Microsoft is hosting its annual Connect(); developer event in New York today. With .NET being at the core of many of its efforts, including on the open-source side, it’s no surprise that the event also featured a few .NET-centric announcements, as well. For the most part, these center around the .NET Foundation, the open-source organization Microsoft established to guide the future development of the .NET Core project.
As the company announced today, Google is now a member of the .NET Foundation, where it joins the likes of Red Hat, Unity, Samsung JetBrains and (of course) Microsoft in the Technical Steering Group.
Google already allows developers on its Cloud Platform to deploy .NET applications thanks to its support for Windows Server, and offers .NET libraries for more than 200 of its cloud services. The company is also an active .NET contributor already. Today’s announcement doesn’t come as a complete surprise then, but it’s still interesting to see that two companies that compete on so many other fronts still find room to work together on other projects.
Samsung, too, is deepening its commitment to .NET by launching support for it on its Tizen platform. As Samsung’s Hong-Seok Kim told me, Samsung was looking for a framework in addition to the web framework and C API that Tizen developers currently use to write their applications. “We looked into alternatives but .NET was superior,” he said and noted that Samsung was looking for a framework with a strong foundation in terms of language support, APIs and tooling, as well as one with a large built-in developer base and open-source community. “.NET has been around for a long time and we liked how open Microsoft was about .NET,” he also noted, and added that Microsoft’s patent promise around .NET also helped the company make this decision.
Given .NET’s existing ecosystem, Samsung surely hopes that this move will also broaden its own Tizen developer ecosystem. In this first release, which will be available as a developer preview today, Samsung’s team focused on bringing .NET to smartphones. By default, though, Tizen is an operating system for lots of different devices, including TVs and watches. Over time, Samsung plans to expand its .NET support to other devices, as well. Samsung is also making a Visual Studio extension and documentation available for .NET developers who want to look into writing apps for Samsung’s operating system.