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Microsoft

Microsoft Common Language Runtime To Be Cross-Platform 308

Posted by kdawson from the .net-going-wide dept.
axlrosen alerts us to a Microsoft sleeper announcement from Mix07: a version of its Common Language Runtime will be available cross-platform. The Core CLR shows up as part of the Silverlight SDK that Redmond is open sourcing. From the blog posting: "The biggest Mix '07 announcement made on opening day of this week's show was one that Microsoft didn't call out in any of its own press releases: Microsoft is making a version of its Common Language Runtime available cross-platform. The CLR is the heart of Microsoft's .Net Framework programming model. So, by association, the .Net Framework isn't just for Windows any more."
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Microsoft Common Language Runtime To Be Cross-Platform

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  • "Cross platform" (Score:5, Funny)

    by brennanw ( 5761 ) * on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @04:30PM (#18946617) Homepage Journal
    Now supporting XP and Vista!

    • Re:"Cross platform" (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Marcion ( 876801 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @04:51PM (#18946997) Homepage Journal
      "Silverlight will plug into Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Safari browsers, meaning the slimmed-down CLR will run on these platforms, as well."

      When a browser became a platform I'm not sure, when they started handing out the Web 2.0 Kool-Aid I suppose. It doesn't mention Linux so I reckon they mean Firefox on Windows.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by tempestdata ( 457317 )
        Slimmed down sounds like marketting speak? Crippled is more accurate.

        Sure they can make a version of the CLR available on all platforms, just has to be crippled enough that people would rather use the one on windows. That way they can say "if you really really want to use it on any platform you can.. but we recommend that you use the version on windows because of X, Y and Z".. Also they will have some stupid excuse for not supporting X, Y and Z on the other platforms as if it was the fault of the other plat
        • Yes I know marketing has one t not two, it was a typo. sorry

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by prencher ( 971087 )
          FUD more?

          The CLR shipped with silverlight runtime is supported in IE, Firefox and Safari on windows and mac. It contains all CLR 2.0 features, and has all of the silverlight libraries. It does however only contain a subset of the BCL (Base Class Libraries), but that is the same for all the users without .NET that downloads the silverlight runtime, be it on mac or windows. You are a fool if you believe that the majority of windows users have any version of .NET installed, let alone 2.0, even today.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        "When a browser became a platform I'm not sure,"

        Since the '90s when Netscape was touting its' server software and advertising "best viewed in Netscape X.x" on web sites.

        Web as a platform is what scared MS into the so-called Browser Wars.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Burpmaster ( 598437 )
      I was at a presentation of XNA [wikipedia.org] and the presenter referred to it as "cross platform" because it runs on both X-Box 360 and Windows XP (and now Vista). Let's not allow Microsoft to dilute the meaning of the terms "cross platform" and "Open Source".

      • Re:"Cross platform" (Score:5, Insightful)

        by rockmuelle ( 575982 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:23PM (#18947485)
        Whoa there... just like 'Open' has other meanings that don't imply 'Open Source', cross-platform has many interpretations. The XNA claim to be cross-platform is definitely a valid one, particularly when you consider that the X-Box 360 is a PowerPC architecture and Windows XP and Vista are primarily run on x86 chips. If single development environment that can not only target three versions of an OS, but also target multiple processor architectures isn't cross platform, then I'm not sure what is.

        -Chris

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by rainman_bc ( 735332 )
        Let's not allow Microsoft to dilute the meaning of the terms "cross platform"

        As opposed to Sun? Only recently do we have a JRE for FreeBSD that's supported. Only recently does Adobe make a Flash client for Linux. Adobe still has yet to make a flash client for 64 bit windows.

        Vendors do it all the time - dilute the meaning of cross platform. What they really mean is "cross platform where it suits us".

    • Famous Blues Brothers quote (Score:5, Funny)

      by flyingfsck ( 986395 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @04:55PM (#18947057)
      "We have both kinds of music here: Country *and* Western."

