The podcast covers the history of .NET Core, including its evolution from Mono to Xamarin, the shift towards open source and cloud computing, the transition to .NET Core and focus on Azure, the challenges faced with the initial release of .NET Core, and the improvements in application performance and hosting costs through rewriting applications and using dependency inversion.
Satya Nadella's leadership led to a shift towards cloud computing, focusing on Azure and committing source code to the Linux kernel project.
.NET Core provided a modular and open source version of .NET Framework, allowing developers to host applications on cheap Linux servers and garnering significant community support.
Deep dives
History of .NET Framework
.NET Framework was released in 2000-2002 as a collection of APIs for Windows development, emphasizing rapid application development. It received updates, with the current stable release being 4.7.2. It was primarily aimed at developers using C#, VB.NET, and later F#. However, for non-Windows users, a project called Mono was started, which aimed to create a cross-platform reimplementaion of .NET Framework. Additionally, Xamarin was created to allow cross-platform UI development.
Shift towards Cloud Computing
Under Satya Nadella's leadership, Microsoft shifted focus towards cloud computing, particularly through the Azure platform. .NET Framework was partially open sourced prior to Nadella's tenure, but he pushed for more openness. Microsoft started working with competitors, creating their own Linux distribution (Sonic) and committing source code to the Linux kernel project. Nadella understood the future of apps and services was in the cloud, and redirected engineering talent accordingly.
Introduction of .NET Core and ASP.NET Core
.NET Core, initially called ASP.NET vNext and later released as .NET Core 1.0, was a more modular and open source version of .NET Framework. It allowed developers to include only the necessary parts of the runtime and host applications on cheap Linux servers. The introduction of .NET Standard provided a common interface for all platforms within the .NET ecosystem. ASP.NET Core and EFCore also garnered significant community support as developers embraced the smaller, faster, and cheaper hosting capabilities.