Founded | March 31, 2014 [1] |
---|---|
Founder | Microsoft |
47-2119192 [2] | |
Legal status | 501(c)(6) organization |
Headquarters | Redmond, Washington, U.S. [2] |
Tom Pappas [3] | |
Website | dotnetfoundation |
The .NET Foundation is an organization incorporated on March 31, 2014, [1] by Microsoft to improve open-source software development and collaboration around the .NET Framework. [4] It was launched at the annual Build 2014 conference held by Microsoft. [5] The foundation is license-agnostic, and projects that come to the foundation are free to choose any open-source license, as defined by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). [6] The foundation uses GitHub to host the open-source projects it manages. [7]
Anyone who has contributed to .NET Foundation projects can apply to be a .NET Foundation member. Members can vote in elections for the board of the directors and will preserve the health of the organization. [8]
The foundation began with twenty-four projects under its stewardship including .NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn") and the ASP.NET family of open-source projects, both open-sourced by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (MS Open Tech). [5] Xamarin contributed six of its projects including the open source email libraries MimeKit and MailKit. [5] As of May 2020 [update] , it is the steward of 556 active projects, [9] including: .NET, Entity Framework (EF), Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), MSBuild, NuGet, Orchard CMS and WorldWide Telescope. Many of these projects are also listed under Outercurve Foundation project galleries.
As of June 2024 [update] , its board of directors consisted of Louëlla Creemers, Mitchel Sellers, Kendall Miller, Chris Woodruff, Glenn Watson, Kevin Griffin and Chris Sfanos. [10]
Darwin is the core Unix-like operating system of macOS, iOS, watchOS, tvOS, iPadOS, audioOS, visionOS, and bridgeOS. It previously existed as an independent open-source operating system, first released by Apple Inc. in 2000. It is composed of code derived from NeXTSTEP, FreeBSD, other BSD operating systems, Mach, and other free software projects' code, as well as code developed by Apple.
Source-available software is software released through a source code distribution model that includes arrangements where the source can be viewed, and in some cases modified, but without necessarily meeting the criteria to be called open-source. The licenses associated with the offerings range from allowing code to be viewed for reference to allowing code to be modified and redistributed for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.
CodePlex was a forge website by Microsoft. While it was active, it allowed shared development of open-source software. Its features included wiki pages, source control based on Mercurial, TFVC, Subversion or Git, discussion forums, issue tracking, project tagging, RSS support, statistics, and releases.
The .NET Micro Framework (NETMF) is a .NET Framework platform for resource-constrained devices with at least 512 kB of flash and 256 kB of random-access memory (RAM). It includes a small version of the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR) and supports development in C#, Visual Basic .NET, and debugging using Microsoft Visual Studio. NETMF features a subset of the .NET base class libraries, an implementation of Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), a GUI framework loosely based on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), and a Web Services stack based on Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and Web Services Description Language (WSDL). NETMF also features added libraries specific to embedded applications. It is free and open-source software released under Apache License 2.0.
CLR Profiler is a free and open-source memory profiler for the .NET Framework from Microsoft. It allows the user to investigate the contents of the managed heap, the behavior of the garbage collector, and the allocation patterns of the program being profiled.
A Contributor License Agreement (CLA) defines the terms under which intellectual property has been contributed to a company/project, typically software under an open source license.
GitHub is a developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage and share their code. It uses Git software, providing the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.
StyleCop is an open-source static code analysis tool from Microsoft that checks C# code for conformance to StyleCop's recommended coding styles and a subset of Microsoft's .NET Framework Design Guidelines. StyleCop analyses the source code, allowing it to enforce a different set of rules from FxCop. The rules are classified into the following categories:
The .NET Framework is a proprietary software framework developed by Microsoft that runs primarily on Microsoft Windows. It was the predominant implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) until being superseded by the cross-platform .NET project. It includes a large class library called Framework Class Library (FCL) and provides language interoperability across several programming languages. Programs written for .NET Framework execute in a software environment named the Common Language Runtime (CLR). The CLR is an application virtual machine that provides services such as security, memory management, and exception handling. As such, computer code written using .NET Framework is called "managed code". FCL and CLR together constitute the .NET Framework.
XML Notepad is an open-source XML editor written by Chris Lovett and published by Microsoft. The editor features incremental search in both tree and text views, drag/drop support, IntelliSense, find/replace with regular expressions and XPath expressions, and support for XInclude. The editor has good performance on large XML documents and has real time XML schema validation. The editor also features an HTML viewer for displaying XSLT transformation results and a built-in XML comparison tool.
The Outercurve Foundation was an independent 501(c)(6) non-profit corporation founded by Microsoft. Its goal was to "enable the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities." They ran several software projects, some of which were connected to the .NET Framework.
Atom is a free and open-source text and source-code editor for macOS, Linux, and Windows with support for plug-ins written in JavaScript, and embedded Git control. Developed by GitHub, Atom was released on June 25, 2015.
Chocolatey is a machine-level, command-line package manager and installer for software on Microsoft Windows. It uses the NuGet packaging infrastructure and Windows PowerShell to simplify the process of downloading and installing software.
ASP.NET Core is an open-source modular web-application framework. It is a redesign of ASP.NET that unites the previously separate ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET Web API into a single programming model. Despite being a new framework, built on a new web stack, it does have a high degree of concept compatibility with ASP.NET. The ASP.NET Core framework supports side-by-side versioning so that different applications being developed on a single machine can target different versions of ASP.NET Core. This was not possible with previous versions of ASP.NET. ASP.NET Core initially ran on both the Windows-only .NET Framework and the cross-platform .NET. However, support for the .NET Framework was dropped beginning with ASP.Net Core 3.0.
The .NET platform is a free and open-source, managed computer software framework for Windows, Linux, and macOS operating systems. The project is mainly developed by Microsoft employees by way of the .NET Foundation and is released under an MIT License.
AppVeyor is a hosted, distributed continuous integration service used to build and test projects hosted on GitHub and other source code hosting services on a Microsoft Windows virtual machine, as well as Ubuntu Linux virtual machines. AppVeyor is a privately-held Canadian corporation founded in 2011.
Microsoft, a technology company historically known for its opposition to the open source software paradigm, turned to embrace the approach in the 2010s. From the 1970s through 2000s under CEOs Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, Microsoft viewed the community creation and sharing of communal code, later to be known as free and open source software, as a threat to its business, and both executives spoke negatively against it. In the 2010s, as the industry turned towards cloud, embedded, and mobile computing—technologies powered by open source advances—CEO Satya Nadella led Microsoft towards open source adoption although Microsoft's traditional Windows business continued to grow throughout this period generating revenues of 26.8 billion in the third quarter of 2018, while Microsoft's Azure cloud revenues nearly doubled.
PeachPie is an open-source PHP language compiler and runtime for the .NET Framework and .NET. It is built on top of the Microsoft Roslyn compiler platform and is based on the first-generation Phalanger project. PeachPie compiles source code written in PHP to CIL byte-code. PeachPie takes advantage of the JIT compiler component of the .NET Framework in order to handle the beginning of the compilation process. Its purpose is not to generate or optimize native code, but rather to compile PHP scripts into .NET assemblies containing CIL code and meta-data. In July 2017, the project became a member of the .NET Foundation.