by Peter Galli on March 11, 2009 09:01am

Microsoft and the Creative Commons have released an add-in for Microsoft Word 2007 that will enable authors to easily insert scientific hyperlinks or ontologies as semantic annotations to their documents and research papers.

Science Commons, a division of Creative Commons, has been championing the creation and use of ontologies - essentially a classification system to organize concepts, not unlike the high-tech Dewey Decimal System.

For its part, Microsoft has developed an add-in that enables the consumption of these ontologies in Word 2007 - and is making the source code available to enable new functionality in Word 2007 - allowing for semantic search capabilities of the documents.

Microsoft is also making the source code available for the Creative Commons Add-in for Word 2007, free of charge, to open source communities on CodePlex through the OSI-approved Microsoft Public License.

Making the source code for the copyright licensing tool available to open source communities provides developers with the opportunity to tailor it for specific industries using domain-specific language.

For example, a developer could choose to modify the tool with language relevant for an author creating a work in the field of genetic research, enabling an author to easily add a copyright license relevant specifically to that subject matter.

The add-in, which was developed in collaboration with the University of California San Diego and Science Commons, serves as a solution accelerator for those working in the ontology field, says Microsoft Program Manager Pablo Fernicola.

"Looking at the developer stack from higher to lower levels of abstraction, the add-in will be useful in three key areas: the development of new ontologies, investigation of new author interaction paradigms, and integration into publishing and semantic workflows," he says.

For those developing new ontologies, the add-in provides a very easy way to test those ontologies with their target audience.

"In many scientific disciplines, Microsoft Word is a very popular tool for authoring papers and articles, and as such authors are already familiar with its usage and features.  The add-in is able to seamlessly build on this familiarity to expose new functionality, while additional ontologies can be downloaded through a REST interface," he said.

You can read more about all this on Pablo's blog.

Tom Rubin, the chief counsel for IP Strategy at Microsoft, also notes that the partnership between Microsoft and the Creative Commons enables creators and users of intellectual property to share and build on ideas while also recognizing and respecting the legitimacy and value of IP.

"We're encouraged that our work together - across the fields of science, technology and law - will present new opportunities for research," he said.

By making the source code for the semantically-enabled add-in available under an open source license, Microsoft is allowing users to improve the add-in or even to port it to other publishing systems.

As such people will, for example, have the opportunity to expand on scientific hyperlinks in research papers. So, when researchers run structured queries in the Web, it will be easier for them to find peer-related documents, and to mark up papers as science evolves.

To John Wilbanks, the vice president for Science at Creative Commons and Executive Director of Science Commons, the Web is broken for scientific researchers: full of hyperlinks of scholarly articles but no way for them to find what they need.

"The semantic Web tool will help bridge the gap between basic research and meaningful discovery, unlocking the value of research so more people can benefit from the work scientists are doing," he said.

This is also just another deliverable in the long history of close collaboration between Microsoft and the Creative Commons, including the June 2006 joint release of a copyright licensing tool that enables the easy addition of Creative Commons licensing information for works in popular Microsoft Office applications, and the July 2008 Creative Commons Add-in for Office 2007 as part of its Scholarly Communication lifecycle of tools.

by Peter Galli on March 10, 2009 04:30pm

I was fortunate enough to spend last Thursday with a group of LAMP engineers who have some experience with Windows Server and IIS, and who are based in Japan.

The three - Kimio Tanaka, the president of Museum IN Cloud; Junpei Hosoda, the president of Yokohama System Development; and Hajime Taira, with Hewlett-Packard Japan - won a competition organized by impress IT and designed to get competitive LAMP engineers to increase the volume of technical information around PHP/IIS and application compatibility. The competition was titled "Install Maniax 2008".

A total of 100 engineers were chosen to compete and seeded with Dell server hardware and the Windows Web Server 2008 operating system. They were then required to deploy Windows Server/IIS and make the Web Server accessible from the Internet. They also had to run popular PHP/Perl applications on IIS and publish technical documentation on how to configure those applications to run on IIS.

The three winners were chosen based on the number of ported applications on IIS, with the prize being a trip to Redmond.  A total of 71 applications out of the targeted 75 were ported onto IIS, of which 47 were newly ported to IIS, and related new "how to" documents were published to the Internet. Some 24 applications were also ported onto IIS based on existing "how to" documents.

