“But even if Microsoft started to deemphasize .NET, I believe .NET would endure because the community will continue to fill in the gaps so that the ecosystem abides.”
Is .NET really that great a platform that these OSS devs will continue to support and improve it after it's been abandoned by Microsoft?
Not saying that's going to happen—but as a .NET dev myself, I'm curious. If it did go that way, I think my only motivation to continue using .NET would be that I don't want to rewrite years worth of code.
C# the language itself is quite nice, probably one of the best mainstream languages out there. I don't really care tho if it would run on the JVM or native (or something else) instead of the CLR.
Right now tho probably the only popular use of non-ms .net (mono) is Unity (which is btw a pretty big deal in the games industry).
This is the real story here. C#, as a language is fantastic, especially with the most recent versions which have added things like the Task Parallel Library, dynamic keyword, and the new async/await stuff. It's very easy to write a great performing app with C#.
If Microsoft were to abandon .Net then I'm pretty sure the motives for maintaining Mono would slip as well.
However I think that is extremely unlikely, no doubt it will be evolved in that annoying Microsoft way but completely abandoning it would make no sense at all.
They won't abandon it. Most of their server software is written in .NET: ASP.NET, Exchange server, etc. Most of their administration tools have been rewritten and now all use Powershell (which also has become the primary interface for server management by admins) under the hood.
Is .NET really that great a platform that these OSS devs will continue to support and improve it after it's been abandoned by Microsoft?
Not saying that's going to happen—but as a .NET dev myself, I'm curious. If it did go that way, I think my only motivation to continue using .NET would be that I don't want to rewrite years worth of code.