Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : .NET Development, Community

Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP Released

Peter Galli — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:40:00 GMT

The Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS) team announced today the release of Windows Cache Extension 1.0 for PHP, a PHP accelerator that is used to increase the speed of PHP applications running on Windows and Windows Server. This is a production-ready release that is provided under an open source BSD license, with the source code hosted and maintained here, and the documentation hosted on php.net.

You can find more details on this release on IIS team Product Unit Manager Mai-lan Tomsen Bukovec's blog.

WinCache extension is a significant open source contribution from Microsoft to the PHP on Windows community. The extension code is hosted and maintained on PHP Extensions Community Library (PECL) and is available for everyone to view, branch, compile, and contribute to.

The IIS team also invites the PHP development community to join it in development of this caching extension for PHP on Windows. There have already been some contributions from the community whileWinCache was in the pre-release mode, and IIS team is looking forward to having others join this new PHP on Windows caching project.

Also, in time for this release, an independent PHP company - Ibuildings - has conducted a benchmark test with the WinCache RTW bits and published the results.

The release of this production-ready PHP accelerator for Windows is an important step towards making the Windows operating system an even better platform for hosting PHP applications.

WinCache extension significantly improves performance of PHP applications and lowers CPU load on the server. This, together with the fact that no application code changes are necessary to take advantage of the caching, makes WinCache a must have extension when running PHP on Windows.

More information about the WinCache extension for PHP can be found as follows:

The PECL documentation on WinCache
The PHP on Windows feature team blogs (Kanwal, Ruslan, and Don)
The WinCache community forum
The IIS.NET documentation on WinCache
The WinCache on PECL source code, licensed under BSD
How to file bugs on WinCache in PECL

Silverlight 4 Beta Hits the Street

Peter Galli — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:59:00 GMT

The beta for Silverlight 4 was released today, Scott Guthrie, a Corporate Vice President in Microsoft's Developer Division, told attendees at the annual Professional Developers Conference here in Los Angeles.

The final verison of the product will be shipped in the first half of 2010, he said, noting that the release of the beta means that developers can begin testing the capabilities of Silverlight 4 to plan for the great applications and rich, compelling user experiences to come, both on and off the Web.

Some 90% of the most commonly requested features were incorporated into Silverlight 4, which is currently installed on 40% of all internet devices and more than 50% of US broadband PCs, Guthrie said.

A number of customers, including Snapflow, Seesmic and H&R Block, as well as numerous Microsoft properties such as Xbox, Bing and MSN, are all already using Silverlight to create compelling user experiences.

The Silverlight 4 beta extends beyond the browser, and brings new out-of-browser capabilities, enabling new experiences that reach deeper into the desktop without additional code or runtimes required.

Webcam and microphone with local recording capability opens new possibilities for innovative interactive media experiences, while native multicast support enables efficient enterprise-wide training and internal communications behind the firewall.

Full support for Silverlight in Visual Studio 2010 gives enterprise developers a tried and trusted development environment and languages that scales for mission-critical enterprise scenarios, while integration with Microsoft Office and Microsoft SharePoint bring the benefits of Silverlight interactivity to a broad enterprise install base, Guthrie said.

Enhanced printing, networking, databinding, reporting and charting capabilities satisfy common business needs, while Silverlight has a growing library of over 60 customizable controls to create rich, interactive applications to rapidly build attractive, functional business applications.

Microsoft also has extended support for Google's Chrome browser with Silverlight 4.

Microsoft is also working with the open source community to ensure that Silverlight content is available to them. Earlier this year, Moonlight 1.0 was released. Moonlight is an open source project that gives Linux users access to Microsoft Silverlight content, and is available for all major Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu.

PDC 2009: Availability of the Windows Azure Platform

Peter Galli — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:14:00 GMT

Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, used the company's annual Professional Developers Conference here in Los Angeles to announce the availability of the Windows Azure platform.

That platform consists of Windows Azure, the operating system as-a-service, and SQL Azure, a fully relational database in the cloud. The Service Bus and Access Control services, formerly known as the .NET Services, now run directly within Windows Azure and are known as Windows Azure platform AppFabric Service.

