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Microsoft Open Sources .NET Micro Framework
An anonymous reader writes "Back in July, Microsoft announced it was making .NET available under its Community Promise, which in theory allowed free software developers to use the technology without fear of patent lawsuits. Not surprisingly, many free software geeks were unconvinced by the promise (after all, what's a promise compared to an actual open licence?), but now Microsoft has taken things to the next level by releasing the .NET Micro Framework under the Apache 2.0 licence. Yes, you read that correctly: a sizeable chunk of .NET is about to go open source."
It's A Trap!
Nope this framework is for mobile devices and the 360.
Microsoft is really dieing in the mobile space right now. WinMo 6.5 Still doesn't have native support capacitive touch screens and the Mobile world is on fire with Android and of course the iPhone.
HTC, LG, and Samsung are all developing or have released Android phones.
Palm and Motorola are now dropping WinMo and going with WebOS and Android.
This is one space where Microsoft is at best an also ran and really is dropping in the race for mind share.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Not quite. Visual Studio Express is free for commercial usage.
.NET micro is mostly for embedded devices running WinCE.
Nope, you're wrong. You're thinking of the .Net Compact Framework. Basically there are three .NET implementations available from MS (ignoring Rotor for the time being). The Windows one (known as "the .Net Framework") is the largest, with lots of libraries and capabilities. The Compact Framework targets Win CE level devices (fewer resources, lower capabilities), and takes about 12 Mbytes. The .NET Micro Framework targets even smaller devices; it has a subset of the .NET classes, and can fit in 300 kBytes or less. The .NET Micro Framework doesn't need an OS to run (but it can run on an OS). That's the thing that was running in the (now defunct) SPOT watches and MSN Direct traffic dongles. Those were tiny devices which couldn't have run Win CE.
and it is also a company, a hierarchal organization were those lower down have to do what those higher up tell them to do. Those higher up have a pattern of behavior that justifies many of the fears on Slashdot. Groklaw is full of evidence, much of which was gained through court systems from around the world.
So to quote Wikipedia
So whats changed
Bogus. Mono is very current with .NET and has even beaten MS to the punch on some features. The major missing features compared to .NET are the MS specific libraries and proper current Silverlight support. So unless you're developing Silverlight apps or Windows specific software (which would obviate the choice to use Mono anyway) I doubt you have even tried Mono.
Time makes more converts than reason
There is Sharp Develop[www.icsharpcode.net]. An open source IDE for .NET. It supports C#, VB, Boo, and F#.
Don't think of it as a flame, more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage.
You don't need SourceSafe at all to do any sort of .NET development. Subversion, git, CVS, etc. all work fine for .NET development.
SourceSafe would be better off forgotten entirely.
You completely forgot the current leader in phone OSes, Symbian. It doesn't get many press releases, but it's got more market share than the iphone, Android, WinMo, AND Blackberry combined. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smartphone#Operating_systems
Lots of people have corrected you, but I'm going to correct you in a different manner: not only is SourceSafe not required, but MS has basically been trying to phase it out in favor of Team Foundation Server (part of VS Enterprise I think) for a while now.
MS knows SourceSafe is crap; it's one of the few products that no one dogfoods internally.