of the 1990s and early 200s, embraced open source and put the .NET ecosystem into the open source.  It was a shocking event which was meant with some pessimism by a community that had been bitten far too many times by the old mantra “embrace, extend, extinguish” from Microsoft (not that they were unique in this mantra).  It’s shocking that we are four years into this process but more shockingly is how well the .NET community is functioning.  This is not an “in the open source” which is code for “you can see the code but we are the developers.”  Microsoft, against all my expectations, has successfully built an open source community around open source .NET.  Take a look at the pull request statistics.  There is a substantial community element in most of the pieces (Chart and to read more it check out Matt Warren’s blog post on this ):

If you look at the time series data Warren has created it looks even more promising.  That’s not to say all is well for everyone in the .NET open source world.

As a person that tried to get back into it, to the point of polishing off SharpenNG to make it work in a post Java 7 world, I have to say that even with the improvements over the last few years the non-Windows platforms are still not first class citizens.  Development for .NET sings under Visual Studio, which of course only runs on Windows.  The old Xamarin Studio rebranded as Visual Studio Mac does provide a decent experience but still nothing in comparison.  People on Linux on the other hand are out in the cold.  Yes there are the command line tools and Visual Studio Code.  That works a lot better than I expected but you can feel how clunky that development is in comparison, and MonoDevelop seems to get worse and worse as time goes on.  When I think about dabbling with .NET again I think about trying Rider by JetBrains the next time.  Perhaps they’ve cracked the nut.  One thing I refuse to do is jump to Windows.

Related to all of that is the other elephant in the room: Microsoft doesn’t support UI development nor has any plans to on Linux.  There are open source alternatives like Avalonia and Eto.NET .  I know that Michael Dominic’s development shop was able to turn out a live geospatial cross platform app, Gryphon , using Avalonia so there can be some serious work done with this.  Maybe because of that official blessing from Microsoft isn’t needed, especially if Rider combined with the above fits the bill.  Maybe that’s the community evolving beyond Microsoft too?  Still, at this stage there is a second (or in the case of Linux third) class citizenship feel about it.  It’s orders of magnitude further along than I thought they would get though, which is a promising sign.