Microsoft will continue to offer Windows Azure as a Community Technology Preview until the end of this year, after which it will switch to a production service under which Azure's cloud services will be made available to enterprises. But users will get a fee pass in January, since charges will only start accruing in February.

In his opening keynote, Ozzie also announced that a small number of customers will go into production today, including Automattic, Inc., the maker of WordPress, which is now live on Azure. Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, Inc., took the stage to demonstrate MySQL, PHP, and Apache support on Windows Azure, as well as to announce that his company is launching a new site that runs on SQL Azure.

Ozzie also used his keynote to made clear that reaching all developers was top of mind for Microsoft.

"To most developers, to developers like you, Windows Azure appears as a model based extension to Visual Studio, enabling you to build apps that leverage your skills in SQL, IIS, ASP.NET, and .NET Framework. Alternatively, and of course it's your choice, you might leverage your skills by using MySQL and PHP within Azure, or you might instead take advantage of our new Azure tools for Java and Eclipse. Reaching all developers is incredibly important to us," he said.

Windows Azure now supported any kind of Windows code and programming model, and any kind of multi-role, multi-tier service design pattern, supporting extremely flexible binding and arbitrary relationships between roles, Ozzie said.

"Because you wanted it, we've broadened far beyond just the .NET programming model, and the Web role, worker role service design pattern. We added support for FastCGI, enabling high scale Web apps to be written in any of a variety of programming languages. And, in sessions this week, you're going to see the Windows Azure team quickly building and deploying Java apps, running under Tomcat. You'll see PHP apps under MySQL," he said.

Earlier this year, Microsoft enabled .NET full trust and native code applications. This functionality allowed developers to spawn xcopy deployable processes. As a result, Java applications can now be packaged and run.

Today, we announced that we are delivering a solution accelerator for Tomcat, an open source software implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies, as well as launching a Java SDK for Windows Azure Storage (tables, blogs, and queues). External endpoints (inbound traffic) to worker roles have also been enabled, which enables applications that receive internet traffic that aren't running under IIS.

During his keynote Ozzie also introduced Vivek Kundra, the Federal Chief Information Officer at the White House, who spoke via live feed from Washington D.C., and who encouraged developers to take advantage of the vast amount of public data to create applications using this new Microsoft technology.

"I'm really excited about what NASA is doing in cooperation with Microsoft with the launch of the Pathfinder Innovation Challenge ... anybody can participate and look at the data that has been democratized through NASA on the Azure platform, that allows people to look around the red planet, slice and dice, and cube, and create information, and advance our understanding of the universe," Kundra said.

This commitment to all developers is not new. When Ozzie first announced the Windows Azure platform at PDC last year, Sam Ramji blogged that developers will also be able to choose from a range of open source development tools and technologies, and be able to access Azure services using a variety of common internet standards, including HTTP, REST, WS* and Atom.

"The Azure platform's goal is to support all developers and their choice of IDE, language and technology. We are also providing programmable components that can be consumed by other applications, and Microsoft is funding and sponsoring open source software development kits to enable Java and Ruby developers to take advantage of Azure. This is significant as this is the first time we are delivering cross-platform software development kits at the same time as Microsoft Developer Network software development kits," he said.

And, earlier this year, Microsoft introduced the PHP SDK for Windows Azure, an open source effort for which Microsoft has provided funding, with development by RealDolmen, whose goal is to provide high-level abstractions that enable PHP developers to interoperate readily with Windows Azure.

The PHP SDK for Windows Azure focuses on REST and provides PHP classes for Windows Azure blobs, tables and queue, helper classes for HTTP transport, AuthN/AuthZ, REST and error management, as well as manageability, instrumentation and logging support.

Next up at PDC 2009 was Bob Muglia, President of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business, who noted that Microsoft is converging on a common developer platform for both servers and services, that will enable developers to continue using familiar .NET Framework and Visual Studio tools and technologies, as well as third party tools such as Eclipse, to create and monetize applications that run on the server and as services in the cloud.

Muglia also announced the company's plan to offer Windows Server Virtual Machine support on Windows Azure, enabling customers to more easily support virtualized infrastructure across the continuum of on premises and cloud computing.

