At the 2022 re:Invent conference, Saikat Banerjee, AWS software development manager, commented sharply: “We found that the .NET open source project is seriously underfunded and can still be called third-party open source.” Then he said that AWS attached great importance to the .net ecosystem in the past, and will continue to strongly support the open source development of .NET in the future.

Surprised by claims that .NET open source is underfunded, Microsoft formed the .NET Foundation, which it describes as “an independent nonprofit organization established to support an innovative, business-friendly open source ecosystem for the .NET platform. , and AWS is one of only 10 corporate sponsors of the foundation.

On the other hand, although Microsoft’s .NET team has invested a lot of energy, at the technical level, the cross-platform process after .NET open source includes the efforts of a large number of external contributors. For example, AWS is very concerned about the open source work of .NET. It not only donates to the .NET Foundation, rewards outstanding .NET projects in the community with cash and points, but also actively participates in the development of .NET cross-platform code, and strives to Go Windows/cross-platform for .NET.

According to Banerjee, AWS is trying to “improve WCF (Windows Communication Development Platform) without letting it retain its original limitations”. This work includes identity federation support for HTTP bindings, and extending WFC message queue support to support message brokers other than Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ), such as RabbitMQ and Amazon SQS.

Another key area is Active Directory (AD), and in Windows AD, a Group Managed Service Account (gMSA) is often used as the account for application services. AWS has ported this component to Linux, developing a component called the credentials fetcher, a daemon process that sits on Linux instances and allows the use of gMSAs in Linux containers.

Also, there has been a cold start issue when launching Lambdas using .NET. The .NET runtime needs to be loaded when the function is running, and the JIT compiler compiles the .NET intermediate code into native code every time, which also takes a long time. The solution in the .NET 7 release is native AOT compilation, and AWS has developed Lambda tools for .NET that add native AOT compilation to Lambda functions.

Why is AWS so interested in .NET cross-platform work? This goes back to .NET Framework, the predecessor of .NET Core. .NET Framework comes from the Windows platform, which makes .NET Core applications that call COM or other native Windows APIs unable to run on Linux. On the other hand, some parts of .NET Framework (such as ASP.NET Web Forms and most of WCF) are not part of .NET Core, making most .NET applications more suitable for Windows or Azure cloud environments, porting to other clouds quite difficult.

Of course, big factories will not engage in open source for Aidan. .NET is the third most popular platform for AWS application development after Python and Java. AWS’s investment in .NET open source work is mostly to get . Windows dependency, easier to use its Linux VM and cloud native technology, so as to get rid of Windows and SQL Server licensing, and get more cloud service customers. Of course, the same optimization also applies to Microsoft’s Azure and other cloud environments. Hello, everyone, hello, it’s a good thing.

In addition, rather than saying that there is insufficient “funding” for .NET open source, it is better to say “insufficient resources”. Microsoft’s internal opinions on .NET open source may not be unified, and resources that are inclined to open source business have been playing games. For example, last year, Microsoft quietly deleted the hot-reloaded function code in the upcoming .NET 6, claiming that this function is only supported in Visual Studio, forcing users to switch to the expensive Visual Studio 2022. This move immediately caused strong opposition and criticism from Microsoft’s internal .NET developers and the external .NET community. Subsequently, Microsoft executives apologized and restored the hot reload function in .NET 6.