Google Joins .NET Foundation Technical Steering Group; Samsung's Tizen Gets .NET Support

At its ongoing Connect(); 2016 developer conference, Microsoft announced that Google has become a member of .NET Foundation Technical Steering Group. The Group, formed in March this year, is responsible for sharing a clear direction of the popular Web services framework with other companies.

Microsoft had formed the .NET Foundation in 2014 as an overseer of the open-sourcing of the software framework; members of the Technical Steering Group, apart from Microsoft and Google, include Samsung, Red Hat, JetBrains, and Unity.

Google has been an active .NET contributor and offers .NET libraries for over 200 of its services. The Google Cloud Platform (GCP) provides first-class support to .NET on the internet search giant’s infrastructure; Microsoft products Visual Studio and PowerShell in August 2016 received GCP support as well.
 
In a blog post, Google said, “Joining the Technical Steering Group for the .NET Foundation expands our participation. We’re excited to work with the industry to contribute to .NET as an excellent open platform for developers in the enterprise. Don’t hesitate to contact us if we can help you bring your .NET workloads to GCP!”

Samsung made an announcement of its own regarding the .NET framework this week. The South Korean titan announced the preview release of .NET Core support for the Tizen OS as well as Visual Studio Tools for Tizen. With these, developers working on the Tizen platform – an operating system jointly developed by Samsung, Intel and The Linux Foundation – will now have the option to create applications using the .NET framework; HTML5 and C were the only supported languages till now.
Reference:

The first .NET preview for Tizen provides developers with device emulators and Visual Studio access with complete IntelliSense and debugging capabilities, according to a VentureBeat report. However, these will only allow developers to create apps for mobile devices; reportedly, only a preview is available currently, and full availability can be expected around March 2017. The company will provide .NET app development support for Internet of Things devices, wearables and smart TVs in future releases.

“Samsung is excited to be a part of the .NET community. .NET has an extensive developer base and great potential,” said Samsung’s Executive Vice President and Deputy Head of Software R&D Center Seung-hwan Cho. “Through thoughtful and progressive collaboration with Microsoft, Samsung is expecting to create unique development experiences for both Tizen and C# developers, enriching the Tizen ecosystem.”