The Alt.Net movement is a powerful force; always looking for better ways of doing things no matter where that alternative might come from. So if it's something new from Microsoft, that's great - if it's an approach from the open source world or an alternate language or somewhere else entirely then that's great too.
Xamarin deserves particular mention as the ability to share 80-90% of your core codebase between all mobile phone platforms is just stellar. It makes absolutely no business sense to re-write your core business logic for each platform and in that platforms language. So much less project risk, merge three/four code bases into one. Do it once then implement native UI's for each platform and bind back to the core library? Spot a problem in the core library on iOS? Android gets the hotfix for free. Just ask Rdio ;-)
Xamarin deserves particular mention as the ability to share 80-90% of your core codebase between all mobile phone platforms is just stellar. It makes absolutely no business sense to re-write your core business logic for each platform and in that platforms language. So much less project risk, merge three/four code bases into one. Do it once then implement native UI's for each platform and bind back to the core library? Spot a problem in the core library on iOS? Android gets the hotfix for free. Just ask Rdio ;-)
Other hotness:
- https://www.nuget.org/ - http://www.servicestack.net/ - http://owin.org/ - http://nancyfx.org/ - https://github.com/MvvmCross/MvvmCross - http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/pex/ - https://github.com/swax/CodePerspective - http://signalr.net/ - https://github.com/Redth/PushSharp - https://github.com/Squirrel/Squirrel.Windows
Last but not least:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/visualstudioalm/archive/2013/06/26/d...