The first-place winner Kimio Tanaka managed to port 71 applications onto a single IIS server. His technical documents can be found here.

Kentaro Yoshikawa, the Platform Strategy CSI Lead for Microsoft Japan, put the competition together and brought the winners to Redmond, where we arranged for them to meet with folk from the Windows Azure, Windows Server and IIS development teams. They also spent time with Sam Ramji, the Senior Director for Platform Strategy, as well as with Tom Hanrahan and Hank Janssen of the Open Source Technology Center.

Kentaro told me that the three were really impressed by the depth of the discussions they had during the day, which was useful to them as they have, until now, mostly lived outside of the traditional Microsoft ecosystem.

They also appreciated the depth of technical thought, strategy and commitment to open source communities that exists within not only the Platform Strategy group, but across Microsoft.

by Peter Galli on March 09, 2009 05:45pm

I would like to introduce Mark Stone, who will be a regular contributor to Port 25 going forward. Mark has a long association with open source.

He did his first Linux install in 1994 and, in the fifteen years since, has served as O'Reilly's executive editor for open source, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Linux Technology, publisher for the web arm of SourceForge's open source evangelism efforts, and later Director of Developer Relations for SourceForge.

During that time he helped Microsoft launch its first two open source projects on SourceForge.net. He has also co-edited two of the foundational books on open source: Open Sources and Open Sources 2.0.

At SourceForge, and as an independent consultant, he has worked with technology companies large and small to help them formulate their community engagement strategy around open source.

He has most recently been working at Microsoft to help identify and support community projects that advance open source on the Windows platform.

Please join me in welcoming him to the Port 25 family and look for his first blog post later this week.

Peter

by Peter Galli on March 09, 2009 04:35pm

In case you missed it, the Apache Software Foundation announced last week that the Qpid project has graduated from the Apache Incubator as a Top-Level Project, which essentially means that the Project's community and products have been well-governed under the ASF's meritocratic process and principles.

Apache Qpid is an Open Source messaging implementation built on the Advanced Messaging Queuing Protocol (AMQP) specification, and is the first open standard for enterprise messaging.

Qpid provides transaction management, queuing, clustering, federation, security, management, and support across multiple operating systems and platforms, and currently runs critical systems for many users and large organizations.

Microsoft was invited to join the AMQP working group last October by the six founding members. Sam Ramji, the Senior Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft said at that time in a blog post that the company had "committed to participate in the development of the specification and is keenly interested in the developing need for interoperability in enterprise messaging."

While message-based transports with security and transactional integrity were a vital infrastructure component throughout financial institutions, the AMQP specification and related implementations "may also provide greater interoperability for a number of other vertical scenarios, including insurance and healthcare. AMQP specifies a wire-level protocol (think of a transport like TCP or HTTP) and FIX, FpML, SOAP, and other messages can be sent of AMQP in LAN and WAN environments," Ramji said.

He also stressed that Microsoft's work in AMQP would be consistent with the commitment to openness outlined in July. As the AMQP Working Group required a limited royalty-free patent licensing commitment from its members Microsoft, as a participant, agreed to grant royalty-free patent licenses on specified terms to implementers of the specification.  

"Since joining AMQP.org last year, we have seen how valuable the AMQP specification is to the participating customers. It is great to see the Apache Qpid project maturing as the community strives to address the customer need for choice and improved enterprise-class messaging interoperability," Ramji said last week.

by Peter Galli on February 27, 2009 12:57pm

Microsoft is once again a Platinum Level sponsor of the annual Open Source Business Conference, which is being held at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco.

As part of this sponsorship, Robert Youngjohns, the president for Microsoft North America, will also be delivering a keynote address to attendees on Wednesday, March 25 from 09h00 to 09h30.

As the leader for Microsoft's sales, services and marketing efforts in the United States and Canada, Robert is passionate about connecting with customers and partners on various topics, including our Open Source initiatives. A Silicon Valley native, Robert brings more than 30 years experience in sales, marketing and strategic business development.

