Day two of Build and we’re on to the more enterprise- and developer-centric side of things. Yesterday was dominated by news about Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1 Update, but today Microsoft has caused ripples of excitement by announcing that the .NET Compiler Platform “Roslyn” is now open source.
If you’re not familiar with Roslyn — and we’d forgive you if this is the case — it is a collection of APIs that provide C# and Visual Basic compilers. We first learned about Roslyn back at Build in 2011, and the first preview version was released later the same year.
Microsoft’s expansion into the world of open source software looks set to continue, and all such projects will be found under the .NET Foundation umbrella. The open sourcing of Roslyn is almost instantaneous, and the project change to “public” during the announcement. While there were a couple of rumors that Microsoft’s “compiler as a service” might be turned into an open source project, it was not something many people genuinely expected to happen before today’s announcement.
This is one announcement that will have developers from all fields of work jumping up and down and you can grab the source code and get to work by heading over to the Roslyn page on CodePlex.
