Microsoft brings .NET to Mac OS X
Redmond is open sourcing .NET and is planning to bring the technology to Mac OS X.
I think this means that the ACT contact manager can finally make its way to the platform, if Marketcircle's Daylite hasn't eaten most of its lunch already.
ACT used to be a most-requested piece of software for the Mac, but CRMs have moved online and there are dozens of options for Mac business users now.
Are there any other interesting software programs that were previously .NET only?
Anything to get excited about?
Comments
Not really, it's mainly used on Windows servers as opposed to PHP on UNIX servers. It's also used for Windows phone apps, you can see here they recommend using a VM to run the SDK:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/interoperability/archive/2012/12/21/how-to-develop-for-windows-phone-8-on-your-mac.aspx
Note the statement about the assumption that the users want to stick with a Mac and not just get a PC. This may let Mac users build, test and most importantly for Microsoft port iOS software to Windows mobile platforms eventually. It should at least let Mac users more easily test and manage .NET deployment to Windows servers.
Microsoft did a good thing with C#, it's one of the nicest development languages to use and has no doubt contributed a lot to its adoption. This is the language used by Unity. It's much better to use than something like Javascript, which I notice Apple has enabled use of as an alternative to Applescript but hopefully Swift will ultimately be that alternative:
http://pietschsoft.com/post/2014/06/07/Basic-Comparison-of-C-and-Apple-Swift-Programming-Language-Syntax
I'd like it if Apple did the same and open-source Swift so that Unity can use it instead of C#. Right now, Unity relies on Mono for C#, which open source proponents warned against relying on:
http://www.fsf.org/news/dont-depend-on-mono
Now that it's open source, it should be ok but Unity (and others like Unreal) would still be better with Swift as it can more easily call Apple's own APIs and there won't be any cross-compilation needed.
There might be a handful of utilities coded in .NET for offline use but these apps aren't all that popular on the desktop. People fill up mobile phones with hundreds of very lightweight apps but not so much with desktops.
I don't think it's the full .NET that's being ported because the UI will be like Apple's Cocoa SDK. It seems to just be the non-UI core code, which as I say is more used for servers where a UI is not important.
http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-to-open-source-more-of-net-and-bring-it-to-linux-mac-os-x-7000035716/
"Microsoft is planning to open source the full server-side .NET core stack and to take that open-sourced .NET core to Linux and Mac OS X, alongside Windows."
It does mean you can switch a website from Windows Server to a UNIX server easily.
Swift is more about releasing a great language to interface with the Cocoa APIs than a general language to be used with other libraries.
Similar to when C# was released, it was really only intended to be productive when implemented with .NET library functionality.
I doubt we'll see Swift for .NET (for example) anytime soon.