Do you think Microsoft will port the .NET Framework to O.S.'s other than Windows?

Question

I mean Microsoft by his will.

Answer 1

Nope. Would really surprise me.

Answer 2

You mean like Silverlight?

Answer 3

I would really be surprised if they did. Silverlight would appear to be a special case.

Think about how Microsoft makes money. Amongst other things ...from the sales of windows systems.

If they specifically create frameworks for other platforms, then they are encouraging people to use those other platforms.

Silverlight provides an exceptional case as I said becuase it allows MS to create browser based apps which can act as services which can be charged for on an ongoing basis.

Answer 4

They would also be repeating work - Mono is already a good open source version of .NET isn't it?

Answer 5

Microsoft has repeatedly said that it will not port .NET to other OSs, and its not in its interest to do so - imagine if people only bought Windows for Visual Studio and then ran all their apps on the free Linux. Shareholders would panic and Ballmer might throw the table!

Microsoft's best result is if most of .NET platform gets ported by someone else, they can then say to run .NET on Windows becuase it gives you a stable, tested, integrated application stack (word that PHBs like to hear, and end up buying Windows to run it on) whilst still saying it works on Linux, aren't we nice, proving that .NET is the most "feature-rich, ubiquitous software development system on the planet, why don't you buy some more Visual Studio licences".

If Mono becomes too popular, MS will have to take steps to stop it, the business cannot survive selling software that people run for free. Note that C# 3 is not (yet) a standard, so maybe this is how it'll pan out - work with C#2 no problem, but to get the new features in C#3, you need Windows.

Answer 6

Microsoft once ported the .net Framework 1.0 to both FreeBSD and MacOS X, but they never made an updated Version.

Nowadays, they ported Silverlight to MacOS X, so maybe that is an area they want to approach in the future for more Parts of the Framework? I do not know, but porting the .net Client Framework would be something I would like to see them Port to MacOS X as well.

Then again, the "full" .net Framework still contains a lot of ties to Win32, so porting it will not be easy I think.

Answer 7

Silverlight 2.0 has a scaled down version of the CLR running on OS-X.

There's the compact framework that runs on Windows-CE, Windows-CE runs on different processors than just vanilla x86 Intel compatible chips. So at least they've got versions of the CLR for different processors.
They have a version of the compact framework running on the Xbox 360 too.

They also had a research project called Rotor that had the CLR running on different OS's (linux if I'm not mistaken) This seems to have been one of the inspirations for Mono.

If I'm not mistaken there have also been contributions from MS to the mono project, an open source CLR running on Linux, OS-X and Windows.

They'll probably won't get the full .Net framework running on other OS's. Especially the WinForms lib has a lot of dependencies to the win32 Api. But they're certainly looking into getting parts of the framework running outside windows. But why look at Microsoft? The CLR is based on open standards. I think OSS projects like Mono and Moonlight are far more interesting.

Answer 8

short answer:

I would not hold my breath until they did.

Seriously, Microsoft will try to defend theit windows platform with any means nessesary. Ports to other plattforms are allways partly broken and not up to date, just to show users it would be better to switch to windows, to get the real deal.

Just my 2 cents.

Answer 9

Rotor was created by Microsoft. That is a port, although incomplete.