EWeek is reporting on some unusual good news from Redmond, which is a rather nice change from the usual flow of negative Microsoft stories. Microsoft has released some ASP.net development tools for Linux. Although I can’t claim to understand all the technical details of exactly what they released, it appears that it is a development tool for Linux developers.

Although I suspect that not a whole lot of people will care about this particular piece of software, the precedent this potentially sets is great.

In the past, when Microsoft has said “cross-platform” what they meant was always “it runs on Windows and it at least sort of runs on the Mac.” Now that Microsoft has started releasing software for Linux, if only a small development tool, perhaps that definition will change to “it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.”

It is also possible that this is just an isolated incident of releasing something for Linux and it will not become regular, but I am glad to see some good news from Microsoft and I hope we see more in the future.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 13th, 2008 at 2:24 pm and is filed under Development, Microsoft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.