 This is Jason Porter with Red Hat Developers and we've got Don, how do you say your last name Don? Shank. Shank. He's here talking about .NET on Realm or Linux, either way. Yes. Very good. How long have you been involved with the .NET initiative? Well I started using .NET back when it started in 2002. So yeah, the whole 15 years just had its 15th anniversary. It was a big deal with .NET. And then .NET Core, as soon as it went open source, I was all over that. Oh, very good. Now how long, some of our viewers may not know, how long has .NET been available on Linux? It was, I guess it was announced as open source, I think it was November of 2014. The first release of it was about a year ago, it was June, last year at Microsoft Build. So it's been available for, let's say a year and a half, but it's been officially available for just about a year. Okay, very good. Now where can I run it? I should be able to run it on all distributions. You can run it in your office, you can run it in your house. You can run it basically anywhere. It runs on Linux, it runs on Mac, it runs on Windows, it runs on any flavor of Linux. Of course it runs great on Realm, but anywhere you want to run a program you can run it. Very good. What kinds of limitations do I have? If I'm running it on Realm, can I write ASP, can I write WinForms? What can I do with it on Linux? Right now it's all server-side, so RESTful Services, ASP.NET with MVC. And then you can, obviously other websites, there's templates for Aurelia, the other one is Escaping, Angular, Web API, regular ASP.NET, ASP.NET, MVC, all kinds of templates. And that templating engine you can get to so you can basically do anything. You can do desktop apps if you want to do some low-level stuff, but then you're outside of .NET, you're jumping into P and Vogue and getting into low-level libraries. It's not pretty. Okay, very good. For you, what is the best feature of .NET running on Realm? For me, the best feature is the community, is the open-source community. I think that is extremely valuable because now you have, instead of one place where you go for support, you can go to GitHub Repos for example and just look at the issues and get answers to your questions, or in my case find out what you did wrong. Wait, is that better than Stack Overflow? Yeah, well, I think it is. I mean, just for me. But the community is the biggest benefit I find of it. I mean, it brings you into the world of open-source. If you've been a traditional Microsoft .NET developer and you lived in that world, and I did for you ever until a few years ago, and then you jump into the world of open-source, you're like, man, there's all this, not just software available, there's all these people that know all this stuff and I make connections with them through GitHub or Twitter or conferences. Next thing you know, you're in it, you're not using it, you're part of it, and that's so valuable. Since .NET has been open-source, or at least core, has been open-source, have you seen a larger uptick in it being used in open-source libraries? Well, what I'm seeing is obviously previous versions of libraries being ported to .NET Core. And then there are some, and this is the thing a lot of developers don't realize this, you can take some libraries that aren't written for core and they will work in core. For example, yesterday I was talking to someone about NancyFX, which is an alternative library for like MVC and RESTful interfaces and that. And they said, yeah, we couldn't get it to work. And I said, no, you can, I've done it, I have a demo, you can get it. Here we go, open-source, you can get it for my repo. And there was just a setting, this is kind of obscure setting in project.json at the time that allows you to use it. So I see stuff being ported and then you start to see more interest. I've talked to some customers that are actually writing and have code in production in .NET Core, which is on Linux, which is really cool. Great. Now how difficult is it to port something to .NET Core? That's a typical IT answer, it depends. And it really does. So there's a, obviously when you write .NET, you're calling APIs. So depending on how many or which APIs you call depends on the complexity. Microsoft has a tool that will analyze it. But the big news, and I have a session today at 4.30, we're going to talk about .NET Standard 2.0, which is, it's like 50,000 more or a total 50,000 API. It goes from 16% coverage of APIs to 70%. That's a big jump. Yeah, it is a big jump. So what's going to happen with .NET Standard? You're going to find a lot of applications that in 1.1, they're like, well, they didn't really come over so well. And 2.0, it's going to be like, Standard 2.0, it's going to be like, wow, these support very easily. So that's a big deal. And that's going to be, I guess the beta bits should be available during Microsoft Build next week. Excellent, very good. And one last question for you. How do I get started running .NET on Linux? Yeah, it's, there's a lot of resources. So the website, our website is redhatloves.net. So that's one place. If you go to .NET, that's Microsoft's website for .NET. DOT.NET. Yeah, which is a great band of the URL. And then you scroll and look around, find Linux and blah, blah, blah. You'll find installation instructions. I have some videos, if you're that, if you like to watch videos on YouTube on how to install .NET on RHEL. We have a redhat development kit, a suite that you can download. And that gives you like a VM virtual box to run it, vagrant to management. You get Docker, Kubernetes and OpenShift. That's really, I think the way to go. I have a video on YouTube how to download and install that. Excellent. That's my job, it's to produce resources. So just start at redhatloves.net or .NET and you're good to go. Excellent, very good. Alrighty, thank you Don. Thank you.