Last week, the long-awaited .NET Core 2.0 was finally released. It has already been a year and a half since we decided to embark on the long journey to introduce .NET into Tizen by participating in the .NET Core open source project. We are undertaking this voyage alongside the .NET Foundation, Microsoft, and the .NET community.

Starting last year with enabling Linux/ARM32 support, this year we are continuing our work on enabling Linux/x86 support with ARM32 RyuJIT backend implementation in parallel. In addition, through the four Tizen .NET preview releases since last November, we have seen the potential of .NET as a new application platform in Tizen and received much interest and feedback from the community.

The first release of Tizen .NET is now being prepared with the official release of Tizen 4.0 scheduled later this year. Tizen 4.0 will include the latest version of .NET Core and a new Tizen C# API. Visual Studio Tools for Tizen is also getting a new, more stable and polished release that supports the latest .NET Core tools.

In all of this, we have been helped by the .NET Foundation and many community developers, especially the Microsoft .NET team. We are truly grateful for all of the help, and we would like to express our gratitude to the community through some remarks from the Tizen .NET team members.

"About one and a half years have passed since I made my first contribution on the .NET Core project, and it's been about nine months since I submitted the first commit to enable x86/Linux CLR. It has been a great pleasure for me to contribute to .NET Core. I especially can't forget the moment when a “Hello, World” example ran on x86/Linux CLR for the first time. I would like to thank the .NET Core project members, especially Jan Vorlicek (@janvorli), Jan Kotas (@jkotas) and Bruce Forstall (@BruceForstall), for their devoted help. While x86/Linux CLR is not included in .NET Core 2.0, I believe that it could be included in a release in the near future."

- Jonghyun Park (@parjong), leader of the Tizen .NET x86 runtime team

"It has been an exciting and unique experience to participate in enabling RyuJIT for ARM32 in .NET. Although we started this work last December with little knowledge of RyuJIT, we have been able to introduce new features to RyuJIT for ARM32 with help from many developers and maintainers. Reviews from maintainers were very detailed, giving us an insight into the internal workings of RyuJIT, and even the smallest comments have been greatly appreciated. I want to express my deepest gratitude to all those who have helped us, especially Bruce Forstall (@BruceForstall) and Carol Eidt (@CarolEidt), for their dedicated help. RyuJIT for ARM32 would not exist without them. Of course, there have been some difficulties due to working in different time zones, but we have managed to take advantage of the time difference to keep development and reviews going 24 hours a day with the help of the maintainers and developers involved in RyuJIT. RyuJIT is still being improved, and I believe that our relationship will endure and we can continue to improve RyuJIT and .NET in the future.“

- Hyung-Kyu Choi (@hqueue), leader of the Tizen .NET ARM32 RyuJIT team

"I have been working with Samsung developers on Tizen, and thanks to the Tizen .NET project, I have been able to participate in an active .NET open source project and help in many ways. Integrating the Tizen and .NET build infrastructures has been a very unique experience. We discussed what to improve and what to work on, and were able to complete all of the work smoothly. In particular, I got a lot of help from Gaurav Khanna (@gkhanna79), Wes Haggard (@weshaggard) and Peter Marcu (@Petermarcu). Together, we built an infrastructure to officially build an ARM32 environment, and built and integrated a separate build infrastructure for Tizen. Thanks again to them."

- Jiyoung Giuliana Yun (@jyoungyun), leader of the Tizen .NET release team

Please join us in celebrating the release of .NET Core 2.0, and looking forward to Tizen 4.0.

Thanks!