I think this is great. I wanted to use F# instead of Julia for numerical computing, but all the benchmarks only had F# on mono, because they couldn't benchmark with the closed source MS stuff. I knew F# was very fast, and could be optimized. Now, with the leaner, cross platform .NET core, and the .NET libs, I will have to backtrack a bit, and take another look.
A lot of talented people on the list for OmniSharp. I wish it success!
The OmniSharp work is mostly focused on C#, but if you are interested in F#, you should check out Ionide (http://ionide.io). It provides similar experience to OmniSharp, but has support for some other great tools used by the F# community (FAKE build tool, Paket package manager, etc.) There is also new upcoming F# Interactive integration that lets you embed graphics, charts and whatnot in the REPL.
I'm starting to get an interest in .NET development because of the recent news regarding Xamarin and the mobile ecosystem.
How does this project relates to .NET development? The web site provides only generic informations such as "enable a great .NET experience in YOUR editor of choice". Would this allow me to open and build Visual Studio projects on non-Windows environments?
The short answer is that yes, with tools like Omnisharp and Xamarin Studio, you can write code targeting the CLR on OSX and Linux. Omnisharp basically interacts with Rosyln (the .NET compiler) to provide integration for various editors.
The longer answer is that it really depends on what type of project you're looking to do. Certain technologies from Microsoft will never get ported. WPF and anything that relies on the System.Web assembly are the more well known exceptions. This is because both of those technologies rely specifically on Windows technology to work. WPF, for example relies on a library called PresentationCore which ultimately ends up using DirectX for rendering. System.Web, if I remember correctly, relies on specific IIS technologies to work.
ASP.NET and .NET are moving to more platform independent states, which is what is on GitHub. The ASP.NET ream removed the requirement on System.Web and instead defined the OWIN standard which formalizes the communication between sites that are developed in .NET and servers that can run them. The 2 most widely used implementors of that are IIS 8 (with the HttpPlatform Handler), Suave (F#), and project Katana, although I know I'm missing one.
OmniSharp is a language service which can be used by editors such as Sublime, Atom, Vim and VS Code to provide syntax highlighting, in place suggestions, error reporting, refactoring and lots of other cool features.
It is open source and cross platform and since it is common language service across all editors, in theory you should expect same error messages and behavior regardless of what OS or editor you are developing in.
Intellisense is the name for the rich auto-complete and member info in Visual Studio. Sometimes it's almost as good as Googling and many in the dot Net ecosystem often use the term "coding via Intellisense" for exploring the library APIs via the IDE.
Omnisharp is bringing Intellisense to non-Visual Studio code editors.
..and every Product Owner in Microsoft pushing to get their baby into the default project templates results in the default projects becoming a bloated mess..
The only really annoying push I see in Visual Studio is the Applications Insights stuff. Default on for a new project. And if it's not on, it scans your dependencies then pops up an ad. I just got such an ad because I had NLog on a project - it specifically mentioned using NLog + Application Insights. But VS+VsVim is so far ahead of the competition that what choice do I have?
Application Insights, Entity Framework, OWIN and two dozen other things are included in a "standard" website template.
Now, I love templates - and I wish that they were easier to use so we'd see more variety - but putting everything and the kitchen sink into the default templates is getting annoying.
So does this multi-platform editor support mean that we can use the Roselyn compiler on Linux? Or is it still recommended to use Mono? How about FSharp support on Linux? Still Mono?
Looks interesting. I think I'll come back when you folks are a little less ... manic. I get itchy around people who feel the need to tell the world they "unapologetically love" anything. When the target of the ardour is .Net, I think I'll wait for the meds to kick in.
A lot of talented people on the list for OmniSharp. I wish it success!