On November 12, 2014, Microsoft made what I consider the most exciting announcement in .NET history: .NET is going open source and cross-platform.
Scott Guthrie announced that the full server-side .NET stack would be open sourced on GitHub under the MIT license, and that .NET Core would run on Linux and Mac in addition to Windows. This was a seismic shift — the same company that once called open source a “cancer” was now one of its most significant contributors.
For those of us who had been building on .NET for years, this opened up a whole new world of possibilities: cross-platform development, containerization, deployment on Linux servers, and a massive community of contributors improving the framework we rely on every day.
It was a great reason to be thankful that year. And as it turns out, it was just the beginning — .NET Core eventually became simply .NET 5+ and is now the unified, modern, cross-platform successor to .NET Framework.
The .NET Core GitHub repo is worth a look if you haven’t already.