How Docker will change Microsoft Development

Two months ago we (Xpirit) published a new edition of our Xpirit Magazine. In this magazine I wrote an article on how Docker will change Microsoft Development. In this blog post you will find the introduction.

If you want to read the whole article, you can download the PDF of the article here . If you want to read the rest of the magazine you can download the whole magazine or other separate articles here !The rest of this article

Within the developer community, Microsoft has always been known for their great IDE, Visual Studio, and their development framework .NET. Together with products such as SQL Server, SharePoint and BizTalk, this was the basic set of tools of every Microsoft Developer. In addition to the Microsoft toolset there were some additions such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS or some other third-party frameworks and tools, but Microsoft’s portfolio constituted the main body of the tooling required by developers.

The downside of this unified toolset and the tight coupling with Windows caused more and more developers and companies to shift away from the Microsoft platform and for various reasons. Companies did not want vendor lock-ins or to rely solely on proprietary software. Moreover, developers wanted more choice and control over the frameworks they used, preferring to move to Open Source.

Times are changing

But Microsoft has changed its strategy – it is moving to a “mobile first, cloud first” world and knows that there is more than Microsoft alone. And this shift of strategy also impacts the Microsoft Developer.

Some major changes were made to overcome the difficulties faced by companies and developers using the Microsoft platform, there were. Microsoft does not only want to offer the best platform and IDE for Microsoft developers, it also wants to offer the best platform for all developers, regardless of the platform or technology being used. We now see Microsoft adopting Open Source, providing development tools on every Operating System (Visual Studio Code) and it is even open-sourcing its own technology.

The .NET platform became Open Source and ASP.NET 5 was completely rebuilt to be able to run on both Linux and Windows. Microsoft created a lightweight version of the .NET runtime called the CoreCLR. This CoreCLR is available on all the platforms and is much lighter than the traditional CLR.  And although it seems trivial because most of the ASP.NET applications run on Windows this actually opens up a whole new range of possibilities.

ASP.NET 5 is a powerful technology. However, the downside always was that it was not Open Source. But now that it is Open Source, ASP.NET has the power and curation of a large company like Microsoft but all the benefits and community of Open Source, allowing the technology to evolve even quicker.

With the CoreCLR, which is an important part of the ASP.NET stack, every developer is able to build and run applications on all platforms.

From mainframes to containers

With regard to application development and deployment, a lot of attention is currently paid to Continuous Delivery and DevOps, i.e. the ability to release an application on demand, and the ability to remove all friction between the people building the application and the people running it.

Read more in the PDF..Enjoy !