I know it's silly but I'm tearing up. I grew up with .NET but neglected it for years because of moving to OS X, iOS and web dev. I played for some time with Xamarin and I'm so happy this is where MS is going. <3 Scott & Miguel, I'm sure they both had a lot to do with it.
What I've overheard on some podcast discussions is that they are taking the multiplatform Silverlight runtime, and have enhanced it to be a headless server-type runtime instead of browser-plugin-UI-focused. It doesn't include all of the windows-only features of the CLR and BCL, but has all you need for ASP.NET vNEXT.
I think Xamarian made a very good move in getting into cross platform toolkits, rather than just relying on support contracts for Mono. At this point I think they're in a position where Microsoft Open Sourcing the .Net runtime isn't going to hurt them too badly.
I would expect that Xamarin's role with Mono is analogous to 37signals\Basecamp is to Ruby on Rails. Neither organization makes money developing Mono nor RoR. They make their money supporting and consulting organizations that chose to use the software that they are developing.
Me too. I went from OSS stuff to .Net in 2009 and fell in love with C#, and eventually Visual Studio. It's nice to see the two worlds merging and moving forward.
