Welcome Google and Congratulations Samsung!

Today, at Microsoft's Connect() event in New York we announced some important news regarding the .NET Foundation Technical Steering Group.

First of all, I'm thrilled to welcome Google to the .NET Foundation Technical Steering Group joining Microsoft, Red Hat, JetBrains, Unity and Samsung to help bring greater innovation to the .NET platform.

Google has been one of the most active contributors outside of Microsoft to .NET Foundation projects over the past two years as well as helping to drive the ECMA Standardization process for C#. .NET workloads have first-class support on Google Cloud Platform including recently announced native integrations into the popular Visual Studio IDE on Windows and deep support for PowerShell. Google's work is a natural fit into the Technical Steering Group and I'm glad they have agreed to come on board to help steer the future direction of the platform.

"We're very happy to add .NET support to our list of supported frameworks on Google Cloud Platform," said Chris Sells, Lead PM for Google Cloud Developer Tools. "Enterprises moving their existing Windows and .NET workloads to the cloud or those targeting .NET Core can find what they need to build great apps for Google Cloud Platform."

Secondly, back in June 2016 I had the pleasure of announcing that Samsung had joined the technical steering group. They have been focusing on ARM support in .NET Core and today we got to see the first fruits of their labor with the preview release of .NET Core support for the Tizen operating system and their Visual Studio Tools for Tizen.

Tizen is an open source operating system based on Linux, supported by the Linux Foundation and open to all developers. Tizen powers 50 million Samsung devices, including Smart TVs, wearables, smartphones, and home appliances. Today, Samsung is releasing the first preview of Visual Studio Tools for Tizen, which supports mobile application development with device emulators and an extension to Visual Studio with full IntelliSense and debugging capabilities. The support for Smart TVs, wearables, and other IoT devices will be added in future releases. Tizen's .NET support will be officially released and shipping on Samsung devices, including Smart TVs, in 2017. This will allow .NET developers to build applications to deploy on Tizen across the globe and continues in our mission to bring the productive .NET development platform to everyone.

"Samsung is excited to be a part of the .NET community. .NET has a huge developer base and future potential," said Samsung's Executive Vice President and Deputy Head of Software R&D Center Seung-hwan Cho. "Through thoughtful and progressive collaboration, Samsung is expecting to create unique development experiences for both Tizen and C# developers, enriching the Tizen ecosystem."

Their work builds on top of several .NET Foundation projects including .NET Core, Mono and Xamarin Forms.

• Tizen's .NET support is a part of the .NET Core open source project: https://github.com/dotnet/core
• Tizen's Xamarin.Forms support is a part of the Xamarin.Forms open source project: https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms
• Tizen's device APIs are a part of the Tizen open source project: https://source.tizen.org
• Download Visual Studio Tools for Tizen here: http://www.aka.ms/tizen

Other .NET Foundation projects have also been very busy. Today, .NET Core, EF Core 1.1 and ASP.NET Core 1.1 were also released including several new features and APIs along with support for more operating system distributions (now up to 12). For more information see the .NET Team Blog.

It's also very exciting to see that ASP.NET Core MVC is now a top-performing web framework on TechEmpower. Today TechEmpower released their Round 13 results which show ASP.NET Core MVC as the fastest mainstream fullstack web framework in the Plantext test.

The Technical Steering Group was formed in late March 2016 and we are already seeing huge progress. Red Hat have released the first release of .NET Core for RHEL, JetBrains have been producing build after build of Project Rider as .NET Core's tooling approaches it's V1.0, Unity have announced support for C#6 and now the Tizen news from Samsung along with Google coming on board and supporting ASP.NET as a first class citizen in Google Cloud Platform. It's fantastic to witness the innovation that is happening on top of the .NET platform right now, all of it only possible because of .NET being open source and welcoming to all.

It's certainly an incredibly exciting time to be a .NET developer!

-- Martin