.NET

As .NET becomes more common cross-platform, a new generation of tools is emerging to help developers manage common workflows when using the same .NET code across multiple operating systems, runtimes and devices. Protobuild is one of these awesome ... [More] emerging new tools and I've very proud to welcome them into the .NET Foundation.  In this guest post, June Rhodes from the Protobuild project team explains more about the project. If it looks like it will be useful to you, I encourage you to give it a try and get involved in the growing community. -- Martin Do you develop cross-platform .NET projects? Maybe you manage them with multiple C# projects on disk for each platform or framework you want to target? Or maybe you use MSBuild conditionals to target multiple platforms and fore-go the use of Linux or Mac IDEs for .NET? I had used both techniques before I developed Protobuild; a cross-platform project generator for C#. With my solutions often having 10 or more assemblies, manually keeping a Windows, Linux and Mac version of every project in sync as well as managing the references was difficult. As someone who frequently works on Linux, selecting the MSBuild option and foregoing the use of MonoDevelop wasn't an option either - I needed the ability to debug the software I was developing on all platforms. I searched around for project generators at that point, but there weren't any particular good C# options. In addition I found that most of the project generators were one-way; if you wanted to add a file to your solution, you needed to open the cross-platform project definitions and add the file there. I wanted less overhead managing projects, so Protobuild supports two-way generation; when you add or remove files in your IDE, these changes get synchronised back to the cross-platform project definitions. Over time Protobuild evolved to support more platforms; it now supports Windows, Linux, Mac (MonoMac, XamMac and Xamarin.Mac), iOS, tvOS, Android, Ouya, PCL (for bait-and-switch), Windows 8 Apps, Windows Phone 8, Windows Phone 8.1, Web (via JSIL) and most recently Universal Windows Apps - and you can target all of these platforms for your project just by selecting a drop-down These days, Protobuild is used by cross-platform projects like MonoGame to manage their projects and dependencies. It's capable of cross-platform package management, and provides an automation layer for build server scripts. If you're managing cross-platform .NET projects, and you'd like to try out or use Protobuild for your own projects, you can download it from the Protobuild website. June Rhodes, Project Lead, Protobuild [Less]

The WiX toolset project holds a special place in my heart. I've built many installers in my time using the toolset and had nothing but positive interactions with the community as a developer, but also the WiX toolset was one of the very first open ... [More] source projects that came out of Microsoft. Rob and his team blazed a trail that we where then able to follow with .NET and so many other open source projects afterwards. That is why I'm especially thrilled that now I get to work more with the project as they have decided to make the .NET Foundation their home. For those few people who have been under a rock for the past decade and didn't know about it, the WiX toolset lets developers create installers for Windows Installer, the Windows installation engine used by many traditional desktop applications and also Windows Server installation mechanisms. The core of WiX is a set of build tools that build Windows Installer packages using the same build concepts as the rest of your product: source code is compiled and then linked to create executables; in this case .exe setup bundles, .msi installation packages, .msm merge modules, and .msp patches. The WiX command-line build tools work with any automated build system. Also, MSBuild is supported from the command line, there is an excellent Visual Studio integration along with links into Team Build / VSTS. WiX includes several extensions that offer functionality beyond that of Windows Installer. For example, WiX can install IIS web sites, create SQL Server databases, and register exceptions in the Windows Firewall, among others. It's used by every single .NET development shop I know. With Burn, the WiX bootstrapper, you can create setup bundles that install prerequisites like the .NET Framework making it easier for end users to run your .NET based applications. You can also use it to create installers for applications created using other runtimes. I once quickly knocked up an installer using the WiX toolset that installed Java + Eclipse + Team Explorer Everywhere along with demo projects, test data and demo scripts just to make my demos quicker to get set up back when I was looking after the Eclipse tooling in Microsoft. Burn also lets you download packages or combine them into a single downloadable .exe. The WiX SDK includes managed and native libraries that make it easier to write code that works with Windows Installer, including custom actions in both C# and C++.  If you haven't tried it yet then what are you waiting for - give it a go now.  If there is any functionality that you want to add then get involved with the amazing community and contribute. May the 4th be with you. Always. Martin WoodwardExecutive Director. [Less]

