14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft seems to take a more friendly approach towards the Linux community, and now they've done something that might have seemed impossible a couple years back. They demoed an app running in a Linux distro at the BUILD 2015 developer conference that takes place in San Francisco, California.
It was a time when Linux was the cancer, and Windows was the cure, at least this is what some people in the upper echelons of Microsoft were thinking. Now things have changed to such a degree that it's hard to recognize Microsoft anymore, and it probably has to do with the new CEO, Satya Nadella, who is changing the direction of the company.
The BUILD 2015 developer conference is usually all about their environment, Window. This event was all the more important as Microsoft is planning to release Windows 10 in just a few months, and the community is hungry to find out more details. Imagine everyone's surprise to see the new Visual Studio Code application taking center stage on an Ubuntu system.
Visual Studio Code is built on open source technologies
To make things even more interesting, Visual Studio Code is actually built on Chromium, the open source Internet browser developed by Google. The package is provided as a binary, and it doesn't need any kind of installation or tweaking. Even if the application were shown to work on Ubuntu, it should be able to run on other Linux systems as well.
Microsoft is going to great lengths to change the way it's doing business, and they are trying to prove that it's a different company. For example, the Microsoft's Openness Team has recently had a "birthday party" for the release of Debian 8.0 (Jessie), which in itself was a strange thing to witness. We look forward to seeing what Microsoft is cooking up next.