A month after revealing plans to open up .NET, Microsoft has provided an early glimpse into the future of the development framework beyond Windows. The company is promising to do away with the legacy barriers that have held back the technology from the new era of multi-platform applications, and developers say it can’t move quickly enough in that new direction.

When the .NET Framework first hit the scene in 2002, developers only had one interface to learn and code against. But as Microsoft expanded its software empire beyond the desktop into mobile and the data center, users found themselves with multiple forks that grew more divergent over time. Eventually, having a .NET application work effectively across multiple platforms became practically impossible.

That fragmentation also made it more difficult – and expensive – for Microsoft to support the platform, which became split among different teams that each maintained on different versions. Instead of pouring extra resources into reuniting the different forks, the company decided to rebuild everything from scratch, which is how the latest incarnation was born.

Microsoft says it designed . NET Core from the ground up to serve as a common foundation across different platforms. The reworked stack is built on a mechanism called “Contracts,” which was originally introduced with Windows 8, that makes it possible to deliver only those features that developers require to target a specific medium. Each function is provided as an independent module, a design choice that will allow organizations to update their implementations one component at the time, which should simplify and speed the process.

Currently, the .NET Core is part of the standard .NET Framework, but the technologies will part ways with the release of Visual Studio 2015. From there on, Microsoft will maintain shorter release cycles for the former and prioritize it when implementing new features. The goal is to bring the framework up to pace with the broader open-source community and foster the development new applications across all supported platforms, including Linux and Mac OS X.