Prior to joining Microsoft, he served as president and chief executive officer of Callidus Software, Inc., a publicly traded company and leading provider of sales management software based in San Jose, CA. Before that, Robert spent 10 years at Sun Microsystems, where he was last executive vice president of Global Sales, responsible for Sun's worldwide sales organization. He also spent 18 years in various roles at IBM.

In addition, we will also be holding the third annual Open Source ISV Forum, on Monday March 23. This event is also an opportunity for open source ISVs - both large and small - to discover more about how Microsoft is working with their communities.

As this is a Microsoft BizSpark event, several of the seminars will focus on open source startups, and there will be the opportunity to meet a number of BizSpark Network Partners, including venture capitalists, angel investors and incubators. The event is also part of Microsoft NXT, a program that helps open source ISVs extend their products to the Windows environment.

by Peter Galli on February 25, 2009 06:53pm

Open Source at Microsoft has gotten a lot of press attention recently.

Influential blogger Matt Asay reported today that Bob Muglia, president of Microsoft's Server and Tools business, was at the Stanford Accel Symposium, where he said that "at some point, almost all our product(s) will have open source in (them) ... If MySQL (or) Linux do a better job for you, of course you should use those products."

Asay also acknowledges that more and more of Microsoft's products already do include open-source software (including MSN Messenger and Visual Studio), "but it's still refreshing to hear Microsoft acknowledge what most enterprise software companies - including proprietary software companies with much to lose from open source - already know: open source is mainstream," he says.

Gavin Clarke of The Register reported this week that Microsoft has invited the open-source community to build plug-ins for Visual Studio 2010, and has improved database support to help build partner backing for its planned integrated development environment (IDE).

Visual Studio general manager Jason Zander told Clarke that he'd like to see open-source developers contribute their best ideas to Microsoft's next IDE. Also, while Visual Studio 2010 is still in the early planning phase, it is already scheduled to support a number of open-source projects and tools, mostly from Microsoft or people recruited from the community.

Zander also called JQuery a "good example of open-source contributed code" for Visual Studio 2010. "We will look for opportunities for things like that," Clarke reports.

And in a recent interview with ZDNet UK reporter Colin Barker, Microsoft CRM division general manager Brad Wilson noted how difficult it is to sit in Palo Alto and design a system that will work with every business in the world.

"So the key now is flexibility. How easy is it to add the stuff we need? I think the old model of 10 years ago, where you built a system that had a big slab of stuff that you had to adopt, has gone. At the same time, we will still bring out our accelerators with pre-packaged software, and more and more of them. But we release them as open source. The idea is that we just put this stuff out there and let people use it. And, if our partners use it, all the better," he said.

by Brian Gorbett on February 19, 2009 01:12pm

Hi, this is Brian Gorbett and I am an Architect in Microsoft's Developer & Platform Evangelism group. This week I had the privilege to speak on a panel at the Saper Law Open Source Symposium in Chicago.

At first, one might be tempted to call this a major contradiction and wonder how Microsoft can be credible at an event like this. But, the fact is, if you are reading this on Port 25, then you already have an idea of just how relevant this discussion is.

I was joined on the panel by Harper Reed, the CTO at Skinnycorp/Threadless Inc.; Sumit Nijhawan, the Group Leader of Product Development at Infogix; Scott VanDenPlas, an Engineer at SkinnyCorp/Threadless. The panel was moderated by Phil Gomes, the Senior Vice President with Edelman Digital.

It was a diverse panel of talent and perspectives to be sure. The audience was a great mix of business owners, startups, partners, academic professors, and computer scientists, and one of the most interesting people I met was another panel guest who is a Computer Scientist building software for giant lasers at the National Laboratory... very cool).

The talk started with introductions, and I felt obligated to explain why Microsoft had a seat at this table since, in discussions before we started, it was clear that many attendees were not aware of all the contributions Microsoft makes to the Open Source community.

There were many people genuinely interested in what we are doing in this space and I had many conversations prior to the talk about the many online resources available to them, such as Port25, Microsoft on Open Source, the Microsoft Shared Source Initiative, Interoperability, etc... basically everything that Port25 is great at educating about.

