Last week at the Build conference, Microsoft announced the formation of the .NET Foundation and the related open-sourcing of Roslyn, now called the “.NET Compiler Platform”. I have been building web applications atop .NET for over a decade and this is the most encouraging news I have heard in a while.

Over the past few years I have watched platforms like Python, Ruby, and of course the JVM (via “new” languages such as Groovy) steal developer excitement away from C# and .NET, at least in the open-source community. Check out this Ohloh graph. While I’m not sure what the future holds for .NET as a client-side platform (I think it largely depends on Xamarin), for server-side, line-of-business web app development, .NET continues to be a terrific platform (if you use the right libraries/frameworks on top of it) and there is absolutely no rational reason for an experienced web developer to jump ship. If Microsoft, Xamarin, and the other eventual sponsors of the .NET Foundation follow through and grow the foundation to its potential, they have a good chance of choking off the somewhat-irrational exodus from the platform.