Google Will Help Build Future Versions of .NET Core

Love is a two-way street. Microsoft has shown considerable affection for Linux over the past two years and by some measure consummated its marriage to open source by joining the Linux Foundation. However, this  news overshadowed the fact that Google has joined the .NET Foundation's Technical Steering Committee.

Microsoft announced both milestones earlier this month at its Connect() conference in New York, where the company outlined several key deliverables that will extend the company's portfolio of tools, new platform and computing capabilities that will bring intelligence to its apps with its new Bot Service preview and Azure cloud platform services. While many of Microsoft's key moves show more than just lip service to the open source community, the company is equally committed to extending its own .NET platform.

Having released the first iteration of multiplatform .NET Core this summer, the company revealed the preview of .NET Core 1.1, which offers 1,380 APIs, support for additional Linux distributions, performance improvements, thousands of new features, hundreds of bug fixes and improved documentation. Bringing Google into the fold builds on Microsoft's ".NET Everywhere" strategy, which aims to bring C# code to phones, TVs and to open source infrastructure and cloud services.

But Google's decision to join the .NET Foundation's Technical Steering committee drew a more muted applause than the news earlier that same morning that Microsoft was joining the Linux Foundation. When Scott Hanselman, Microsoft's principal program manager for Azure, ASP.NET and Web tools, made the announcement during his keynote presentation at Connect(), there was a brief silence, followed by a polite, though hardly exuberant, applause. "I don't want your pity applause," Hanselman quipped.

Allowing that the reaction was more surprise than pity since the move could give a boost to the Google Cloud Platform, Hanselman explained the significance of having Google join Red Hat, JetBrains, Unity and Samsung help steer the direction of .NET Core.

"Googlers have quietly been contributing to .NET Foundation projects and they are also helping drive the ECMA standard for C#," Hanselman told attendees at Connect(). "The Google Cloud Platform has recently announced full support for .NET developers and they have integrations into Visual Studio and support for PowerShell. All of this is made possible by the open source nature of .NET and of .NET Core, and I could not be more thrilled to be working with our friends at Google to move C# forward and to move .NET forward and to make it great everywhere."

Support for .NET goes back for several years when Google added .NET support throughout its infrastructure, including libraries for over 200 of the company's cloud services. The company has also recently added native support in Google Cloud Platform for Visual Studio and PowerShell. Back in August, Google announced support for the .NET Core release including ASP.NET and Microsoft's Entity Framework.

Google isn't the only major player to give .NET a lift. Apps built with .NET Core will also find their way to TVs, tablets, phones, wearables and other devices with help from Samsung, which used the Connect() event to release the first preview of Visual Studio Tools for Tizen, the embedded OS used to power Samsung devices. The tooling will enable mobile application development using device emulators and an extension to Visual Studio's IntelliSense and debugging features.

Martin Woodward, executive director of the .NET Foundation, noted that there are 50 million Tizen-powered devices in the wild. Said Woodward: "This will allow .NET developers to build applications to deploy on Tizen across the globe and continues in our mission to bring the productive .NET development platform to everyone."

Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 11/28/2016 at 1:34 PM