The WiX toolset project holds a special place in my heart. I've built many installers in my time using the toolset and had nothing but positive interactions with the community as a developer, but also the WiX toolset was one of the very first open ... [More] source projects that came out of Microsoft. Rob and his team blazed a trail that we where then able to follow with .NET and so many other open source projects afterwards. That is why I'm especially thrilled that now I get to work more with the project as they have decided to make the .NET Foundation their home. For those few people who have been under a rock for the past decade and didn't know about it, the WiX toolset lets developers create installers for Windows Installer, the Windows installation engine used by many traditional desktop applications and also Windows Server installation mechanisms. The core of WiX is a set of build tools that build Windows Installer packages using the same build concepts as the rest of your product: source code is compiled and then linked to create executables; in this case .exe setup bundles, .msi installation packages, .msm merge modules, and .msp patches. The WiX command-line build tools work with any automated build system. Also, MSBuild is supported from the command line, there is an excellent Visual Studio integration along with links into Team Build / VSTS. WiX includes several extensions that offer functionality beyond that of Windows Installer. For example, WiX can install IIS web sites, create SQL Server databases, and register exceptions in the Windows Firewall, among others. It's used by every single .NET development shop I know. With Burn, the WiX bootstrapper, you can create setup bundles that install prerequisites like the .NET Framework making it easier for end users to run your .NET based applications. You can also use it to create installers for applications created using other runtimes. I once quickly knocked up an installer using the WiX toolset that installed Java + Eclipse + Team Explorer Everywhere along with demo projects, test data and demo scripts just to make my demos quicker to get set up back when I was looking after the Eclipse tooling in Microsoft. Burn also lets you download packages or combine them into a single downloadable .exe. The WiX SDK includes managed and native libraries that make it easier to write code that works with Windows Installer, including custom actions in both C# and C++.  If you haven't tried it yet then what are you waiting for - give it a go now.  If there is any functionality that you want to add then get involved with the amazing community and contribute. May the 4th be with you. Always. Martin WoodwardExecutive Director. [Less]

At Xamarin Evolve this morning, .NET Foundation Director Miguel de Icaza officially open sourced the Xamarin SDKs for Android, iOS, and Mac and contributed them to the .NET Foundation under the MIT license. This includes Mono runtime ports for iOS ... [More] and Android, bindings to the native APIs on these platforms, the basic command-line build tools, and a full, cross-platform UI stack in Xamarin.Forms. Today’s open source release delivers on Scott Guthrie’s announcements at //build last month and our shared vision of open source .NET on every single device, from mobile to desktop to cloud. I'm pleased to also see that the Xamarin engineering team join the .NET Core teams working fully in the open on GitHub, continuing to make the Xamarin SDKs better for everyone, everywhere. The future of native cross-platform mobile .NET development is now in the hands of every developer, and we’re excited to see where you’ll take the platform. Take a look at Miguel's blog post for more information or go to open.xamarin.com to get involved. [Less]

At Xamarin Evolve this morning, .NET Foundation Director Miguel de Icaza officially open sourced the Xamarin SDKs for Android, iOS, and Mac and contributed them to the .NET Foundation under the MIT license. This includes Mono runtime ports for iOS ... [More] and Android, bindings to the native APIs on these platforms, the basic command-line build tools, and a full, cross-platform UI stack in Xamarin.Forms. Today’s open source release delivers on Scott Guthrie’s announcements at //build last month and our shared vision of open source .NET on every single device, from mobile to desktop to cloud. I'm pleased to also see that the Xamarin engineering team join the .NET Core teams working fully in the open on GitHub, continuing to make the Xamarin SDKs better for everyone, everywhere. The future of native cross-platform mobile .NET development is now in the hands of every developer, and we’re excited to see where you’ll take the platform. Take a look at Miguel's blog post for more information or go to open.xamarin.com to get involved. [Less]

With all the exciting changes in the .NET Ecosystem and the opening up of the platform to individuals and companies outside Microsoft, the .NET Foundation has recognized that it’s important that we help open up how technical decisions are made in the ... [More] .NET platform as well as keep everyone on the same page as to the direction of the combined projects that make up the core components of the .NET platform. Therefore, today we are creating a new working group in the .NET Foundation to fulfil this role - the Technical Steering Group. I am pleased to announce that Red Hat, JetBrains and Unity have agreed to join Microsoft on the .NET Foundation Technical Steering Group. This marks an important milestone in opening the technical decision making processes of the core .NET components and also demonstrates the commitment of these partners in helping to make sure .NET continues to be an open, innovate and exciting development platform. When I talked with developers in the early days of .NET there was a common misconception that there was a single all-powerful .NET team somewhere hidden in an building on the Microsoft campus working away on all the various .NET APIs that they used. However that's never been the case. While there is a core team of engineers working on the compiler, languages, core libraries, web frameworks etc, there have also always been other teams in Microsoft working on other parts of .NET. These teams are spread across many groups and also spread across the globe. To ensure there was consensus in how the platform should move forward and co-ordination when it came to changes and major updates these teams would keep in touch via email, conference calls and occasional meetings. In many ways, the Technical Steering Group is formalizing those existing processes to ensure co-ordination and strong technical review that happened between core .NET project teams in the past and opening this up so that all leaders of core .NET components in the .NET Foundation are part of the Technical Steering Group and also other companies and organizations who are basing the developer tools and products on a deep integration with the .NET platform. The Technical Steering Group does not replace the efforts that individual projects do to ensure open community involvement in verifying their plans (such as the API review process from the CoreFX project or the C# Language Design process), but exists to ensure that all the core components are aligned with each other. As discussed earlier, as well as the leaders of the core .NET components in the foundation, the following companies have also announced today that they are joining Microsoft in the Technical Steering Group Red Hat are leading the charge when it comes to helping companies host .NET workloads on Linux with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Microsoft have a good, close partnership with Red Hat and they have already been involved in discussions around bringing features in .NET to Linux but the Technical Steering Group increases the strength of this relationship and opens it up to all the teams working on core .NET technologies - not just between individual teams in Red Hat and Microsoft. JetBrains have built tools that .NET developers love for many years, including the hugely productive Visual Studio add-in ReSharper. At the start of the year, JetBrains also announced Project Rider, a cross-platform C# IDE, based on the IntelliJ Platform and using ReSharper technology. While ReSharper is hosted inside Visual Studio, Project Rider is a full, standalone IDE that runs on Mac OS X and Linux as well as Windows.  Project Rider has deep integrations across the .NET stack to allow it to make programing and debugging so productive, relying heavily on Mono and .NET Core. Unity is far and away the world’s favourite game engine for creating mobile games on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. They are also leading the VR revolution with Native Oculus Rift, Gear VR, and Playstation VR support already available and Microsoft HoloLens + Steam VR/Vive on the way. Unity power many of the console and desktop games loved by gamers worldwide. The C# scripting engine at the heart of Unity is used by games developers across the world and continuing to keep this on the cutting edge of .NET development is critical to maintaining the performance and productivity for developers building on Unity. It also helps ensure all the blazing fast speed improvements being made flow both ways. The excitement and innovation around .NET keeps growing and growing. I'm looking forward to seeing what this increased openness, co-ordination and collaboration will bring. Please join me in welcoming Red Hat, JetBrains and Unity to the Technical Steering Group. Martin WoodwardExecutive Director | .NET Foundation [Less]

With all the exciting changes in the .NET Ecosystem and the opening up of the platform to individuals and companies outside Microsoft, the .NET Foundation has recognized that it’s important that we help open up how technical decisions are made in the ... [More] .NET platform as well as keep everyone on the same page as to the direction of the combined projects that make up the core components of the .NET platform. Therefore, today we are creating a new working group in the .NET Foundation to fulfil this role - the Technical Steering Group. I am pleased to announce that Red Hat, JetBrains and Unity have agreed to join Microsoft on the .NET Foundation Technical Steering Group. This marks an important milestone in opening the technical decision making processes of the core .NET components and also demonstrates the commitment of these partners in helping to make sure .NET continues to be an open, innovate and exciting development platform. When I talked with developers