The panel discussion was very dynamic and very interactive. In particular, Harper Reed and I always have great conversations. While we are on very different ends of the software spectrum (if you watch the video, Skinnycorp/Threadless is almost 100 percent built on Open Source software - the web stack is 100 percent,) Harper and I agree on the most fundamental topic in technology decisions: solve the business problem with whatever technology works.

During the panel discussion you will hear Harper, Scott (a distinguished engineer at SkinnyCorp/Threadless), and myself say this a few times. You will also hear Harper talk about how they are interoperating with Azure in a project they are working on. Again, using the right technology for the business problem at hand. I admire Harper and his team for the work they do and the tremendous community that they serve.

I am delighted that I got the opportunity to have great conversations with incredibly smart people about a topic many people don't associate Microsoft with. I hope that I will have the opportunity to have more of these discussions, and learn as much as I did at this event, from other people at different venues.

If you want to listen to the full panel discussion, the video is posted on my blog (there is a bit of audio interference at the beginning but, don't worry, it doesn't last).

by Peter Galli on February 16, 2009 10:30am

Microsoft and Red Hat announced this morning that they have recently signed agreements to test and validate their server operating systems running on one another's hypervisors.

This is deeply significant as it means that customers will be able to confidently deploy Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), virtualized on Microsoft and Red Hat hypervisors, knowing that the solutions will be supported by both companies.

In short, Red Hat has joined Microsoft's Server Virtualization Validation Program, and Microsoft is now a Red Hat partner for virtualization interoperability and support.

Microsoft will also be listed in the Red Hat Hardware Certification List once the Red Hat certification process has been completed later this year.

Microsoft will also publish Linux Integration Components for RHEL when the testing and validation is complete and, according to Mike Neil's blog on this news, Red Hat is expected to provide Windows Hardware Quality Labs drivers for a variety of Windows Server versions.

"This means that those customers with valid support agreements will be able to run these validated configurations and receive joint technical support for running Windows Server on Red Hat Enterprise virtualization, and for running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V or Hyper-V Server 2008," Neil says.

So, while Microsoft and Red Hat will continue to compete, customers have asked us to work together on technical support for server virtualization. These agreements respond to that request by giving them a new level of integration between Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows Server for their heterogeneous IT environments.

Customers with valid support agreements will now be able to call either Microsoft or Red Hat to have their issues resolved. If the first vendor contacted cannot resolve the issue, they will refer the problem to the other vendor for resolution; assuming the customer also has a valid support agreement with that vendor.

In the event that the second vendor cannot resolve the problem alone, Microsoft and Red Hat will work together to come to a resolution for the mutual customer.

What's more, once RHEL is validated as a guest on Windows Server 2008, Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 R2 - which will include cross platform monitoring - will support RHEL server versions 4 and 5 in the second quarter of this year so that customers can manage the applications and operating systems in the guest VM.

This will allow customers to monitor end-to-end data center applications that are distributed across both Windows Server and RHEL, whether these servers are physical or virtual, thereby improving the visibility organizations have of these distributed applications, and reducing their operational costs by providing a single tool to manage these across operating systems.

Also, to be clear given that questions are going to be asked about how this compares to the existing relationship between Microsoft and Novell, this agreement with Red Hat is specific to joint technical support for our mutual customers using server virtualization. So, in that regard, think of it as one dimensional, whereas Microsoft's partnership with Novell is multi-dimensional.

For more on all this, you can read Mike Neil's blog, the press release here, and watch the public webcast.

by Peter Galli on February 11, 2009 01:42pm

Moonlight 1.0 is now available.

Moonlight is an open source project that gives Linux users access to Microsoft Silverlight content, and is available for all major Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu. This milestone release is part of the technical collaboration between Novell and Microsoft.

Microsoft has worked with the Moonlight team and Novell to enable interoperability between Windows and Linux platforms and extend the high-quality interactive Web and video experience for the benefit of the Linux community, said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET Developer Division.

Microsoft has provided Novell with access to its test suites for Silverlight, and provides Linux end users of Moonlight with free access to the Microsoft Media Pack, a set of licensed media codecs for video and audio that bring optimized and licensed decoders to every Linux user using Moonlight. Windows Media Video (.wmv), Windows Media Audio (.wma) and MP3 files are supported through the Microsoft Media Pack.

