Warren - Dot net

Hi, I just listened to episode 142, and wanted to correct and clarify a few things about your discussion of the recent port of “.NET” to NetBSD.

I put that in quotes because this is not a port of the entire Microsoft .NET stack.  It is .NET Core, a very much stripped-down version of .NET intended primarily to serve back-end applications:

  http://dotnet.github.io/

I don’t mean that it’s entirely headless.  There is also a subset of the GUI libraries, just as there is a subset of, say, the networking APIs.  But, don’t go on GitHub and download a random Windows .NET project and expect it to build out of the box.  Except for toy programs, you pretty much have to be very careful to target .NET Core specifically when writing the program.

If you want a full-featured .NET stack for BSD and other open systems, you actually want Mono instead, today.

One of the few features .NET Core has over Mono is support for ASP.NET, which brings us to why you’d care about this on the BSDs.  All those sites on the Internet you see with *.aspx URLs are now potentially portable to the BSDs.

(As opposed to those with *.asp URLs, which is the old^Wclassic ASP framework.)

This was a huge motivation for the creation of .NET Core: allow Windows ASP.NET apps to run on Microsoft Azure cloud platform, which hosts a whole lot of non-Windows VMs.