"ASP.NET vNext (and Rosyln) runs on Mono, on both Mac and Linux today. While Mono isn't a project from Microsoft, we'll collaborate with the Mono team, plus Mono will be added to our test matrix. It's our aspiration that it 'just work.'"
I wonder whether we will be seeing a .NET web server for mac and linux. Hosting a C# MVC app on linux will be sweet.
They're already providing a .NET web server. That's the 'self-hosting' examples Scott shows in the article: when you run the application that way, it becomes a web server for your app. It's just like a Node.js application. For a production deployment on Linux I'd probably run the app using Mono on a localhost port, and run Apache in front of it with a reverse-proxy config pointing to localhost.
BTW, if you're not a fan of ASP.Net MVC's style of web framework, take a look at Nancy[1]. It's much more lightweight, and can also run under Mono on Linux.
I'm really looking forward to the self-hosting features. I have a few client (Windows Forms) applications that would be so much better within the browser. Opening that door for client-side web applications where network connectivity is a major issue would be so helpful.
However, there's 150 comments and no mention of the "vNext" name. Someone else must find the name silly!
vNext has been used for a while with ASP.NET and visual studio development. The next release is canonically called vNext (version next) until a formal name is given prior to release.
I write code on a Mac and script-built VMs seem to be the way to go. Sharing host folders the VM mounts and letting the actual code run on the VM is much closer to the server environment (leading to much fewer surprises). While it may hide a bug that would manifest itself under OSX (or other Unix) it's a useful setup.
Having said that, I've also worked a lot with slimmer environments - venv on top of the native OS - with reasonable success.
I wonder whether we will be seeing a .NET web server for mac and linux. Hosting a C# MVC app on linux will be sweet.