in the early days of .NET there was a common misconception that there was a single all-powerful .NET team somewhere hidden in an building on the Microsoft campus working away on all the various .NET APIs that they used. However that's never been the case. While there is a core team of engineers working on the compiler, languages, core libraries, web frameworks etc, there have also always been other teams in Microsoft working on other parts of .NET. These teams are spread across many groups and also spread across the globe. To ensure there was consensus in how the platform should move forward and co-ordination when it came to changes and major updates these teams would keep in touch via email, conference calls and occasional meetings. In many ways, the Technical Steering Group is formalizing those existing processes to ensure co-ordination and strong technical review that happened between core .NET project teams in the past and opening this up so that all leaders of core .NET components in the .NET Foundation are part of the Technical Steering Group and also other companies and organizations who are basing the developer tools and products on a deep integration with the .NET platform. The Technical Steering Group does not replace the efforts that individual projects do to ensure open community involvement in verifying their plans (such as the API review process from the CoreFX project or the C# Language Design process), but exists to ensure that all the core components are aligned with each other. As discussed earlier, as well as the leaders of the core .NET components in the foundation, the following companies have also announced today that they are joining Microsoft in the Technical Steering Group Red Hat are leading the charge when it comes to helping companies host .NET workloads on Linux with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Microsoft have a good, close partnership with Red Hat and they have already been involved in discussions around bringing features in .NET to Linux but the Technical Steering Group increases the strength of this relationship and opens it up to all the teams working on core .NET technologies - not just between individual teams in Red Hat and Microsoft. JetBrains have built tools that .NET developers love for many years, including the hugely productive Visual Studio add-in ReSharper. At the start of the year, JetBrains also announced Project Rider, a cross-platform C# IDE, based on the IntelliJ Platform and using ReSharper technology. While ReSharper is hosted inside Visual Studio, Project Rider is a full, standalone IDE that runs on Mac OS X and Linux as well as Windows.  Project Rider has deep integrations across the .NET stack to allow it to make programing and debugging so productive, relying heavily on Mono and .NET Core. Unity is far and away the world’s favourite game engine for creating mobile games on iOS, Android and Windows Phone. They are also leading the VR revolution with Native Oculus Rift, Gear VR, and Playstation VR support already available and Microsoft HoloLens + Steam VR/Vive on the way. Unity power many of the console and desktop games loved by gamers worldwide. The C# scripting engine at the heart of Unity is used by games developers across the world and continuing to keep this on the cutting edge of .NET development is critical to maintaining the performance and productivity for developers building on Unity. It also helps ensure all the blazing fast speed improvements being made flow both ways. The excitement and innovation around .NET keeps growing and growing. I'm looking forward to seeing what this increased openness, co-ordination and collaboration will bring. Please join me in welcoming Red Hat, JetBrains and Unity to the Technical Steering Group. Martin WoodwardExecutive Director | .NET Foundation [Less]

Windows Live Writer has been turning blogging up to 11 since 2007, but since 2012 things have been a bit quiet with the application itself. However over the past few months I have had the pleasure working with a very pasionate group of engineers ... [More] volunteering their time to ensure that Live Writer has a sustainable future. I'm pleased to announce that today the .NET Foundation welcomes a new project - Open Live Writer. One of the great things about Live Writer has always been the passionate community behind it and I can't wait to see what that community does now everying is open source and on GitHub. In this guest post from Rob Dolin, he explains more about the new project and how to get started with the new, Open Live Writer which is available to download now. -- Martin Windows Live Writer Released as the open source Open Live Writer It’s a great day for bloggers who have a favorite tool for creating content. Today Microsoft announced that Open Live Writer was released and has been contributed to the .NET Foundation. Open Live Writer is an open source application enabling users to author, edit, and publish blog posts. It is based on a fork of the well-loved but not actively developed Windows Live Writer code. Scott Hanselman helped carry the torch at Microsoft on this project, and I’ve been proud to be part of the all-volunteer team to make it happen. History of Windows Live Writer The product that became Live Writer was originally created by a small, super-talented