Google has been one of the most active contributors outside of Microsoft to .NET Foundation projects over the past two years as well as helping to drive the ECMA Standardization process for C#. .NET workloads have first-class support on Google Cloud Platform including recently announced native integrations into the popular Visual Studio IDE on Windows and deep support for PowerShell. Google’s work is a natural fit into the Technical Steering Group and I’m glad they have agreed to come on board to help steer the future direction of the platform.

“We’re very happy to add .NET support to our list of supported frameworkson Google Cloud Platform,” saidChris Sells, Lead PM for Google Cloud Developer Tools. “Enterprises moving their existing Windows and.NET workloads to the cloud or those targeting .NET Core can find what theyneed to build great apps for Google Cloud Platform.”

Secondly, back in June 2016 I had thepleasure of announcing that Samsung had joined the technicalsteering group. They havebeen focusing on ARM support in .NET Core and today we got to see the firstfruits of their labor with the preview release of .NET Core support for theTizen operating system and their VisualStudio Tools for Tizen.

Tizen is an open sourceoperating system based on Linux, supported by the Linux Foundation and open to alldevelopers. Tizen powers 50 million Samsung devices, including Smart TVs,wearables, smartphones, and home appliances. Today, Samsung is releasing thefirst preview of Visual Studio Tools for Tizen,which supports mobile application development with device emulators and anextension to Visual Studio with full IntelliSense and debugging capabilities.The support for Smart TVs, wearables, and other IoT devices will be added infuture releases. Tizen’s .NET support will be officially released and shippingon Samsung devices, including Smart TVs, in 2017. This will allow .NETdevelopers to build applications to deploy on Tizen across the globe andcontinues in our mission to bring the productive .NET development platform toeveryone.

“Samsung is excited to be a part of the .NETcommunity. .NET has a huge developer base and future potential,” said Samsung’s Executive Vice President and Deputy Head of SoftwareR&D Center Seung-hwan Cho. “Through thoughtful and progressivecollaboration, Samsung is expecting to create unique development experiencesfor both Tizen and C# developers, enriching the Tizen ecosystem.”

Their work builds on top of several .NET Foundationprojects including .NET Core, Mono and Xamarin Forms.

• Tizen’s .NET support is a part of the .NET Core open source project: https://github.com/dotnet/core
• Tizen’s Xamarin.Forms support is a part of the Xamarin.Forms open source project: https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms
• Tizen’s device APIs are a part of the Tizen open source project: https://source.tizen.org
• Download Visual Studio Tools for Tizen here: http://www.aka.ms/tizen

Other .NET Foundation projects havealso been very busy. Today, .NET Core, EF Core 1.1 and ASP.NET Core 1.1 werealso released including several new features and APIs along with support formore operating system distributions (now up to 12). For more information seethe .NET TeamBlog.

It’s also very exciting to see that ASP.NET CoreMVC is now a top-performing web framework on TechEmpower. Today TechEmpowerreleased their Round 13 results which show ASP.NET Core MVC as the fastestmainstream fullstack web framework in the Plantext test.

The Technical Steering Group wasformed in late March 2016 and we are already seeing huge progress. Red Hat havereleased the firstrelease of .NET Core for RHEL,JetBrains have been producing build after build of Project Rider as .NET Core’s toolingapproaches it’s V1.0, Unity have announcedsupport for C#6 and nowthe Tizen news from Samsung along with Google coming onboard and supporting ASP.NETas a first class citizen in Google Cloud Platform. It’s fantastic to witness the innovation that ishappening on top of the .NET platform right now, all of it only possiblebecause of .NET being open source and welcoming to all.

It’s certainly an incredibly exciting time to be a .NET developer!

-- Martin