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Comment by akshayB | Hacker News Reader

This is good news but little bit too late. Microsoft strategy of sticking with windows to slow down Linux and Mac back fired . If they opened up .Net few years back cross platform app development landscape would have been totally different today.

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I'm not sure Microsoft came too late to the party. Perhaps MSBuild is a bit crappy (I don't know, never used it), but I can imagine Roslyn becoming more useful now on other platforms since it's open sourced. It'll be great that one can be sure the runtime behaves the same on all platforms Roslyn will run on. And it'll also be nice if new runtime features will be available on every platform at (more or less) the same time. I think Roslyn could have a nice future ahead. Personally speaking, I find writing C# is much more enjoyable as writing Java.

And who knows, maybe someone will build a decent MSBuild replacement. Or perhaps the Xamarin guys already have a nice alternative.

> "And who knows, maybe someone will build a decent MSBuild replacement. Or perhaps the Xamarin guys already have a nice alternative."

You might want to check out FAKE, it essentially lets you write MSBuild configurations using F#:

http://fsharp.github.io/FAKE/

This recent announcement means that a multi-platform FAKE in the near future looks like a good bet.

And there's also a C# version of FAKE, named Cake. http://cakebuild.net/

I used fake in anger. I wouldn't recommend using it compared to more mature alternatives for serious projects. It seemed strictly worse than using NANT & invoking msbuild. Yes, xml is horrible, but NANT is mature. Both tools don't understand file dependencies. From that perspective they are inferior to make.

Funny - I've used exactly the same thing NANT & msbuild. Couldn't get my solution to build just with NANT.

What do you mean totally different? Outside of silicon valley and start up world .net and Java dominate.

I don't know why you think it is too late? Do you think people aren't going to embrace cross-platform .NET?

Probably because it just has to do with something related to microsoft. For some reason, people just hate Microsoft. Even though they produce some of the best development tools... people still hate them. In the words of taylor swift, "And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate"

If this was done in 2005, I think it would have been a different story

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