Four things developers should know about the new Microsoft

The changes unleased by the new, post-Ballmer Microsoft on its user and developer base in the past week have been northing short of seismic. Here are four of the biggest takeaways for developers from the many announcements that have come out of the Build conference.

1. Microsoft’s new development culture runs on open source

This is about more than Microsoft open-sourcing existing work. Granted, it’s nice to have, and nobody’s complaining about great swaths of open source, cross-platform .Net infrastructure. But the underlying issue is much larger: Microsoft’s entire software development culture, going forward, will be powered by open source.

No, it doesn’t mean all of Microsoft’s products will be open source, so don’t hold your breath waiting for an open source version of Windows. But it does mean the culture of tools around Microsoft’s products — the languages, the compilers, the development environments — will to be open endeavors.

What’s more, the way those things will be open source will be far more in line with the way open source has worked in the software world outside of Microsoft. When Big Red(mond) announced that the next-generation .Net compiler, code-named “Roslyn,” would be open source, many wondered if it would be released under Microsoft’s own MS-PL. Instead, it was released under the Apache 2.0 license, which grants patent licenses to the work — a major about-face for the normally protective Microsoft, since developers were previously leery of how much patent leeway Microsoft would give with its open-sourced creations.

The scope and utility of those tools has now been hugely broadened. A key selling point for Roslyn is that it turns the compiler into an API of its own — which could in time have as much impact on Microsoft’s software ecosystem as something like Node.js had with JavaScript.

This brings up another reason why the shift to open source for Microsoft’s development tools makes sense. All of the really exciting developments in software culture in the last decade or more have been open source: Node.js, Hadoop, cloud- and infrastructure-related tools like Puppet and Chef (both now supported in Azure, hint hint), and so on. For Microsoft to continue to miss out on being a part of all this, or to only be a part of it by allowing use of it on its platforms, means Microsoft would continue to shirk the energy and creativity of the very developers Microsoft claims to prize so highly — developers who have been working first and foremost outside of Microsoft’s ecosystem.

2. Build once, run anywhere may finally be real, but developers may face new issues with it

The idea of a genuinely singular Windows platform has been more pipe dream and propaganda than reality for too long, but now, for the first time in Microsoft’s history, it’s real. But for developers, the reality of creating something that can run across Microsoft-powered devices is just the beginning of a new set of issues.

For starters, developers now have to think about writing cross-device by default. It’s akin to the initial push for mobile-friendly websites, with many of the same issues. Those don’t just involve multiple display sizes, although that’s hard enough — what looks good on a 5-inch screen looks like a waste of space on a 10-inch tablet or a 21-inch desktop. It’s also about having to make good use of multiple input modalities: touch, conventional mouse and keyboard input, and who knows what else comes down the line over time (such as the Kinect).

Designing a mobile-friendly — or in many cases, mobile-first — website is a lot easier than it used to be thanks to the frameworks and design metaphors available for that job. While Microsoft would be foolish to not provide toolsets to make such cross-platform design easier, that sort of work isn’t something that can be wholly automated. It still falls to the designer to make the hard choices.

3. The cloud is the new development environment, as it should be

Strictly speaking, this isn’t news, but everything that’s unfolded of late has hammered it home harder. When news about Roslyn finally started to emerge, it became clearer that the technology was meant to be an adjunct to Microsoft’s new set of cloud-hosted, Azure-powered IDEs. The more ambitious and cloud-centric the projects developers are working on, the more likely they’ll be to reap the benefits of using a cloud hosting system — that is, the massively parallel load testing and live telemetry offered through Microsoft’s services.

It remains to be seen if others will take Microsoft’s open source work on Roslyn to develop their own cloud-hosted app environments. Such a move would afford Microsoft yet another challenge in the form of an alternative to their particular cloud (an increasing source of their dependable long-term revenue) and would give developers, Microsoft-centric and otherwise, tmore freedom of choice.

4. Microsoft’s development future isn’t solely on Windows anymore

If Office for the iPad wasn’t proof enough, nothing is. Microsoft’s future as a software company can’t be tied to Windows alone anymore; it has to become a multiplatform outfit. One easy way to do that is to make its tools portable — hence, open-sourcing many of them — but that by itself won’t do it. Microsoft needs to have at least one developer success story that’s not directly tied to Windows — a language or runtime that thrives as globally as, say, Python or JavaScript — and that proves to be useful without merely driving people back to Microsoft’s core technologies.

This means developers who’ve typically shunned Microsoft’s tools and platforms may find more reason to use a Microsoft original (and, specifically, Windows), without being tied to its origins. The C# and F# languages have already offered some of this, but there ought to be more once we see how Roslyn affects the future of the .Net family. At best, it could prove to be as germinal for cross-platform language development as the JVM has been. If that does happen, Microsoft could finally find itself in the position of not needing Windows, and the culture of software born and bred for it, as its biggest success story.

This story, “Four things developers should know about the new Microsoft,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Get the first word on what the important tech news really means with the InfoWorld Tech Watch blog. For the latest developments in business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.