Today, Microsoft announced that it would be open sourcing MSBuild, the main component of Visual Studio that allows developers to easily compile apps. This announcement ends what many considered to be a fraught relationship with open source software and heralds a new era of Microsoft software development.
In a blog post, Microsoft said that the MSBuild tool, which is part of the .NET framework and helps compile code, was going open source. Visual Studio is billed by Microsoft as being one of the best way to build apps for all platforms, and so Microsoft"s commitment to making this open source shows just how far the company has come.
Previously, MSBuild was available at no cost, but the added developer interactivity of making it open source enables the software to be, as they say in the announcement, "the best choice for .NET developers on the Linux and Mac platforms."
MSBuild can now be found in the GitHub repository here.