It would be nice to have both JVM and .NET CLR available on major unix like platforms.
This work was done (almost) entirely without any MSFT involvement. Contributions were done by a bunch of guys affectionally called "the port team" whom you wouldn't want to meet in a (technical) dark alleyway ;)
@janhenke, @josteink, @ajensenwaud, @xied75, @kangaroo, @ghuntley, @qbit & @richlander (MSFT)
https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr/issues/455
edit: Special shoutout to interoute.com and Paul Kelly whom comped the infrastructure needed for the team to collaborate on/test with FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
edit: Extra special shoutout to @kangaroo who was the first successfully merged pull request after MSFT open-sourced everything. His commits added support for .NET on OSX. He was awarded a custom, personalized/engraved scotch glass at the recent .NETFringe open-source .NET conference in portland a couple weeks ago.
We gave @kangaroo a "port" glass to thank him for his OS X "port" and did it in Portland at the already mentioned .NET Fringe conference. We also gave him two bottles of port, one of which was "Washington Port" from Whidbey island (Whidbey being the codename for .NET 2.0). The engraving was done in the Microsoft "Garage".
We're looking forward to giving out a nice set of engraved FreeBSD port glasses once FreeBSD catches up to the OS X and Linux.
I've been a Java on Ubuntu/Linux for as long as my professional career but would love to see .NET becomes THE first class OSS enterprise stack on FreeBSD.
FreeBSD needs more LOVE from MSFT.
Having said that, I would love to see the .NET team produces something like Gradle/Maven (aside from the hatred toward Maven, NuGET is way behind and MSBuild reminds me of Ant thus NuGET + MSBuild combo is similar to ANT + Ivy instead of Maven/Gradle. And if you guys ever decided to adopt a scripting language for build, please, for the love of technology, do not use F# for the build scripting language like http://fsharp.github.io/FAKE/, just... not readable :)).
I cannot wait for the day when I can write a solid .NET GUI app or tools or Web-App for FreeBSD that looks nice and be productive with the tooling around it (unfortunately IntelliJ/Eclipse, Java, Maven, Tomcat/TomEE, Jetty, PostgreSQL/MySQL stack are still way too far ahead).
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If BSD on .NET is of interest to you (or anyone else reading) and are willing to help out please introduce yourself in https://gitter.im/dotnet/coreclr . Any help is appreciated on all systems, even if it is infrastructure, documentation or general marketing/pr.
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Additionally if you want to see .NET on OpenBSD/NetBSD please jump in the channel and let us know how, why and where you will be using it. The team is quite small and wants to make sure efforts are focused correctly.
I still think the main focus of the team is getting it working on FreeBSD, but if OpenBSD and NetBSD can gain from that effort we're more than willing to work together.
So far, unfortunately, there has been little commits (or even testing) for the other BSDs. So if you want your BSD represented, it looks like you may have to step up and take some responsibility :)
I think this github-issue here is full of good advice, so please do check it out:
For more details check out http://owin.org/ which is the main project that has been working to unshackle .NET from IIS by providing a implementation free interface for building http applications.
Other projects of interest are https://github.com/SuaveIO/suave and https://servicestack.net/ , http://nancyfx.org and https://github.com/Topshelf/Topshelf