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by matt me ( 850665 )

      Now supporting XP and Vista
      Haha I clicked through to make that exact joke.

    • Sadness. (Score:5, Funny)

      by oGMo ( 379 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @06:10PM (#18948287)

      You say this sarcastically, but this is what Microsoft really means when they say "cross-platform": it runs on all Windows platforms. (Vista, XP, Mobile, XBOX, etc.) I'm not joking. There should be (+1, Sad, Sad World) moderation.

  • Currently, Silverllight 1.1 is x86 only. It won't run on PowerPC based Macs, just the ICBMs.

    For a logistical standpoint, that doesn't seem very cross platform to me if they've already chopped off half of the other platform with the 1.1 release...

    Yes, this is my current soapbox.

  • Mono? (Score:3, Informative)

    by morgan_greywolf ( 835522 ) * on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @04:34PM (#18946703) Homepage Journal
    Wasn't .NET already cross-platform with the introduction of Mono?

    • Re:Mono? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Jugalator ( 259273 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @04:37PM (#18946771) Journal
      Yes, kinda, partially.

      My question is more like --

      Will this aid Mono development? Is Mono still necessary? What about the Windows specific API's? A lot in .NET Framework is, like System.Windows.Forms, and Microsoft.*.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rapett0 ( 92674 )
        You know, I wonder if they can just take the approach as some of the Windows emulators take on Linux. Once its all opened up and the workings are exposed, just replace those functions as needed based on the platform. At the end of the day, all the platforms have differences or one type or another, so changes would have to be made to the fundamental libraries anyway to ensure same behavior cross-platform.

      • Re:Mono? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by gral ( 697468 ) <kscarr73@gmai l . com> on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @04:59PM (#18947123) Homepage
        The Core is not really that much. It is just enough to say they are Cross Platform like Java, but really not enough to allow a dev to run .Net code compiled on Windows on a linux or Mac. Mono is actually alot further along, and actually WANTS the CLR to run Cross Platform.

      • Will this aid Mono development?

        Probably not, since the Microsoft Permissive License [microsoft.com] has a GPL-like 'viral' clause, which means that if Mono used the code, Mono would probably have to be licensed under the Ms-PL.

        Is Mono still necessary?

        Yes.

        What about the Windows specific API's? A lot in .NET Framework is, like System.Windows.Forms, and Microsoft.*.

        I doubt they'll open up those. The announcement relates only the the CLR, not the .NET Framework.

        • Probably not, since the Microsoft Permissive License has a GPL-like 'viral' clause, which means that if Mono used the code, Mono would probably have to be licensed under the Ms-PL.

          I don't see a "viral" clause in the Ms-PL. All the Ms-PL requires is that you include its copyright notice with your distribution and that the Ms-PL licensed code itself remains under the Ms-PL.

          "Is Mono still necessary?" Yes.

          Yes, but not because of the license. It's because Mono does a lot more than run CLR and .NET code.
      • Will it aid Mono? No, not really. The CLR is what they refer to, which is only the driver behind the Common Type System, Code Access Security model, the MSIL Interpreter and so on. Types, Classes and Namespaces within the framework are just that - framework classes. They aren't part of the CLR.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fm6 ( 162816 )
      An underfunded third-party implementation of the CLR is not exactly the same thing as one that is backed both by the name and the resources of Microsoft.
    • My understanding is that MS retained IPR on .NET 2.0 features (including CLR support for generics) and they could hit Mono for the 2.0 features any time they wanted. Access to those features is worth something.
    • It was cross-platform from the very start, Microsoft released Rotor for FreeBSD back in 2002.

      Shared Source CLI Provides Source Code for a FreeBSD Implementation of .NET [microsoft.com]

  • Me? Cynical? Never. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @04:34PM (#18946705) Homepage Journal

    The Core CLR shows up as part of the Silverlight SDK that Redmond is open sourcing.

