Open source interoperability makes it easier and less costly to develop and manage mixed IT environment; Local developers and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) excited about Microsoft’s end-to-end solutions at recent Malaysia Open Source Conference 2014
KUALA LUMPUR, 24 November 2014 — Microsoft Corporation (Microsoft) reinforced its commitment to cross-platform developer experiences by open sourcing the full server-side .NET stack and expanding .NET to run on the Linux and Mac OS platforms. The milestone moment kicked off Microsoft’s Connect (); event in the United States, where the company unveiled Visual Studio 2015 Preview and .NET 2015 Preview, and also released Visual Studio Community 2013, a new free edition of Visual Studio that provides developers with easy access to the Visual Studio core toolset. The announcements build on the excitement of the local Malaysia developer community for Microsoft’s “open” mobile-first, cloud-first strategy.
Community Enthusiastic Over Microsoft’s Commitment to Open Source
Local developers and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are excited with the traction they are seeing in Microsoft’s commitment to advancing interoperability, open standards and open source. Microsoft Malaysia recently partnered the open source community in Malaysia by sponsoring MOSCMY 2014, which saw more than 300 participants taking part in various workshops, discussions and keynotes aimed at unravelling current and future trends of Open Source Software (OSS) and hardware. Held annually, MOSCMY is also a platform for businesses to leverage the latest open source innovations, best practices and success stories.
Dinesh Nair, Director of Developer Experience & Evangelism, Microsoft Malaysia shares that enthusiasm, saying, “We have to meet the developers of today where they are, as opposed to asking them to come to where we are. Through these latest announcements on Visual Studio and .NET, we continue to demonstrate our commitment to delivering a comprehensive end-to-end solution for developers to build and manage applications across multiple devices and platforms.”
Open, Accessible and Cross-Platform
Delivering on its promise to support cross-platform development, Microsoft is providing the full .NET server stack in open source, including ASP.NET, the .NET compiler, the .NET Core Runtime, Framework and Libraries, enabling developers to build with .NET across Windows, Mac or Linux. Through this implementation, Microsoft will work closely with the open source community, taking contributions for future improvements to .NET and will work through the .NET Foundation.
“A strong, open source, cross-platform Common Language Runtime (CLR) opens significant new options for building the systems we need,” said Harisfazillah Jamel, Co-Founder of the Open Source Developer Community and Chairman of the recent Malaysia Open Source Conference 2014. “This significantly expands the choices we have in terms of finding the right tools to solve the problems we encounter. I’m very excited to have access to the quality virtual machine and tooling of the CLR without having to completely rework from scratch!”
Tham Chin Seng, Research and Development Manager, Agmo Studio—a Malaysian software development firm that offers mobile and web solutions to businesses and consumers—was mutually thrilled with the news, “There is a huge change for developers that has been slowly and steadily building up for the last couple of years. We are now moving to a world where developers have to constantly think about building for the mobile and cloud platforms. Application development is getting more complex, and what developers like ourselves need is support and resources to do that in the most efficient and convenient way. This move to open source .NET is further exciting news and shows that Microsoft is certainly moving in the right direction to win the hearts and minds of developers, no matter what they are building.”
Businesses Reaping Benefits of Interoperable Open Source
Companies in Malaysia are also increasingly turning to technology as an integral component in helping prepare the business for the 21st century. Ikhasas Sdn Bhd, a multidiscipline company in Malaysia specializing in property development, construction, engineering, infrastructural works and turn-key designs, needed scalability and uninterrupted operation to cope with its demands and expansion. With rising IT infrastructure and maintenance costs, Ikhasas turned to open source for a viable yet affordable solution to enhance their values and operational efficiencies. “With our rapid expansion, we needed a cost-effective solution for efficient and reliable communication between our offices. With an open source Voice-as-a-Service (VaaS) solution built on top of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, we got the best of both worlds – a reliable service at an affordable price,” said Ken Tee, Management Information Systems Manager, Ikhasas Sdn Bhd.
Dinesh added, “Over the years, we have seen growing interest from Malaysian businesses in OSS implementation, resulting in great success stories such as Ikhasas. We will continue to engage with open source and standards communities in a variety of ways to promote interoperability, which makes it easier and less costly for local customers like Ikhasas to develop and manage mixed IT environments. In fact, MOSCMY 2014 was a great platform where we got some really positive feedback from developers who were impressed with how open Microsoft really is. With billions of devices in the market today, developers need tools that target many different form factors and platforms.”
Visual Studio for Every Developer
Available now, Visual Studio Community 2013 is a free, fully featured edition of Visual Studio including full extensibility. Targeting any platform, from devices and desktop, to Web and cloud services, the community edition provides developers with easy access to Microsoft’s Visual Studio toolset for all non-enterprise application development. Developers can get started with Visual Studio Community 2013 here.
Visual Studio 2015 and .NET 2015: build for any device
Built from the ground up with support for iOS, Android and Windows, Visual Studio 2015 Preview makes it easier for developers to build applications and services for any device, on any platform.
To further support cross-platform mobile development with .NET, as part of their strategic partnership, Microsoft and Xamarin announced a new streamlined experience for installing Xamarin from Visual Studio, as well as announced the addition of Visual Studio support to its free offering Xamarin Starter Edition — available later in the year. In addition, for Web developers interested in building cloud-powered apps that target mobile devices, Microsoft delivered the final release of Apache Cordova tools. Developers can get started Visual Studio 2015 Preview here.
In addition, Microsoft also announced the preview of ASP.NET 5.0, a streamlined framework and runtime optimized for cloud and server workloads. In addition, the new Connected Services Manager in Visual Studio 2015 makes it easier to connect applications to line-of-business API services such as the Office 365 API and SalesForce, among others.
Visual Studio Online: Agility and DevOps in the cloud
Building on a year of service enhancements, Microsoft announced additional capabilities for Visual Studio Online, its online service for development projects, by announcing additional capabilities for the service, including these:
- Release Management as a service, available in preview, to enable customers to automate and manage application releases without the need to set up or maintain any service infrastructure.
- Cloud Deployment Projects, to allow organizations to more easily and reliably provision and configure development, test and production environments in Azure.
Visual Studio 2013 Update 4
Also, Microsoft announced the availability of Visual Studio 2013 Update 4, the fourth fully featured update in the past 12 months, which includes various productivity enhancements and additional capabilities. Download and product information can be found here.
“Microsoft is making available comprehensive tools and resources for developers to build open, interoperable cloud services with the freedom and flexibility they need – bringing to life Microsoft’s vision of being the productivity and platforms company for a mobile-first, cloud-first world. Thousands of open standards are supported by Microsoft and many open source environments—including Linux and Hadoop—run on our platform. The end goal of our open source strategy is to give customers and partners even greater choices and opportunities to bridge Microsoft and non-Microsoft technologies together, and be successful in today’s heterogeneous technology world,” concluded Dinesh.