Yesterday, Somasegar, corporate vice president of the Developer Division at Microsoft announced Microsoft is going to open source the .NET platform. Since I left Microsoft in 2011, this is one of the moments I am most stunned. There is a fully featured community edition of Visual Studio, Android emulator, .NET open sourced under the MIT License, support for Linux and Mac OS X. Further background information can be found on my former colleague Immo’s post over here.

I went from Windows to Mac once I left, dug into Python, Java, a lot of Apache projects and somewhat C++ and JavaScript, developing for the new Jolla and Sailfish OS and contributing to the IoT project  OpenHAB. Anyway, I never really was that overwhelmed by the dev ecosystem as I was with Microsoft.

It does not look like the Microsoft I left at all, however, with these major changes, I will be definitely one of the first nailing .NET on my Mac OS X.  I am looking forward for this. For today, I will install the new Visual Studio Community 2013 on my virtual Windows, though.