    That's great. Now if Microsoft would actually implement a few web standards (rather than spewing out more Microsoft "standards") I might actually trust them. As it happens, though, I don't. Internet Explorer has the absolute worst track record of all the modern web browsers. It's fairly straight forward to tune Javascript/DOM code to run in Mozilla, Opera, and Safari. But Internet Explorer? Meh. Let's just say that it adds another 30-50% to the project time.

    Now Microsoft wants to broadcast their wonderful multimedia technology that will enhance the web, be cross-platform, show cool multimedia-type stuff that we can already do with SVG or Canvas. Woohoo. Whoopdedoo. Wow.

    Not.

    This smacks of yet another Microsoft embrace, extend, and extinguish stratgey. "Yeah, guys. Come on in. Here's the Silverlight plugin which works on Macs. We're going to be real buds with these Mac peoples! We're even porting a teeny bit of the CLR (ed: And you thought Java was browser bloat?) to make our XAML/Avalon/WPF technology work for you guys. Oh, did we mention that Macs are kind of slow? (ed: They are now!)"

    Next version: "We haven't seen enough customers demand support for the Mac. So we're dropping the plugin for that platform and adding some amazing new features to the Windows version." *FWHHOOOSH* Extinguished.

    If Microsoft really wanted to compete, they'd be the first to implement the OpenGL API for the Canvas tag that the WHATWG has been working on. Oh, but wait! That wouldn't be Window-y enough. It would have to be the DirectX API through Javascript, dontchaknow. :-/

    • Parent not trolling (Score:5, Informative)

      by metamatic ( 202216 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @04:49PM (#18946949) Homepage Journal
      That's exactly what Microsoft did with ActiveX. They pushed ActiveX as cross-platform, delivering an ActiveX SDK for the Mac and supporting ActiveX components in IE.

      Then after a while, they dropped ActiveX support, saying it was too much effort to make it work on OS X.

      Then after a while longer, they dropped IE too.

      Same with WMV. Seen Windows Media Player for the Mac? No? That's because they dropped it a while back, and killed all support for DRM-protected Windows Media on the Mac. (Instead they suggest that people use a third party QuickTime plugin that only handles unprotected WMV.)

      Jeez, lots of Microsoft fanboys or astroturfers moderating today.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Richard_at_work ( 517087 )

        Same with WMV. Seen Windows Media Player for the Mac? No? That's because they dropped it a while back, and killed all support for DRM-protected Windows Media on the Mac. (Instead they suggest that people use a third party QuickTime plugin that only handles unprotected WMV.)

        Im pretty sure that Windows Media Player for Mac never handled protected WMV files at all (I am prepared to stand correct though), so there was nothing lost with the move to Flip4Mac.

    • Troll, eh? (Score:3, Informative)

      by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) *
      I wish I could say I was surprised. :-/

      From TFA:

      The Core CLR will include the garbbage collection, type system, generics and many of the other key features that are part of the CLR on the desktop. It won't include COM interop support and other features "that you don't need inside a browser," the Microsoft execs say.

      Which is to say that it's being ported just for Silverlight. Silverlight depends on XAML [wikipedia.org]. (Originally expanded to Extensible Avalon Markup Language.) XAML is the serialized form of WPF [wikipedia.org] (Windows P

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Chester K ( 145560 )
      It's fairly straight forward to tune Javascript/DOM code to run in Mozilla, Opera, and Safari. But Internet Explorer? Meh. Let's just say that it adds another 30-50% to the project time.

      Now Microsoft wants to broadcast their wonderful multimedia technology that will enhance the web, be cross-platform, show cool multimedia-type stuff that we can already do with SVG or Canvas.

      Actually, the reason they're bundling the CLR is because the browser's own Javascript/DOM systems (which are also supported by Silverli

      • Re:Me? Cynical? Never. (Score:5, Informative)

        by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:21PM (#18947439) Homepage Journal
        Dude. CANVAS [mozilla.org]. Hello?

        Microsoft pulled the wool over your eyes. They were showing you a DOM app that needed to modify the rendering tree in order to make a move. This is similar to a 3D Scene Graph, but without the hardware acceleration. When Microsoft showed you the Silverlight app, they were showing you a hardware-accelerated drawing program. The very purpose for which Canvas was created.

