Not long ago I wrote a blog post about how platform restrictions harm .NET. This led to a lot of discussion online and on Twitter. At some point David Kean suggested a more productive approach would be to create a UserVoice issue. So I did and it quickly gathered a lot of votes.

I’m visiting Toronto right now so I’ve been off of the Internet all day and missed all the hubbub when it happened. I found out about it when I logged into Gmail and I saw I had an email that the user voice issue I created was closed. My initial angry knee-jerk reaction was “What?! How could they close this without addressing it?!” as I furiously clicked on the subject to read the email and follow the link to this post.

Bravo!

Serious Kudos to the .NET team for this. It looks like most of the interesting PCL packages are now licensed without platform restrictions. As an example of how this small change sends out ripples of goodness, we can now make Octokit.net depend on portable HttpClient and make Octokit.net itself more cross platform and portable without a huge amount of work.

I’m also excited about the partnership between Microsoft and Xamarin this represents. I do believe C# is a great language for cross-platform development and it’s good to see Microsoft jumping back on board with this. This is a marked change from the situation I wrote about in 2012.