A pre-release of Moonlight was made available on January 19, 2009 to allow Linux users to stream Barack Obama's Inauguration, and more than 20,000 Linux users downloaded Moonlight to watch that Silverlight broadcast.

"Microsoft Silverlight offers the most comprehensive and powerful solution for the creation and delivery of rich internet applications and media experiences, and is used by hundreds of thousands of developers worldwide," Guthrie said.

For his part Miguel de Icaza, the founder of the Mono project founder and vice president of Developer Platforms at Novell, said Moonlight brings the benefits of Silverlight's popular multimedia content to Linux viewers. "This first release delivers on the goal of breaking down barriers to multimedia content and creating parity in the user's viewing experience regardless of whether the user is on Windows or Linux."

by Peter Galli on February 10, 2009 07:38am

There's a new Open Network in town, known as Snakebite, which is the brainchild of Trent Nelson, a committer to Python.

Snakebite is a network of some 37 servers of different shapes and sizes, spread over three sites and specifically geared towards the needs of open source projects like Python.

In short, and according to its Website, Snakebite is a network to provide open source developers unrestricted access to as many of the different platforms, operating systems, architectures, compilers, devices, databases, tools and applications that they need to optimally develop their software.

"Why do we develop open source software on closed networks? Why do open source developers only have access to a fraction of platforms that their software will eventually run on? And why the *@&# are the Windows buildbots always red?! Snakebite was created out of a desire to try and address problems like these faced by open source projects," the Website says.

Some months back, Nelson realized that while buildbots were fine when everything was running smoothly, nothing compared to actually having access to a system when a developer is trying to debug something.

"So, I thought to myself, why not buy a couple of clunky old boxes off eBay and donate them to the Python Software Foundation, such that all developers had access to them ... Ten months, seven trips to Michigan State University, six blown fuses and about $60,000 later, I'm proud to introduce you all to Snakebite: The Open Network!," he said.

This means that every CPython, Jython, IronPython and PyPy committer will have access to every development server on the network, Nelson says, adding that he has already extended the offer to prominent Python projects like Django and Twisted.

The end-goal is to ultimately invite other open source projects like Apache, Subversion, MySQL and Postgres, among others, but given that this network is Nelson's "gift to All Things Python, first and foremost," Python projects will always get preferential treatment.

Nelson also has big aspirations for Snakebite going forward, which you can read all about in this email he sent to the Snakebite list.

Nelson was also blown away by the level of support he received for the initiative: "Microsoft jumped on board and provided unlimited MSDN licenses in less time than it took me to write them an e-mail asking for stuff. Having the support of Microsoft from very early on has been a huge boost, and the MSDN licenses have already been invaluable ," he said.

An email to HP asking them for a Tru64 license and 2GB of RAM for the Itanium box he bought off eBay, also resulted in the company shipping two quad Itanium 2 RX-5670s, full of 73GB 15k disks and 78GB of RAM between the two servers; 32GB in one and 46GB in the other.

Sun, Google and Canonical have also expressed interest in the project, but Nelson has stopped asking for hardware as they have run out of space to host it all.

But, in a recent post to the Python Committers mailing list, Nelson notes that it will probably be a few weeks before users can start logging in and doing stuff. 

"The HPCC/CSE server room at MSU is about to have walls knocked in and ramps built in order to accommodate a giant PDU that has been sitting outside it for about six months; the Snakebite rack is going to get shuffled around a bit so I figure there's not much point going live before that's taken care of," he said.

by Peter Galli on February 04, 2009 07:13pm

Members of OASIS, the international open standards consortium, have approved nine Web services specifications as OASIS Standards.

The WS Reliable Exchange (WS-RX), WS Transactions (WS-TX), and WS Secure Exchange (WS-SX) standards support reliable message exchange, coordinate the outcome of distributed application actions, and enable trusted relationships.

The three WS-RX standards - WS ReliableMessaging 1.2, WS ReliableMessaging Policy 1.2, and WS MakeConnection 1.1 - allow messages to be transferred reliably despite failures in software components, systems, or networks. They enable a broad range of features, including ordered delivery, duplicate elimination, and guaranteed receipt.

