.NET becoming OpenSource?

I have already started to see an increase in people starting to talk about hiring into .NET roles and offering the chance to work with ASP.NET Core 1.0 & .NET Core 1.0 but for me as a recruiter to fully understand:

a) What was going to change?
b) Why this was such a big deal?

MS decided that they would start a complete new product line rather than continue on with ASP.NET 4.6 or 5. For the last 15 years, since the release of ASP.NET 1.0 was shipped we have seen the adoption of this grow rapidly then over the last 3- 5 years, this number has started to decline in lieu of more OpenSource tech.

The whole idea behind .NET Core is new, so starting a fresh would inherently make sense. Despite the new functionality being intro’d through the new Core 1.0 CLI, I found that the main reason for this move, was to ensure that ASP.NET Core would be seen as a new product line, one that is OpenSource. Dustin Gorski highlighted this really well in a late blog entry using the example of integrating Node.JS over Powershell in Core 1.0 (www.dusted.codes).

After some further research I found that one of the main goals of .NET Core is to provide a single cross-platform version of .NET, not intended to replace the likes of Mono but due to its open source nature, to allow Mono Engineers to utilise CoreFX Libraries and also contribute to them as well. See https://github.com/dotnet/corefx for a list of .NET Core foundational libraries.

One thing for existing Web Engineers to bear in mind is that initially ASP.NET Core 1.0 will not have all the subsystems available in 4.6 and it is still a short way off of this for now. MVC and WebAPI will be there but things like SignalR and VB will not be available yet as eluded to by Scott Hanselman.

So what should hiring managers be aware of?

Well as far as I can tell aside from the aforementioned differences, organisations that adopt the newer tech and make the switch will inevitably be able to attract a more impressive candidate, those that already know about ASP.NET Core 1.0 will arguably be the ones who are active in the OpenSource Community and see development and the Web as more than just a job.

However, there is also a flip side to this, if you adopt this new tech too early, as we all know you will inevitably have to deal with teething issues and struggles that become apparent at the early stages of any new release.

I’d be keen to hear the development communities thoughts on this; Do they see it as being a logical step for Microsoft? Is it worthwhile moving to this OpenSource project or do you think it will be another Silverlight and be a bit of a flop with a lack of adoption?

Do you think its worth waiting until the bugs are worked out and the full subsystem set released?