team of engineers including Jeremy Allaire, JJ Allaire, Joe Cheng, Charles Teague, and Spike Washburn. The team joined Microsoft through an acquisition in 2006 and organized with the Spaces team where I was working. Becky Pezely joined the team and over time, the team grew and shipped many popular releases of Windows Live Writer. As Microsoft was planning for the version of Windows Live that would coincide with the Windows 8 operating system release, the teams that built the Windows Live client apps for Windows were encouraged to focus on building a smaller set of Windows 8 apps designed to work well with both traditional PC input mechanisms and touch. The original team concluded their work on Windows Live Writer with Windows Live Writer 2012. Reviving Live Writer Even though there was no active development, Windows Live Writer continued to be a favorite tool of a passionate community of Windows PC users for authoring, editing, and publishing blog posts. Data from WordPress.com at the time suggested that Windows Live Writer (even two years after active development ended) was the #1 app for authoring a blog post to WordPress.com on a Windows PC. In fact, some of our technical evangelists were actively using Windows Live Writer for publishing on WordPress-powered blogs. A few team members from my former MS Open Tech team took an early interest in joining Scott Hanselman to revive Live Writer as an open source project. By January 2015, a group of about a half-dozen engineers interested in spending some of their volunteer time to help release an updated version of Live Writer had found each other. Jon Gallant sent an email to a few large group email lists at Microsoft soliciting volunteers and we collected about 50 people interested in helping. Anne Legato, Ed Essey, and the team at The Garage were most helpful in sharing advice on launching external projects. Scott Guthrie also agreed to be Open Live Writer’s sponsor. Why v0.5 You might wonder why we’re releasing a version 0.5 now instead of waiting to get to a v0.9 or a v1.0. A few considerations went into this. First, we wanted to get this out as an open source project as quickly as possible so people outside of Microsoft could start participating. Second, we suspect many people may be taking some vacation around the end of December and we wanted to make sure the project was available. Third, Eddie Kessler and the folks on Google’s Blogger team asked us to ship no later than early December 2015 so they could turn-off an old API that Windows Live Writer was dependent on. Eddie and team originally had planned to turn-off the API earlier and we are thankful for their collaboration and partnership in extending its life until we could release Open Live Writer. Why .NET Foundation The volunteer team considered a few options for releasing Open Live Writer. Ultimately, we found a great partnership in the .NET Foundation to support our goals around growing community participation for the project. Martin Woodward, Robin Ginn, and the team has been super-helpful in many matters including open source governance and administrative support, to marketing and communications. And Open Live Writer is many thousands of lines of C# code, so the .NET Foundation is a good technical match too. J Enough Background, SHOW ME THE BITS! To download the latest version of Open Live Writer, visit our website: http://www.OpenLiveWriter.org/. Open Live Writer is designed to sit side-by-side with Windows Live Writer so installing Open Live Writer won’t impact your existing version of Windows Live Writer. For the latest news and updates about Open Live Writer, you can follow us on Twitter as @OpenLiveWriter and find other ways to connect on: http://www.OpenLiveWriter.org/. Help Wanted Open Live Writer is brought to you by a volunteer team and continued improvements are dependent on volunteers. The code is available on GitHub: http://www.github.com/OpenLiveWriter/ and we welcome pull requests and open issues. However, we’re not just looking for developers. Anyone who wants to test early bits, help with visual design, interactive design, technical writing, partnership negotiation, product management, marketing, digital media, and more would be welcomed. You can find ways to plug-in to the community at: http://www.OpenLiveWriter.org/. Thank You Thanks very much for your interest in Open Live Writer and many happy blog posts— --Rob Rob Dolin (@RobDolin) Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Cross-Platform and Open Tools team (On behalf of the Open Live Writer committers) [Less]