The three WS-TX standards - WS-Coordination 1.2, WS-AtomicTransaction 1.2, and WSBusinessActivity1.2 - describe an extensible framework for coordinating transactions across a mixed vendor environment, while the three WS-SX standards - WS-Trust 1.4, WS-SecureConversation 1.4, and WS-SecurityPolicy 1.3 - provide methods for issuing security tokens, establishing trust relationships, and allowing key material to be exchanged more efficiently.

All nine standards were developed under the Royalty-Free on RAND mode of the OASIS Intellectual Property Rights Policy, and participation in the WS-RX, WS-TX, and WS-SX Technical Committees remain open to all interested parties. You can read more in this OASIS release.

OASIS members include, among others, Microsoft, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, and Novell. Paul Cotton, the Partner Group Manager in Microsoft's Connected Systems Division, says that the standardization of these versions of the WS-SX, WS-RX and WS-TX specifications is a major step that finalizes the core Web services standards.

"The Web services standards offer mature support for critical customer enterprise scenarios, whether the protocols are used alone or in combination, thereby scaling from simple to complex scenarios," Cotton says.

In its drive for interoperability between different implementations on various platforms, Microsoft'sInteroperability Technical Strategy Team is already participating as a code contributor to an Apache project: the Stonehenge incubator project, which has been approved as an incubator project within Apache Software Foundation.

The WSO2 and Microsoft have already contributed code for a web-services based sample application, known as StockTrader, to this effort.

StockTrader is also just the starting point for the broader goals of Stonehenge, which aims to develop a set of sample applications to demonstrate seamless interoperability across multiple underlying platform technologies by using currently defined W3C and OASIS standard protocols.

by Alessandro Catorcini on January 29, 2009 07:55pm

This is Alessandro Catorcini, and I am the Lead Program Manager for Live Search API. I wanted to talk about today's announcement that we are releasing the official Live Search add-in for Mozilla Firefox.

The Live Search add-in will allow Firefox users to have an officially supported add-in for Live Search in their browser that enables query auto-suggest. The new feature integrates with the Live Search API to provide suggested query keywords, making it easier and faster for searchers to find the information they want and need.

This release, while relatively small in scope, takes advantage of the work we've done as part of our Live Search API 2.0 which enables the richest and most flexible search API offered by any major search provider.  We listened a ton to developers as we built 2.0 and the we think the feature set reflects that - multiple protocol support (in contrast to only AJAX from GOOG), unlimited queries for customer-facing sites and apps, and an awesome array of result presentation options.

With this latest API release and the Open Search compliant RSS feeds that we've made available for all of our search content as part of Silk Road, Open Search clients will now be able to display query suggestions when using the Live Search API.

For developers, the new endpoint will serve Open Search query suggestions in JSON format (as they are consumed by major players like Firefox) and can be queried here.

Firefox users who want to use the Live Search add-in with query suggestions can install the descriptor file here.

by Peter Galli on January 26, 2009 08:48pm

Microsoft has released more source code under an OSI-approved license: this time it has made the source code for the Web Sandbox runtime available under the Apache 2.0  open source license.

The Web Sandbox project explores how to advance the web platform to improve security, isolation, quality of service and extensibility capabilities for web developers and website users.

More information on the licensing details, as well as comprehensive documentation for experimenting and integrating with the Web Sandbox, can be found here. 

But, while developers are being encouraged to help define and refine the Web Sandbox, it is not recommended for those developers creating production sites as it is still under development.

The Web Sandbox was created in response to limitations found in the current web platform, and is designed to explore potential solutions. Having a more secure and robust architecture as a foundational building block will help drive the next wave of Web innovation.

The Sandbox is a framework that works on most modern browsers that support the"ECMA-262, 3^rd Edition" (JavaScript) standard, and provides the same features in all modern web browsers.  No browser add-ons or changes are required to leverage this technology. Beyond security, the Web Sandbox normalizes the different browsers and provides consistent W3C DOM support.

Since the initial release of Web Sandbox at PDC 2008, the team has received a lot of useful feedback from the web security community, and has also been collaborating with a number of customers, partners and the standards communities, all of whom want to adopt the  technology when it is ready. 

