Microsoft releases .NET Core 1.0 to go beyond Windows

As part of its ongoing efforts to support the open source community, Microsoft has released .NET Core 1.0. The new .NET runtime platform has been opened to the community and is available as a crossplatform offering across Linux and Mac OS X, in addition to the company’s proprietary Windows operating system.

Microsoft announced the first release of .NET Core back in 2014, but the platform took more than a year to take shape. The Redmond giant has also revealed ASP.NET Core 1.0 as an open source, modular version of the original ASP.NET framework.

Additionally, Microsoft has expanded its existing partnership with Red Hat to debut its .NET Core on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift. “Today, we’re pleased to announce that .NET Core is now not only available on Red Hat

Enterprise Linux and OpenShift via certified containers, but is supported by Red Hat and extended via the integrated hybrid support partnership between Microsoft and Red Hat,” the Red Hat team members wrote in a statement.

The new development is aimed to help enterprises build new solutions on .NET and test them directly on computing platforms other than Windows. This might be considered as a backdrop for Microsoft’s own operating system. However, the software giant is targeting to please more developers through the new announcement.

Microsoft claims that about 18,000 developers from over 1,300 companies have already contributed to the initial development of .NET Core. This is just the beginning, but certainly quite a huge one to make the new platform successful in the market.

Microsoft could use developer contributions in expanding its existing product offerings. Also, the extensive community support would bring .NET in line with Java and other developer platforms.

Developers can leverage solutions like Portable Class Libraries (PCL) to take advantage of .NET Core 1.0 and enhance their existing apps. Likewise, there are Xamarin tools to enable app development for multiple platforms using the new open source model.

Microsoft isn’t alone in the race to develop new open source technologies. Facebook and Google are working with the community. While Facebook has framework React to support developers, Google is making things easier for the AI world through TensorFlow.

The verdict on how successful .NET Core is has not come out. Nonetheless, it already has brought Microsoft closer to Red Hat and the ever-growing open source community.