More of Microsoft’s App Development Tools Goes Open Source

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Today marks a milestone since we launched Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (MS Open Tech) as we undertake some important open source projects. We’re excited to share the news that MS Open Tech will be open sourcing the Entity Framework (EF), a database mapping tool useful for application development in the .NET Framework. EF will join the other open source components of Microsoft’s dev tools – MVC, Web API, and Web Pages with Razor Syntax – on CodePlex to help increase the development transparency of this project.

MS Open Tech will serve as an accelerator for these projects by working with the open source communities through our new MS Open Tech CodePlex landing page. Together, we will help build out its source code until shipment of the next product version.

This will enable everyone in the community to monitor and provide feedback on code check-ins, bug-fixes, new feature development, and build and test the products on a daily basis using the most up-to-date version of the source code.

The newly opened EF will, for the first time, allow developers outside Microsoft to submit patches and code contributions that the MS Open Tech development team will review for potential inclusion in the products.

We were happy to see the welcoming response when Scott Guthrie announced a similar open development approach with ASP.NET MVC4 and Web API in March. He said they 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. Check out what Scott has to say about this new EF news on his blog today.

Together, this news further demonstrates how we want to enable our growing community of developers to build great applications. Take a look at the projects you’ll find on CodePlex:

  • Entity Framework – The ADO.NET Entity Framework is a widely adopted Object/Relational Mapping (ORM) framework that enables developers to work with relational data as domain-specific objects, eliminating the need for most of the data access plumbing code that developers usually need to write
  • ASP.net MVC 4 – this is the newest release of the ASP.net MVC (Model-View-Controller) framework. It is a web framework applying the MVC pattern to build web sites that separate data, presentation and actions.
  • Web API – this is a framework that augments ASP.net MVC to expose easily XML and JSON APIs consumable by websites or mobile devices. You can view it as a special model that instead of returning HTML (views) returns JSON or XML (data)
  • Web Pages/ Razor version 2, i.e. a view engine for MVC. It is a way to mix HTML and server code so that you can bind HTML pages to code and data.

We are proud to have created an engineering culture for open development through the people that work at MS Open Tech. We’ve grown into an innovative hub where engineers assemble to build, accept and contribute to open source projects. Today we profiled our new MS Open Tech Hub where engineering teams across Microsoft may be temporarily assigned to MS Open Tech to participate in the Hub, where they will collaborate with the community, work with the MS Open Tech full time employees contribute to MS Open Tech projects, and create open source engineering best practices. Read more about our Hub on our Port 25 blog and meet the team working on the Entity Framework, MVC, Web API, and Web Pages with Razor Syntax projects at MS Open Tech. We’re nimble and we have a lot of fun in the process.

Gianugo Rabellino
Senior Director Open Source Communities
Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
A subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation