I’ll admit that I have had my enthusiasm and optimism damaged over the years.
Over promise and under deliver has become something of a thing to just expect and so every announcement was met with scepticism and an entire salt mines worth of salt.
But recently I’ve had reason to be poking around with recent tools from “other vendors” – not just Apple but also MS.
And I have to be honest – while Apples idea of x-platform seems to be “iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS” MS seems to be “getting it”.
I downloaded the most recent versions of VS for Mac and the first thing I got when it started to set up was this :
Note the choices. So I can build an app for macOS iOS or Android. Hmm OK this seems promising. Installed everything and after a couple giant downloads eventually VS started up. Some minor quibbles with the look (ie/ the main template selector window isnt resizable but …. here is what it gave me as choices
Lots of options and the one I’m most curious about is “App – Multiplatform”. I’m going to see what that means by giving it a whirl.
At any rate if MS can deliver on most of what they seem to be shooting for it will be a real boon for professional developers and those very sophisticated citizen developers.
It seems MS really is trying to go back to their “developers developers developers mantra”. They just dont have to be developing solely for Windows with this roadmap 🙂
Then let me play your Demotivator 😉
All this shiny, colored chart is worth nothing because of overlapping concepts. This .NET5 concept is build on a rotten foundation and needs Win32 because most parts of the system is still Win32. Let me prove this with this example, see all the quirks and structural limitations the MS Terminal Teams had to overcome: (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/building-windows-terminal-with-winui/).
There is this https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/20200914112802.80611-1-wei.liu@kernel.org/T/ Contribution of Microsoft to the Linux Kernel. Obviously they want to get rid of Windows in their own implementation of virtual machines in Azure.
And secondly they made Windows recently to mount Linux partitions natively https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/access-linux-filesystems-in-windows-and-wsl-2/ (I wonder myself how they evade filenames like “con” or “lpt1”, or differentiate between “FiLe” and “File”)
So when even Microsoft doesn’t rely on its own system anymore, why should we?
Lastly I remember to check out what EEE means…
I still see MS efforts in .Net 5 as a “good step” in cross platform development that they are pursuing with a lot of vigor
Will it be perfect ?
No
But x-platform it looks VERY promising and so far, when trying things out, seems quite robust already
Hence my optimism that they, or one of many other vendors that is targeting x-platform development, will be here sooner than we expect
YMMV