        As for the AI speed (assuming that the performance issues weren't entirely being caused by the DOM manipulations), Silverlight still uses Javascript for scripting. If it can run so much faster in their CLR scripting why don't they use their new Javascript engine in Internet Explorer?

        In case you think I'm joking, that is exactly what Mozilla is doing with their new Tamarin engine [slashdot.org]. The new engine is faster and more feature rich, ergo it's being integrated into the browser platform. To make matters even more interesting, Mozilla and Adobe are sharing the development of the engine, so that they can both use it. Mozilla in the browser, Adobe in Flash.

        I'm sorry. Microsoft is pulling a fast one on you. There is no need for Silverlight other than to lock you into Microsoft technology.
        • +1 knows what the fuck he's talking about

          • Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score:5, Informative)

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @06:25PM (#18948455)
            Unfortunately neither of them actually knows what they are talking about.

            For starters, a.k.a. why Chester K doesn't know what he's talking about, at MIX they showed JavaScript in the browser against C# in Silverlight v1.1 - not C# in JavaScript. The speed comparisons are correct.

            why AKAIAmBatman is wrong is because this is absolutely not about the performance of rendering. The setup here is that you have one app, with whatever that infrastructure is running in, delegating to the player code. The player code being C#, JavaScript, or a human. This is how you typically do chess games and no surprise it's how they did it here. Therefore the JavaScript is doing no rendering of any kind. That is unless the game was implemented using JS, but even if it was it doesn't matter. The idea is to give each player 1 second to calculate and they give you the best move and how many calculations done. This is merely a measure of raw computational power: calls, either some array lookups, and simple math (potentially bitwise arithmetic, potentially not depending upon the implementation). Finally they used the same algorithm just implemented in the two different languages.

            And because Chester K was misinformed this populates down into AKAIAmBatman's comments where things go wrong. The Tamarin engine has nothing on this. ActionScript has nothing on this. What we're talking about is approaching near native code speed in the browser. JavaScript, no matter what, just isn't going to get there and still be JavaScript. It's way too dynamic. Maybe you can do some whole program analysis but even that is going to be tough. It seems the goal for Tamarin is only a 10x improvement (http://simonwillison.net/2006/Nov/9/tamarin/) if you look at the source code. That means that C# will still be 1000 times faster than the improved Tamarin engine. It's just a fact - JavaScript sucks.

      • I don't *want* JavaScript that is written to consume CPU cycles. Its bad enough that it is hard to control as it is. What if you get this same page on a computer without a fast CPU? Flash is anoying enough, let's leave it at that (and even though I am a Java programmer, I don't want Applets either, make it a WebStart application if you need my CPU cycles).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Excors ( 807434 )

      the OpenGL API for the Canvas tag that the WHATWG has been working on

      Only a minor point to clarify, but the WHATWG hasn't been working on the OpenGL API, and the 2D canvas (which it has worked on, and which has been implemented) isn't designed to be hardware-accelerated. Some Firefox [mozilla.org] and Opera [annevankesteren.nl] developers have been experimenting with exposing OpenGL ES, and it seems likely that they will propose it in the WHATWG at some point to get standardisation, but that hasn't happened yet and it isn't much of a priori

      • Actually, it is mentioned in the spec; albeit briefly: "A future version of this specification will probably define a 3d context (probably based on the OpenGL ES API)."

        Basically, it's been reserved and pointed to as a future point of development. Opera seems to be the most eager to develop this part of the spec, but so far they haven't released anything. As I was saying, if Microsoft wants to accelerate web development they'd look at helping the WHATWG by defining and implementing that part of the spec. Tha

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Excors ( 807434 )

          Yep, but the spec saying "3D would be cool" is a long way off actually doing any work on it - there was a bit of discussion on the mailing list some years ago, but (as far as I'm aware) nothing else has been done within the WHATWG since then. (And all the work is done in the open, so it would be obvious if they had done any.)

