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Comment by nbevans | Hacker News Reader

I hold out hope that the next Microsoft CEO won't be as blind as Ballmer was and that the first thing on his hit list will be to buy Xamarin or at least "secure" it to prevent anyone else buying it; a suitably large investment could do that.

Xamarin would provide the perfect solution to getting a major foothold on mobile app developers, which is what Microsoft so desperately needs for their Windows Phone aspirations. Once you have developer mindshare, you have cracked half the problem.

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Microsoft should buy Xamarin, but they'll also need to open-source all of .NET. That would improve Mono on non-Windows platforms. That would be the best thing they can do to really get a foothold in the mobile space and also win back some part of the startup community.

That would be a super-powerful move. They should drop prices for Pro Visual Studio as well.

P/Invoke and stuff like that is unopensourcable. The run time is way too deeply embedded in COM and the registry for its own good.

This move could have outright killed java in 2006 when the .NET 2.0 was way ahead of java in everything. Right now - I am not so sure it will be such a big thing.

(Disclaimer - haven't touched serious project in 4-5 years in .NET but I loved C# and the libraries)

Funny, but P/Invoke seems to work great on Linux with Mono... it's probably the single biggest reason I started out with it, as JNI by comparison is an ugly beast.

I love a lot of what C# and .Net have to offer, even though half of my server-side dev time is in node.js for the past couple years, I still like a lot of .Net ... It will be really interesting to see where things go in the next couple of years. I think unchaining VS and Office from Windows would be the best move MS could make right now. Web Matrix (with an extension) is imho second best dev environment for node.js out there, and that they haven't integrated this into VS really surprises me.

MS put a lot of effort into libuv, so not sure why they wouldn't get the runtime system that uses it up to speed better.

The BCL in .Net are second to none in terms of breadth and comprehensiveness. I feel that if MS really opened up most of .Net in MS-PL or something similar, it could really gain ground outside of windows... Again, this would mean getting VS and Office away from the windows anchor.

I believe a lot of the framework is open source. http://referencesource.microsoft.com/netframework.aspx

Unfortunately, the .Net Framework source is available under a 'reference license'.. You are allowed to look at the source, but not modify or redistribute it. Mono specifically has to be very careful about these problems, so if you have ever looked at Microsoft's 'shared source' code you are not eligible to contribute to Mono.

Why would MSFT needs Xamarin if their own tools are exceptionally good?

Cross-Platform mobile development ?

MS still don't understand the meaning of the word "cross-platform".

They will support all and any platforms as long as they are windows.

They will support all and any platforms as long as they are windows.

Don't let reality stand in the way of your irrational bigotry.

But in case you'd like to learn something new - here is the pricing for hosting Linux servers on Microsoft's Azure system:

http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-ma...

It works very well and is price competitive with Amazon EC2.

Except we were talking about cross platform applications - , which MS is just beginning to reluctantly pursue.

But hey, lets turn paraphrased Henry Ford one liner into bigotry accusations.

Microsoft is contributing patches to support Hyper-V virtualization to the FreeBSD kernel to allow FreeBSD VMs to run on Azure:

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=38019

Wouldn't the opposite be better?

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