OData team embraces open source

Yi Ding - MSFT

March 5th, 20150 0

Dear OData lovers,

As many of you may have already noticed, the OData team is embracing open source.

What does this empower you to do?

You now can:

About codes

Get and build them
Run tests: unit tests, functional tests & end-to-end tests
Be involved into development via pull requests and get them actively reviewed and merged
Asking features/raising bugs about them via GitHub issues
Observe our development via the commits
Watch our execution and planning via GitHub isuses

About documents

View them
Comment on them using the Disqus infrastructure we leverage
Be involved into content writing by forking the “gh-pages” branch of the repositories, writing in Markdown format, and sending pull requests

Great, but how?

To empower you to do the things mentioned above, we now:

Open source all our projects on GitHub. They are:

ODataLib, EdmLib, OData Client for .NET, the spatial library, and OData Client Code Generator: https://github.com/OData/odata.net
Web API for OData: https://github.com/OData/WebApi
RESTier: https://github.com/OData/RESTier
And more others in the OData organization: https://github.com/OData

Start to use GitHub pages to host our documentation for samples:

https://odata.github.io/odata.net/
http://odata.github.io/WebApi/
http://odata.github.io/RESTier/
If you find the links above hard to remember, there is a home page with a shorter URL: http://odata.github.io/

Start to develop directly on GitHub

Commit frequently instead of once after every binary release
Track tasks, enhancements, and bugs on GitHub issues

How is this different from what we did before?

It’s different in many ways:

Uniformity: all on GitHub. No more some-on-GitHub and some-on-CodePlex.
Transparency: transparent planning via GitHub issues and transparent execution via commit history.
Involvement: code contribution via pull requests and issue contribution via GitHub issues are available and will be actively reviewed and merged.

Have we finished?

No. We are still beginners in doing the real open source. We’d love to learn from your help to improve in any aspect. If you’d like to help, send any advice/suggestion to odatafeedback@microsoft.com or create a GitHub issue to us.

Looking forward to see you at GitHub. 🙂

Best regards,

The OData team