          In any case, Microsoft is staying out of the WHATWG because of the lack of a patent policy, but they're involved in the HTML WG [w3.org] and seem to be interested in pursuing the HTML5 work no

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cshark ( 673578 )

      "That's great. Now if Microsoft would actually implement a few web standards (rather than spewing out more Microsoft "standards") I might actually trust them. As it happens, though, I don't."

      Please correct me if I'm wrong (and I'm sure you will), but wasn't C# released as an ECMA standard? I guess what I'm not clear on from your post is what exactly a "microsoft standard" entails. If open standards like ECMA-334 aren't good enough for you, what is?

  • Be afraid, bitches.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LibertineR ( 591918 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @04:34PM (#18946709)
    If a lot of you, previously unexposed to the CLR gain access to it, you will discover that it is not the crap that so many of you have read it to be.

    From denial, to grudging acceptance, to surprised admiration, is how the process works, and whether you hate Microsoft or not, a few months playing with C# usually results in the comment "Damm, why didnt they do this with Java?"

    The Borg isnt dead, they have only been regenerating. Prepare to modulate shield frequencies, because they are coming.......

    • Who cares, you can run Python on both!

    • Re:Be afraid, bitches.... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by UnknowingFool ( 672806 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @04:47PM (#18946911)

      From denial, to grudging acceptance, to surprised admiration, is how the process works, and whether you hate Microsoft or not, a few months playing with C# usually results in the comment "Damm, why didnt they do this with Java?"

      After playing with C# for a few months, the answer I came up with is that C# happened after Java and (I would hope) improve upon Java in some ways. But I stopped using it because of a few reasons. The first of which was the cross platform problem. While Java wasn't open source at the time, it worked on a lot of different platforms. At best you could implement .NET with Mono but there was no guarantee that a change by MS would not negate the hard work of the Mono team. The second reasons is that MS has always been long on promises about technology and short on execution. I'm content to let some else be the guinea pig.

      • I was afraid my comment would create another C# vs. Java debate, as that was not the intent. I was just relaying what I have experienced from people new to the language after hearing nothing but crap about it. In every case, people who read all the Slashdot crap about C# or .NET for that matter, when exposed to the real thing, discover it to be much better than expected, and I was only suggesting the same thing this go'round with Silverlake.

        I did NOT want to create another C#-Java slugfest, trust me....

        • True. Some debates always delve into shouting matches about minutae that don't matter. Emacs 1337! No, vi 1337! I was merely responding that some people like me have tried C# but had legitimate reasons not to use it. I found nothing wrong with the language itself.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by fitten ( 521191 )
        So your only real beef was that it wasn't 'cross platform' enough for you? I've written both Java and C# and I can definitely tell you which one I think has better development tools and is easier to develop in (and it ain't Java), is pretty fast, etc. One complaint that I do have is that some of the underlying class libraries could have been implemented better... for example, iterating through a collection prevents you from modifying that collection. I can understand a very simple implementation prohibi

      • FUD (Score:3, Informative)

        by ZxCv ( 6138 )
        At best you could implement .NET with Mono but there was no guarantee that a change by MS would not negate the hard work of the Mono team.

        Really? How so? What kind of change from MS would make Mono stop working? In the absolute worst possible case, I'm sure Microsoft could hamper future development of Mono, but that takes nothing away from any apps that are currently running just fine on Mono.

        Speaking on ~4 years of experience, .NET does a fine job at being cross platform, contrary to what everyone aroun

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by suv4x4 ( 956391 )
      If a lot of you, previously unexposed to the CLR gain access to it, you will discover that it is not the crap that so many of you have read it to be.

      Who actually claimed the CLR and C# is "crap". No one said that. Microsoft business is more of politics and the burden of supporting obsolete legacy architectures. .NET's CLR engineering isn't hindered by either of those.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rapett0 ( 92674 )
      Parent has a great point. I am not a fanboy for any particular platform as you will see in my previous posts, though maybe I do take MS's side simply because I think the bashing is over the top sometimes.

