It's happening. It's the reason that a lot of us came to work for Microsoft, and I think it's both the end of an era but also the beginning of amazing things to come.

The .NET 2015 wave of releases is upon us. Here's what's happening and we announced it today in New York. There's a lot here, so drink it all in slowly.

Be sure to check out all the blog posts I'm linking to at the end, but here's my personal rollup and take on the situation.

• We are serious about open source and cross platform.
  • .NET Core 5 is the modern, componentized framework that ships via NuGet. That means you can ship a private version of the .NET Core Framework with your app. Other apps' versions can't change your app's behavior.
  • We are building a .NET Core CLR for Windows, Mac and Linux and it will be both open source and it will be supported by Microsoft. It'll all happen at https://github.com/dotnet.
  • We are open sourcing the RyuJit RiyuJit and the .NET GC and making them both cross-platform.
• ASP.NET 5 will work everywhere.
  • ASP.NET 5 will be available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Mac and Linux support will come soon and it's all going to happen in the open on GitHub at https://github.com/aspnet.
  • ASP.NET 5 will include a web server for Mac and Linux called kestrel built on libuv. It's similar to the one that comes with node, and you could front it with Nginx for production, for example.
• Developers should have a great experience.
  • There is a new FREE SKU for Visual Studio for open source developers and students called Visual Studio Community. It supports extensions and lots more all in one download. This is not Express. This is basically Pro.
  • Visual Studio 2015 and ASP.NET 5 will support gulp, grunt, bower and npm for front end developers.
  • A community team (including myself and Sayed from the ASP.NET and web tools team) team have created the OmniSharp organization along with the Kulture build system as a way to bring real Intellisense to Sublime, Atom, Brackets, Vim, and Emacs on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Check out http://www.omnisharp.net as well as blog posts by team members Jonathan Channon
• Even more open source.
  • Much of the .NET Core .NET Framework 4.6 and its Reference Source source is going on GitHub. It's being relicensed under the MIT license, so Mono (and you!) can use that source code in their .NET implementations. the source code to the .NET Framework.
  • There's a new hub for Microsoft open source that is hosted GitHub at http://microsoft.github.io.

Open sourcing .NET makes good sense. It makes good business sense, good community sense, and today everyone at Microsoft see this like we do.

Related Links

• Download Visual Studio 2013 Update 4
• Download Visual Studio 2015 Preview
  • Learn more with the Visual Studio 2013 Update 4 Release Notes, Visual Studio Community 2013 with Update 4 Release Notes and Visual Studio 2015 Preview Release Notes
• Soma’s blog post
• Brian Harry blog post
• Visual Studio roll-up blog
• On-demand videos
• Visual Studio Community
• Download Visual Studio Ultimate 2015 Preview

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