Windows Live Writer has been turning blogging up to 11 since 2007, but since 2012 things have been a bit quiet with the application itself. However over the past few months I have had the pleasure working with a very pasionate group of engineers ... [More] volunteering their time to ensure that Live Writer has a sustainable future. I'm pleased to announce that today the .NET Foundation welcomes a new project - Open Live Writer. One of the great things about Live Writer has always been the passionate community behind it and I can't wait to see what that community does now everying is open source and on GitHub. In this guest post from Rob Dolin, he explains more about the new project and how to get started with the new, Open Live Writer which is available to download now. -- Martin Windows Live Writer Released as the open source Open Live Writer It’s a great day for bloggers who have a favorite tool for creating content. Today Microsoft announced that Open Live Writer was released and has been contributed to the .NET Foundation. Open Live Writer is an open source application enabling users to author, edit, and publish blog posts. It is based on a fork of the well-loved but not actively developed Windows Live Writer code. Scott Hanselman helped carry the torch at Microsoft on this project, and I’ve been proud to be part of the all-volunteer team to make it happen. History of Windows Live Writer The product that became Live Writer was originally created by a small, super-talented team of engineers including Jeremy Allaire, JJ Allaire, Joe Cheng, Charles Teague, and Spike Washburn. The team joined Microsoft through an acquisition in 2006 and organized with the Spaces team where I was working. Becky Pezely joined the team and over time, the team grew and shipped many popular releases of Windows Live Writer. As Microsoft was planning for the version of Windows Live that would coincide with the Windows 8 operating system release, the teams that built the Windows Live client apps for Windows were encouraged to focus on building a smaller set of Windows 8 apps designed to work well with both traditional PC input mechanisms and touch. The original team concluded their work on Windows Live Writer with Windows Live Writer 2012. Reviving Live Writer Even though there was no active development, Windows Live Writer continued to be a favorite tool of a passionate community of Windows PC users for authoring, editing, and publishing blog posts. Data from WordPress.com at the time suggested that Windows Live Writer (even two years after active development ended) was the #1 app for authoring a blog post to WordPress.com on a Windows PC. In fact, some of our technical evangelists were actively using Windows Live Writer for publishing on WordPress-powered blogs. A few team members from my former MS Open Tech team took an early interest in joining Scott Hanselman to revive Live Writer as an open source project. By January 2015, a group of about a half-dozen engineers interested in spending some of their volunteer time to help release an updated version of Live Writer had found each other. Jon Gallant sent an email to a few large group email lists at Microsoft soliciting volunteers and we collected about 50 people interested in helping. Anne Legato, Ed Essey, and the team at The Garage were most helpful in sharing advice on launching external projects. Scott Guthrie also agreed to be Open Live Writer’s sponsor. Why v0.5 You might wonder why we’re releasing a version 0.5 now instead of waiting to get to a v0.9 or a v1.0. A few considerations went into this. First, we wanted to get this out as an open source project as quickly as possible so people outside of Microsoft could start participating. Second, we suspect many people may be taking some vacation around the end of December and we wanted to make sure the project was available. Third, Eddie Kessler and the folks on Google’s Blogger team asked us to ship no later than early December 2015 so they could turn-off an old API that Windows Live Writer was dependent on. Eddie and team originally had planned to turn-off the API earlier and we are thankful for their collaboration and partnership in extending its life until we could release Open Live Writer. Why .NET Foundation The volunteer team considered a few options for releasing Open Live Writer. Ultimately, we found a great partnership in the .NET Foundation to support our goals around growing community participation for the project. Martin Woodward, Robin Ginn, and the team has been super-helpful in many matters including open source governance and administrative support, to marketing and communications. And Open Live Writer is many thousands of lines of C# code, so the .NET Foundation is a good technical match too. J Enough Background, SHOW ME THE BITS! To download the latest version of Open Live Writer, visit our website: http://www.OpenLiveWriter.org/. Open Live Writer is designed to sit side-by-side with Windows Live Writer so installing Open Live Writer won’t impact your existing version of Windows Live Writer. For the latest news and updates about Open Live Writer, you can follow us on Twitter as @OpenLiveWriter and find other ways to connect on: http://www.OpenLiveWriter.org/. Help Wanted Open Live Writer is brought to you by a volunteer team and continued improvements are dependent on volunteers. The code is available on GitHub: http://www.github.com/OpenLiveWriter/ and we welcome pull requests and open issues. However, we’re not just looking for developers. Anyone who wants to test early bits, help with visual design, interactive design, technical writing, partnership negotiation, product management, marketing, digital media, and more would be welcomed. You can find ways to plug-in to the community at: http://www.OpenLiveWriter.org/. Thank You Thanks very much for your interest in Open Live Writer and many happy blog posts— --Rob Rob Dolin (@RobDolin) Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Cross-Platform and Open Tools team (On behalf of the Open Live Writer committers) [Less]