      Regardless, I cut my teeth in the C++/ASM world and jumped into .NET kind of early. Did it have some issues to start? Sure. Does it still have some? Sure. As all languages and platforms due. However, I feel many people felt that .NET (and subsequently the CLR/IM, etc) was meant to be cross platform h

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Iloinen Lohikrme ( 880747 )
      Darling and others, as I am may day drunk, I just have to say this: all languages are all the same. I use and have used Java as my primary programming language for the last 5 to 6 years. Before that I used Pascal and some C to achieve what I wanted. In these years I have to confess, all these languages to me have seem to be all the same. Yes, Java is more object orientated and thanks to modern IDE's (hallelujah for Netbeans) developing has newer been as easy at it is. The story still remains the same, I co

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by IGnatius T Foobar ( 4328 )

      If a lot of you, previously unexposed to the CLR gain access to it, you will discover that it is not the crap that so many of you have read it to be.

      In the end, it doesn't matter. Using the .NET framework both hurts Java marketshare and props up Microsoft's marketshare, and their monopoly. Do you really want to hand even more keys-to-the-kingdom to Microsoft? What if, a few years from now, .NET pushes Java out of the market, and Microsoft gains a monopoly in this space? Do you really think .NET would

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by naasking ( 94116 )
      If a lot of you, previously unexposed to the CLR gain access to it, you will discover that it is not the crap that so many of you have read it to be.

      It isn't, but it's still more complicated than it needs to be, and not general enough to be a true CLR. After almost 6 years of working on .NET for my day job, I'd say I have a fair handle on it, and there are a number of aspects of the CLR that still leave a sour taste.

      It definitely improved over Java in VM-level generics, value types, and other smaller stuff,
    • I've found that .net imposes between a 50 to 400% performance penalty for floating point computationally intensive code as compared to native code. (One extreme example being 3D Perlin noise generation -- where the code running under .net 2.x is almost 4 times slower than native code.). If you're using the Intel 9.x compiler and it finds vectorization opportunities, the performance difference can be even larger.

      And .net application startup time stinks too.

      Intel's C/C++ compiler rules -- It's *so* much bette
      • In other news, hand-optimized assembly using hardware accelerated vector processing for floating point operations is shown to be faster than using Bash scripts for the same purpose. Seriously, if you are going to make an argument about performance, at least make one better than a strawman. Any developer worth his salt would simply write the perf-critical code in an appropriate language and call out to it, which is trivial to do in .NET. The reason to write code in .Net isn't for blazingly-fast specializ

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by ameline ( 771895 )
          Yeah -- nice try -- it's not a strawman -- The call out to unmanaged code and return each take over 1000 cycles. (And such callouts don't work at all in mono.) So something that should take about 500 cycles (3D perlin noise generation) now takes ~2500. Ouch -- just a bit slower than leaving it managed. (For image rendering with procedurally generated textures, the perlin noise generator is frequently a *huge* spike in the

          Sometimes you need nice fast math functions that can take a small handful of cycles.

          My
    • Yeah... its regenerating w/ all its might. Zune has been released w/ great fanfare and has destroyed the iPod. XBox360... are they even making any other consoles? Microsoft destroyed Nintendo as a company just like they were Apple circa 1988.

      Yup... dream on Balmer fan boy.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Dan Ost ( 415913 )
      Python is what Java should have been.
      In some ways, C# is an improvement over Java, but not enough of an improvement to keep me from saying
      "Python is what C# should have been".

  • Not the whole CLR... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mattintosh ( 758112 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @04:39PM (#18946797)
    The summary got my hopes up. I like C# and .NET quite a lot, but I also like Mac OS and Linux. I've been trying out Mono and Monodevelop (as well as some Xcode plugins for C#/Mono), but they're really not a good match for VS2k5 yet. (I'm hoping that "yet" comes true and doesn't turn into "ever".)

