Big Day for Fans of Source Code - Code for Power Toys Released

You can now get the source code to your cell phone.

Someday you might probably be able to get the source code for Java.

And most importantly to me… Microsoft has launched a site for community development!  From Jim Newkirk’s blog:

Over 13 months ago (April 4, 2005 in fact) I posted something on my blog that I was leaving the patterns & practices team. Since that time we assembled a team of people and in turn built a community site for developers to innovate and participate in collaborative development projects. The web-site launched last Thursday, May 11, 2006 and is currently in beta. I encourage you to check out the site at https://codeplex.com .

On this site you’ll find several good projects with more to come in the next few months.  From Developer Division in general you’ll find IronPython and the Atlas Control Toolkit.  From our little team you’ll find the TFS Admin Tool, MSBee project, and MSE project. 

Our three projects reached their 1.0 milestones this past month and we’ve now moved all the source code to the codeplex site! Continuing development will happen there as we take feedback, bug fixes, suggestions, and code changes from community members.  Our team will be blogging a lot more about this as we go. 

A big thank you should go out to our devs and especially Sara Ford who was our Scrum Leader and PM driver for these releases. She also coordinated a lot with the Codeplex guys and also dealt with all the legal hurdles around releasing the source to our projects.

Enjoy!

Update: Read Sara's more detailed post here... https://blogs.msdn.com/saraford/archive/2006/05/16/599399.aspx

BTW - If you'd like to be a developer and work on collaborative development projects at Microsoft... please let me know.