This was the same year Antitrust came out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust_(film)
Any support for open source or cross-platform stuff was a bulwark against claims of monopoly abuse, but none of it worked well enough to be a true replacement. Mono worked for some purposes, but it was far from the first party support cross-platform .NET gets today. Nowadays it sounds like .NET Core + third-party GUI libraries is the way to go.
For reference for those unfamiliar with the terms:
.NET Core was the name given to the cross-platform fork of the .NET runtime.
It was forked out of .NET 4.x and dropped support for a lot of things in the first versions.
It ran on various distributions of Linux and MacOS.
At the same time there were forks of other libraries/frameworks in the .NET ecosystem to have 'Core' variants. Often these were dropping support for legacy parts of their code so that they could run on Core.
Later versions of .NET Core brought over support for a many of the things that had been dropped.
.NET Core and .NET had stand-alone versions until .NET Core was renamed to . NET and became .NET 5.
So, if you want to do the most modern cross-platform C# you would use .NET 9.
It is "Core" in a lineage sense, but there's no need to make that distinction any more. The term "Core" is out of date, because the experimental "Core" fork succeeded, and became the mainstream.
> It was forked out of .NET 4.x and dropped support for a lot of things in the first versions.
>An early name for the .NET platform, back when it was envisioned as a successor to the COM platform (hence, "COM+"). Used in various places in the CLR infrastructure, most prominently as a common prefix for the names of internal configuration settings. Note that this is different from the product that eventually ended up being named COM+.
For example, see the top comment in https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/src/coreclr/vm/o...
I love .NET. It’s a great stack, especially for backend web apps. Blazor is a great SPA framework too. But I loathe how Microsoft continue to handle just about everything that isn’t the framework and C# / F#. It’s laughable.
.NET Standard includes various versions of things that MS doesn't even touch.
I stopped doing .NET stuff before .NET 5 so I'm not hugely up to date with the latest shenanigans.
It’s just funny for newcomers to peel back the onion more. Writing a source generator? Target .NET standard 2.0 (not even 2.1) for a whole host of reasons.
Visual Basic .net ! What ?
The current release is .NET 8
.NET 9 is about 3 months away from the usual November release.
A factoid that's shared sometimes (no idea if true) is that Microsoft now employs more Linux kernel engineers than Windows kernel engineers due to Azure.
The Microsoft of the Halloween Documents[0] is a different Microsoft from the one we see today that understands open source as something good rather than as a threat, and it started with Microsoft being forced to play nice.
"The cloud" as we understand it didn't exist yet.
Strange times.
Bona fides: I have used GCP for 3 years, AWS for 3 years, and Azure for ~ 1 year. As well as the more "bare-metal" types of cloud providers like Linode/Akamai, and Vultr -- all the latter of which are great for self managing your infra.
I also really find the ability to spin up Windows Server and Windows 10/11 etc super useful for builds, testing, Hyper-V.
I really like Azure for huge projects with many moving parts.
Is "historical context" not as clear as I thought? You're the second person to challenge this by pointing out the current situation when I'm talking about how we got here.
Microsoft Azure was first released on February 1, 2010
Microsoft released .NET Core 1.0 on June 27, 2016
