Microsoft has made some big announcements today regarding .NET and the future of the platform. For starters, the company has said that the full server-side .NET Core stack will be open sourced, from ASP.NET 5 down to the Common Language Runtime and Base Class Libraries.
If that wasn"t enough for you, the company has also announced that the open source .NET assets will be expanded to run on Linux and OS X in addition to Windows.
Microsoft has already started the process of making the entire .Net server stack available to the open source community. The company has already open sourced ASP.net and the C# compiler and over the next several months, the remainder of the .NET Core Runtime and .NET Core Framework will be released.
As part of the open source .NET project, Microsoft is expanding .NET to target Linux and Mac OS X in addition to Windows. This will provide flexibility for .NET developers, and enable .NET to be used in many new application scenarios. Microsoft is working closely with the Mono community to make this happen and to jointly deliver an open-source, enterprise-ready .NET implementation for the server to Windows, Linux and OS X.
These are both huge announcements by Microsoft and shows how they are committed to the open source community. If you want to start playing with the new open source goods, you can do so here.