    Unfortunately, only the "Core CLR" will be ported, and only to the Mac OS (probably due in part to MS Office for Mac), not Linux, and not even older (PPC) Macs. I also seriously doubt there will be much in the way of developer tools for the(se) other platform(s).

    Sad, really. Office and VS are the only two decent Microsoft products, and they refuse to port either of them to a decent platform (aside from the tiny fragment of Office that makes it to the Mac).

    • Re:Not the whole CLR... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Chester K ( 145560 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:18PM (#18947387) Homepage
      Unfortunately, only the "Core CLR" will be ported, and only to the Mac OS (probably due in part to MS Office for Mac), not Linux, and not even older (PPC) Macs. I also seriously doubt there will be much in the way of developer tools for the(se) other platform(s).

      A subset of the CLR similar to the Compact Framework is included in Silverlight; with a much simpler security model. It's not a replacement for the full .NET Framework by any stretch. There have been whispers about a Linux version of Silverlight as well (Flash has one, and Microsoft is trying to provide a superset of the Flash/Flex featureset).

      As for developer tools, while it's not exactly developing on a Mac, per se, you can use Visual Studio to do remote debugging on CLR code running in a Silverlight app on a Mac client.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by drew ( 2081 )
      SharpDevelop is a pretty cool free IDE for .NET but so far still only works on Windows. (Monodevelop was forked from a very old version of SharpDevelop) In my opinion it's almost as good as VS2k5. If you're willing to pay for an IDE (as you seem to be if you are comparing to Visual Studio) there's a .NET/Java IDE called X-Develop that appears to be pretty good, and runs on Mac, Linux, and Windows. I haven't used it beyond a few days of trial evaluation, but it looked really impressive to me.
  • How's this differ from rotor?
    • The main difference is that it's not ancient. We're up to .NET 3.0 now. Rotor (at least the cross-platform version) was 1.x.
  • How will this effect the Mono project?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Marcion ( 876801 )
      Nothing because Microsoft will mess it up.

      Open Source or no, they are still Microsoft, they announce something big *then* go program it in a half-baked way, then hope to fix it with service packs and hot fixes.
    • Not much, Mono is much bigger than a CLR.
  • Now they are even copying Java's "free but can't include it with your distro" licensing scheme. Only they have 'improved' on it by adding in bans on benchmarking and, oh yeah, you can't use it on Linux. And you can't even use your code with mono if you develop it with Microsoft's CLR.

    So basically this is exactly like every other feature they ripped from Java and then pissed on.
    • You're right. Its almost exactly the direction Sun's taken with Java, and this is why Microsoft is doing it. Its a marketting/mindshare thing, not a utility thing.

      0xDEADBEEF

  • Don't! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Daishiman ( 698845 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @04:55PM (#18947051)
    It's a trap!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Locutus ( 9039 )
      I wonder what technique they'll use to force this on OEM pre-loads and what techniques they'll use to break the Flash/Shockwave plugins from working.

      It's not like OEMs are going to be as easily pushed around like they were when Microsoft forced their browser on them and essentially pushed Netscape Navigator off the pre-loads. Just competing isn't something Microsoft knows how to do so there must be some way they plan on forcing this on the public along with a way to harm Flash sites/users.

      So how will they p
  • They could've just used the CLR instead of having to code their own, but alas. Microsoft open sourced only now when put under pressure by Adobe.

    Pitty.
    • Well, that's wrong. The CLR was always open source. Licensed under Ms-PL (pretty open source developer friendly, surprisingly) and with a clickwrap contract stating that Microsoft pledges not to sue you for patent infringement (and granting worldwide, non-exclusive, perpetual royalty-free distribution rights) provided you don't sue them or any of their customers, it's one of the most open things they have (remember, if they try to sue you, they would have to use the argument "clickwrap contracts are not v
      • I hate replying to myself. Anyways, I'm slightly off here. The CLR is not the open source component, the CLI is. What the difference between the Common Language Runtime and the Common Language Infrastructure is, I don't know.
  • So Microsoft is really mad about Ubuntu and the iPhone and are trying to generate as much news as possible today?

