March, 2012

More Open Source goodness from Microsoft today, with the announcement that we are open sourcing ASP.NET MVC 4, ASP.NET Web API, ASP.NET Web Pages v2 (Razor) - all with contributions - under the Apache 2.0 license.

You can find the source on CodePlex, and all the details on Scott Guthrie's blog.

“We will also for the first time allow developers outside of Microsoft to submit patches and code contributions that the Microsoft development team will review for potential inclusion in the products,” Guthrie says. “We announced a similar open development approach with the Windows Azure SDK last December, and have found it to be a great way to build an even tighter feedback loop with developers – and ultimately deliver even better products as a result.”

You can now browse, sync and build the source tree of ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Razor here.

In short, as Principal Program Manager Scott Hanselman notes in his blog about all this goodness: Open Source = Increased Investment. ASP.NET is a part of .NET, it will still ship with Visual Studio. It's the same ASP.NET, managed by the same developers with the same support.

It is also very important to note, as Guthrie points out, that ASP.NET MVC, Web API and Razor will continue to be fully supported Microsoft products that ship both standalone as well as part of Visual Studio (the same as they do today).

“They will also continue to be staffed by the same Microsoft developers that build them today (in fact, we have more Microsoft developers working on the ASP.NET team now than ever before),” he says. “Our goal with today’s announcement is to increase the feedback loop on the products even more, and allow us to deliver even better products. We are really excited about the improvements this will bring.”

Great news for our CodePlex community: CodePlex now supports Git!

Git has been one of the top rated requests from the CodePlex community for some time, and giving CodePlex users what they ask for and supporting their open source efforts has always been important to us.

And the goodness continues, as the CodePlex team has a long list of improvements planned.

So, why Git? CodePlex already has Mercurial for distributed version control and TFS (which also supports subversion clients) for centralized version control. The short answer is that the CodePlex community voted, loud and clear, that Git support was critical.

With the addition of Git, CodePlex now has three options when it comes to Open Source project hosting. Projects can now select between TFS, Mercurial, and Git.

Each developer has their own preferences, and for some, centralized version control makes more sense to them. For others, DVCS is the only way to go. We’re equally committed to supporting both these technologies for users.

You can get started today by creating a new project or contribute to an existing project by creating a fork.

For help on getting started with Git on CodePlex, see the help documentation here. If you would like to switch your project to use Git, please contact CodePlex Support with your project information.

For more information on this news, read the CodePlex blog.

I am excited to share some great news about how we are opening up the SQL Server data platform even further with expanded interoperability support through new tools that allow customers to modernize their infrastructure while maximizing existing investments and extending virtually any data anywhere.

The SQL Server team today introduced several tools that enable interoperability with SQL Server 2012.

These tools help developers to build secure, highly available and high performance applications for SQL Server in .NET, C/C++, Java and PHP, on-premises and in the cloud.

These new tools include a Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Native Client, a SQL Server ODBC Driver for Linux, backward compatibility with ADO.Net and the Microsoft JDBC Driver 4.0 and PHP Driver 3.0.

You can find more information on all this goodness on the SQL Server blog here.

I am pleased to announce another open source milestone as we continue to deliver on our commitment to Interoperability: today, the Facebook C# SDK was submitted to the Outercurve Foundation’s Data, Languages, and Systems Interoperability gallery.

This project is a set of libraries that enables developers of all Microsoft platforms, as well as Mono, to build applications that integrate with Facebook. The project contains core libraries for authentication and calling Facebook APIs. Additionally, the project contains platform specific helpers such as extension methods for ASP.NET MVC.

The Facebook C# libraries give app developers a stable, small-footprint SDK that enables quick app integration into Facebook. This has allowed mobile and web app developers to quickly create Facebook apps that meet the needs of their customers.

The Facebook C# SDK has had 10 major releases, and has been downloaded more than 115,000 times, proving to be one of the most popular community-driven open source projects in the .Net ecosystem.

The project, which already has a significant user base, was hosted on CodePlex.com but has moved to github, with developer discussions supported on Stack Overflow.

Nathan Totten, Jim Zimmerman and Prabir Shrestha developed the Facebook C# SDK and contributed the project to the Outercurve Foundation, which currently has three galleries and 21 projects, each of which was contributed with funding and resources to support the project and/or gallery for a period of three years.

Of the 225 developers who currently contribute to Outercurve projects, fewer than 45% are employed by Microsoft.