Microsoft Enterprise Library - Open Development Model

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entlib-for-the-winMicrosoft Enterprise Library has a long and prominent history. Over the years, it has evolved into a mature collection of application blocks, each focused on addressing specific cross-cutting concern. New blocks have been introduced, while others become deprecated with the evolution of the .NET Framework and other Microsoft technologies.

In p&p we highly value openness and transparency, and we always look for opportunities to encourage these values. That’s why we are particularly thrilled and proud to announce the Open Development Model for all application blocks which make up Microsoft Enterprise Library.

Concretely, this means:

  1. Starting Thursday, Nov 21, 2013, we will be accepting community contributions to the codebase (both new features and bug fixes), subject to the contribution guidelines.
  2. Microsoft patterns & practices continues to staff the project to curate as well as engage in active development and sustained engineering together with the community.
  3. In the spirit of true open source, the p&p project team will use the same process for making updates to the application blocks as any community member. No secret repositories, hidden issue trackers, or internal-only processes.
  4. Our quality bars are not lowered in any way.

We target friction-free consumption and contribution:

  1. We’ve tried to make each block into a small single purpose library to lower the barrier of entry for both use and contributions. Dependencies have been minimized and most blocks can be used independent of one another.
  2. The entlib.codeplex.comrepo has been refactored and split into 10 individual repos and projects on CodePlex, 8 for the blocks, 1 for the common infrastructure and 1 for the reference implementation:
  3. Each project site contains a dedicated product backlog and discussions forum.

We are also working out a process for community contributions to our written guidance and hands-on labs. We welcome your ideas on what would work for you.

Thank you for reading this far. Now, what are you waiting for? Go and submit your pull requests!