    Balmer crys.. "I still matter!"

  • Stop the celebration (Score:5, Informative)

    by PineHall ( 206441 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:09PM (#18947265)
    From the blog:

    Microsoft is not opening up the source code to the Core CLR. It is opening the code to the DLR by posting it to the Microsoft CodePlex source-code repository under a Shared Source Permissive license.
  • If it's under the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL) [microsoft.com], then it's being released under a BSD-like license with an explicit patent grant. I think that would really put to rest whatever remaining concerns people have have had about possible Microsoft patents on core CLR technologies.

    More generally, I think Microsoft has really shown signs of change with the CLR, IronPython, and related technologies. Maybe they are starting to "get" it at least a little.

    (However, Ms-PL isn't OSI-approved yet; what's up with t

  • Didn't we already know this? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Qwavel ( 733416 ) on Tuesday May 01, 2007 @05:59PM (#18948105)

    MS had already said that they planned to support Apple (and WinCE) for their WPF/E (windows presentations everywhere) technology. They then renamed that to Silverlight, and lo-and-behold, it still supports Apple. Where's the news?

    Not to mention that this was predicted all along. MS has been supporting the MacOS for years, and hinting at the cross-platform possibilities of their net platform. MS wants the Mac to replace Linux as the alternative to Windows, so this is a pretty straightforward decision for them. So why are people acting suprised?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by I'm Don Giovanni ( 598558 )
      The news is that the first bits are available, and it's the complete CLR, not a stripped down CLR. The accompanying .NET Frameworks libs are stripped down, but the CLR is complete, supporting all .NET languages. The original wpf/e spec only had support for C# and VB.NET, and lacked support for reflection and whatnot (which many of the more "exotic" languages depend on).

      Also, the DLR is new.

  • Definition of 'Cross Platform' (Score:4, Interesting)

    by steveoc ( 2661 ) on Wednesday May 02, 2007 @02:21AM (#18952959)
    From inside the mind of Microsoft, 'Cross Platform' could well mean something like this :

    Being Cross-Platform means that Silverlight will be available on many different supported Operating Systems, and Silverlight represents THE most cross-platform product produced by Microsoft in its long and exciting history.

    The wide range of operating systems targetted for production release of Silverlight include :

    Vista Enterprise
    Vista Ultimate
    Vista Home Premium
    Vista Business
    Vista Home Basic (Limited support for some features)

    The features and facilities of the free cross platform runtime binaries will understandably differ from platform to platform. For example, on Vista Home Basic, the silverlight runtime binary will only operate in full resolution no more than 3 times in any 24 hour period .. this being a feature that users have strongly demanded from Microsoft during pre-production surveys and beta tests.

    Silverlight for Vista Enterprise and Vista Ultimate will be able to run for a whole 8 continuous hours in any 24 hours period before a noticable degradation in performance and visual resolution is apparent. Again, this is in response to demand from users for a safer and more secure experience when executing silverlight applications, and demonstrates Microsoft's committment to tailor its development to exactly suit the wishes of its valued users.

    Silverlight makes use new synergistic paradigms in the field of computer science to provide the richest experience possible for the end user. Unfortunately, such highly advanced concepts as are seen in this new platform are not easily retrofitted to older legacy operating systems which are no longer vendor supported. Whilst Microsoft would dearly love to provide runtime binaries for systems such as Windows XP, our users have shown a clear preference for the more modern and powerful Vista range of operating systems, and so it is unlikely that a fully supported Silverlight runtime will be made available for Win XP. There may be some residual interest for Windows XP in the hobby niche market, however professional organisations overwhelmingly choose Vista.

    Similarly, antique operating systems such as VMS, PrimeOS, MS-DOS and Linux either do not provide the necessary power to run Silverlight, or may in some instances have serious question marks regarding their legality, which unfortunately may impact our ability to support Silverlight in these environments. But again, the demand there is very low-impact, being part a dwindling hobby niche market of little mainstream interest.

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