Microsoft Said to Pay About $400M in Xamarin Acquisition
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
The paranoid in me acknowledges that outside of MS Office, they've pretty much never kept a non-windows client project alive for more than two major releases. I wouldn't mind seeing the VS Code codebase become closer to what VS proper could have been, and seeing more cross platform support in that regard. I do like what they've been working on in Azure services and integration, just hoping the teams don't come in just to die in a year or two (Managed JScript, IronRuby, IronPython for starters).
I'm honestly hoping for the best, but that hope is definitely tempered.
1) All of .NET is open sourced under the Apache License (not some weird MS license)
2) Xamarin had started taking thousands of lines of code from the open sourced .NET framework and replacing parts of Mono with it (like System.Decimal, etc). So that merge had started happening anyway.
3) The "Mono" differentiation was probably going to go away with .NET Core maturing.
4) MS needs a quick step up with cross platform toolkits for .NET, and nobody better than Xamarin, who's been doing it for a decade.
If they abandon Xamarin, you still have an APL'd .NET framework that's fully developed out in the open, and nobody is really left in a lurch. You can fork it.