Microsoft Releases New Dev Tools Compiled With Open Source Code

Jason Zander blogged about new releases of Microsoft’s developer tools today – tools that include many contributions from the open source community with the MS Open Tech Hub on CodePlex.

The OSS community helped build out the source code for ASP.NET MVC 4, Web API, Web Pages 2 and Entity Framework 5 – key components in the new releases of Visual Studio 2012, Team Foundation Server 2012, and .NET Framework 4.5. Through CodePlex, developers outside Microsoft submitted patches and code contributions that the MS Open Tech Hub development team reviewed for potential inclusion in these products. I described this process in more detail last month, More of Microsoft’s App Development Tools Goes Open Source.

Today’s news had an additional cool factor. As Jason highlighted in his blog, “Developing great apps for Windows 8 is an important goal of this release. Therefore, in coordination with today’s developer tools releases, you’ll notice that the final version of Windows 8 has released to the web as well.”

There is a ton of great resources on these tools that you can check out and download today. The ASP.net website is a great place to start. I also recommend my friend Scott Hanselman’s new videos.

Microsoft’s partner-centric approach has been with the company since the very beginning. Today’s milestone shows that all developers can contribute to and benefit from Microsoft’s open platforms in the future.

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