I’ve said for years that .NET should be open sourced and cross-platform, and that development is finally taking place. Today Microsoft announced a preview of coreclr running on Ubuntu, and this evening I was able to build it on Ubuntu 14.04 running in a docker container.

HelloWorld.exe on Ubuntu 14.04 in a docker container

There were quite a few steps involved, and as this is a preview there is also quite a bit still missing. Notably compilation of managed code on linux (using roslyn) is not available, so after building the coreclr on Ubuntu you have to pop into Windows and build it, and the corefx libraries, then copy a bunch of crap over to your linux system. You also still need mono for some callable wrappers, and nuget to grab a bunch of dependent packages. Still, all in all it feels fairly historic, and coming on the heels of Microsoft’s announcement of their new cross-platform code editor I’d say it’s been a good week for them and those of us who are fans of their tools (whatever platform we find ourselves working on).

If you want to try it yourself the ubuntu:14.04 docker image is a good starting point. Note that you’ll want to install both wget and curl before following the instructions to get coreclr running.