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Comment by jchannon | Hacker News Reader

.Net is going cross platform. What are you going to use if you develop on OSX or Linux? It won't be VS

Unless of course they push to make VS cross platform. I wouldn't be surprised if this is in the works. There has been a huge push at MS to become more cross platform with their product offerings. They must know a lot of their developers run OSX with a Windows VM just to run VS. I know pretty much our entire team does that.

As someone who has worked with Visual Studio and integration APIs for a long time, a port of VS across platforms would be a huge undertaking. A rewrite, essentially.

Visual Studio is heavily tied to WPF (Windows-only) presentation framework, COM (Windows-only) for communication across components and plugins, as well as bits of native legacy code throughout (Windows-only.)

Truly, you're looking at rewriting Visual Studio to get it on OSX. Heck, MS would probably be better off just buying Scrawl and rebranding it as Visual Studio for Mac.

And remember: while .NET is going cross-platform, there are no public plans for a cross-platform UI toolkit; there is no cross platform WinForms or WPF from Microsoft.

If Microsoft made VS cross platform, they would make a much more lightweight, modular IDE aimed at (initially) C#,VB,F# and javascript. They'd be able to leave out decades of that old COM/Win32/C++ cruft.

Essentially, this is what they would make. Or, they could simply buy this...

Why do i need to care? Today the only cross platform thing I worry about is if my site works correctly in IE/Firefox/Chrome/Safari. I don't care about my tools, I use windows, in the past I've used windows in a virtual machine on OSX. I'm not worried about it as a web developer.

Xamarin Studio.

Personally I'm not too fond of Xamarin Studio. I really hope Scrawl will be a good alternative for writing C#.

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