The goal? An open and interoperable standard that will help foster interoperability with complementary technologies like script frameworks and drive widespread adoption of the Web Sandbox.

This move is good news for Microsoft and the open source communities. But, it is important to note that while an Apache license is being used, the Web Sandbox project is not an Apache Software Foundation project and is not sponsored or endorsed by the ASF.

Microsoft does, however, already have an active relationship with the ASF. In fact, last year the company announced it had become a sponsor of the ASF so as to help enable the Foundation pay administrators and other support staff so that its developers can focus on writing great software.

Sam Ramji, the senior Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft, also delivered a keynote address at ApacheCon in New Orleans last November.

Microsoft's Interoperability Technical Strategy Team already participates as a code contributor to the Apache Stonehenge incubator project; the company has also contributed a patch to ADOdb, a popular data access layer for PHP used by many applications and which is licensed under the LGPL and BSD; while Microsoft's Powerset team contributes to HBase, an open-source, column-oriented, distributed database written in Java.

by Peter Galli on January 26, 2009 06:52pm

CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting Web site, has grown by leaps and bounds over the past calendar year. Visits to the Website more than doubled to top 19-million in 2008, while new registered users were up more than 70 percent to over 66,000 and the number of new projects more than doubled to 4,542 over the year.

That brings the grand CodePlex total to more than 120,000 registered users and 7,500 projects.

According to a blog by Sara Ford, the Program Manager for CodePlex, there were 12 new releases of the CodePlex software over the year, with new features including Subversion client support; an upgraded UI; Silverlight hosting; an AJAX Source code browser; and Search improvements.

The top five Open Source projects created in 2008, by page view count, were WPF, the main site for updates on the WPF roadmap and the portal for accessing the WPF Toolkit and the WPF Futures releases; the Silverlight Toolkit, a collection of Silverlight controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle; the CompositeWPF, designed to help users more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight client applications; MVCSamples, prototype and sample ASP.NET MVC Sample applications; and the Unity Application Block, a lightweight extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection. 

Also, earlier this month, DotNetNuke Corporation, the creator of the industry-leading DotNetNuke development framework, decided to leverage the CodePlex infrastructure for its core product distribution. DotNetNuke said it would utilize CodePlex for download infrastructure, bandwidth, and metrics reporting for its core product offerings. Until now, DotNetNuke had been leveraging services from SourceForge.Net.

So, what's next you may ask? Well, Sara and the team are eagerly waiting for your feedback and suggestions.

by Peter Galli on January 23, 2009 12:45am

Microsoft and Novell joined forces this week to make sure that Linux users were able to watch the Barack Obama Official Inauguration stream with Novell's Moonlight, an open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight 1.0.

The issue was that while the inauguration stream was fully Moonlight compatible, as the full set of Silverlight 2 codecs are in the codec pack for Moonlight, the player used managed code and the  Moonlight 1 beta only supports Javascript.

The solution? Developers on Novell's Mono team sprang into action the day before the Inauguration and worked late into the night so that Linux users and those with PowerPC Macs could watch the stream with Moonlight.

This is yet another great example of how co-operation can play out to the benefit of all involved, and underscores how the advantages of the relationship between Microsoft and Novell play out in the real world.

As Ben Waggoner, the Principal Video Strategist for Silverlight, said on his blog, using managed code in the player left out Linux users of the Moonlight 1.0 beta, as well as PowerPC Mac users. "We've heard a lot of requests to add support for those platforms, and so we teamed up with the Moonlight team at Novell and they've created a Silverlight 1.0 version of the player that works great in both Moonlight and PowerPC Macs," he says.

Once the CLR/DLR is supported as part of Silverlight 2 compatibility, players like the Inauguration one will work without modification. But, that something like this could come together on such short notice is "a testament to the chops and passion of the Moonlight team and the great platform we're both implementing. I'm glad we got this chance to demonstrate how serious we are about this collaboration," he says.

For his part, Novell's Miguel de Icaza's noted on his blog  that  Microsoft worked late into the night to get them access to the code that was used during the inauguration so it could be tested with Moonlight. 

Ars Technica also has an indepth article about how this was all turned around in a day, which is worth reading.