A couple weeks ago I kicked off a series of written interviews with our .NET Foundation Advisory Council members. The Advisory Council is composed of OSS project leaders that care deeply about .NET and the success of the foundation. They drive key ... [More] initiatives in the foundation and guide the board. Learn more about what the Advisory Council is all about and participate in public discussions with them on our forums. For this next post, I interviewed Daniel Roth. Daniel is a Senior Program Manager on the ASP.NET team at Microsoft. His passions include delighting customers by making frameworks simple and easy to use in the cloud. Tell us a little bit about yourself. What's your background? When did you start getting interested in programming? I started working at Microsoft and on .NET fresh out of college a little over a decade ago. During that time I’ve worked on a bunch of areas in the .NET Framework including the networking stack, serialization, XAML, ASP.NET Web Services, WCF, MVC and Web API. In college I studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. I also did an M.Eng program with an emphasis on robotics. My mother was a programmer at the University of Massachusetts working on IBM mainframes, so I probably inherited some of my interest in computers from her. In high school I was particularly interested in questions of consciousness and artificial intelligence which led me to take my first computer science courses. What initiatives are you working on (or passionate about) within the .NET Foundation? I’m passionate about making it super easy to setup well-run open source .NET projects. I think there’s a lot we can do to make it easy to setup your project, setup your build infrastructure, sign your bits and make it simple to accept contributions. I’m also excited about making it really easy to setup open source documentation for .NET projects. The Read the Docs folks have been doing some really cool work on adding Sphinx extensions for .NET and API doc generation that I think are going to be great for building an open source network of .NET documentation.   Can you tell us some of the first open source projects you worked on as a contributor? Why did you get involved? How did you get started? My main exposure to open source has been through taking our existing .NET projects at Microsoft open source. This started with many of our ASP.NET projects including ASP.NET MVC, Web Pages and Web API. It’s amazing to see that the entire .NET stack is now open source! What were some of the challenges in open sourcing those ASP.NET projects? How many people were involved? How did you do it? Any leaders stand out? I think the main challenge with making ASP.NET open source was that it was a very new way for us to do our work. There really wasn’t any other major part of .NET that was open source at the time so we had to figure out and invent a lot of what it takes to do open source work at Microsoft. We had to move our engineering systems to be open source friendly and figure out how to take community contributions. There was also a cultural shift from being very tight-lipped about what we were working on to being much more open and transparent. We had to learn how to work effectively with our community on a day-to-day basis. There were numerous folks involved with this effort (my involvement in the initial setup was pretty minor), but Scott Guthrie certainly was a big supporter and helped make a lot of these things happen. Looking back, what bug are you most proud of fixing in an open source project? I remember when we first started taking contributions into our open source ASP.NET projects back in 2012. We had Miguel de Icaza, the creator of Mono, submit a pull request for us that we then merged while he was on stage. That was a pretty big moment for .NET open source. What project(s) do you spend most of your time on now? Currently I am working on ASP.NET 5 and the new .NET Execution Environment (DNX), which gives you a common platform for running .NET code cross-platform on Windows, Mac and Linux. Can you tell us one thing you have learned about running an open source project? I’ve learned that keeping it open is definitely better! I love the transparency of working on open source projects and its great working with a community of active contributors. Why is open source software important to you? Open source to me means you have a project that is now owned by a community of contributors instead of just a small team of developers working in isolation. It means you are working on something much bigger than one small team or individual can create. What is it about .NET that you like most? The C# language is simply gorgeous. I love the async/await support. The libraries that come with .NET are awesome. The tooling available for .NET is best in class (ex. Visual Studio Code). And it’s all going to just keep getting better now that .NET is fully open source and cross-platform! What does the future of .NET look like in your dreams? I dream of a vibrant open-source .NET community building apps and frameworks that I have never even imagined. I can’t wait to see what the open source community is going to create with .NET! Thanks, Daniel! Feel free to ask more interview questions in the comments below. Enjoy, -Beth Massi, .NET Foundation Technical Evangelist [Less]