In addition, Muglia announced the new release of ASP.NET MVC beta 2, a free, fully-supported framework that enables developers to rapidly build standards-based Web applications through rich AJAX integration and enhanced extensibility.

In other related news, SugarCRM, a provider of commercial open source customer relationship management software, today also announced that it will offer its CRM applications on Windows Azure to enable its customers and value-added resellers to benefit from the real-time scalability, high availability and on-demand infrastructure of Azure.

"With Windows Azure, Microsoft has built a true cloud computing platform going well beyond the simple hosted infrastructure that most service providers offer today. Windows Azure enables SugarCRM value-added resellers to create and deploy unique solutions for customers around the globe. This new service is another key component of the Sugar Open Cloud, the SugarCRM cloud strategy for delivering simple, affordable CRM anywhere based on customer need," said Larry Augustin, CEO of SugarCRM, in a press statement.

Microsoft to Open Source the .NET Micro Framework

Peter Galli — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 15:16:00 GMT

I have great news to announce. Today, at the Microsoft Professional Developer Conference (PDC) here in Los Angeles, we announced not only the release of version 4.0 of the.NET Micro Framework, but also that we are open sourcing the product and making it available under the Apache 2.0 license, which is already being used by the community within the embedded space.

The .NET Micro Framework,a development and execution environment for resource-constrained devices, was initially developed inside the Microsoft Startup Business Accelerator, but recently moved to the Developer Division so as to be more closely aligned with the overall direction of Microsoft development efforts.

The result of this is that the .NET Micro Framework has become a seamless development experience, bringing a single programming model and tool chain for the breadth of developer solutions, all the way from small intelligent devices, to servers and the cloud. There are also no more time-limited versions.

Including the source code for almost all of the product also ensures that developers now also get access to the Base Class Libraries that were implemented for .NET Micro Framework and the CLR code itself.

However, both the TCP/IP stack and Cryptography libraries are not included in the source code. Program Manager Colin Miller told me this was because the TCP/IP stack is third party software that Microsoft licenses from EBSNet, so we do not have the rights to distribute that source code. If someone needs to access the source code for the TCP/IP stack, they can contact EBSNet directly.

As for the Cyptography libraries, they are not included in source code because they are used outside of the scope of the .NET Micro Framework. Customers who need to have access to the code in the cryptography functions will find that these libraries can be replaced, Miller said.

I asked Miller what the future plans for the .Net Micro Framework were, and he made clear that Microsoft intends to remain actively involved in its ongoing development, working alongside the community. While the license will allow customers to take the code and make specialized versions to fit their needs, customers told us they wanted Microsoft to stay involved to avoid any possible fragmentation of the platform.

"As such, we are planning on establishing a core technology team that is made up of both Microsoft and non-Microsoft contributors that continues the goals of producing a high quality product for very small devices. This group will act as the gateway to community contributions while, at the same time, Microsoft Developers will continue add functionality and coordinate with the overall .NET team," he said.

Microsoft is also in the process of forming a community of interested and involved members to help shape the future direction of the product. There will be a core technology team that is composed of Microsoft and external partners, and people will be encouraged to propose projects, which will be vetted before they are accepted.

"The site will also support people building extensions that exist alongside the platform rather than being integrated into it, " Miller told me.

New Bridge Broadens Java and .NET Interoperability

Peter Galli — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 15:31:00 GMT

Microsoft continues to deliver on its ongoing promise to build bridges between different technologies, and this week jointly announced with Noelios Technologies a new interoperability bridge between Java and .NET through REST.

The Microsoft Interoperability Technical Strategy team has been working with Noelios to build an extension to the Restlet Framework. As such, Noelios has released a new bridge for Java and .NET. It is shipping a new version of the Restlet open source project, a lightweight REST framework for Java.

This includes the Restlet Extension for ADO.NET Data Services, which makes it easier for Java developers to take advantage of ADO.NET Data Services, a set of recently added .NET Framework features that provides a simple way to expose a wide range of data sources, such as relational databases, XML files, and so on, through a RESTful service interface.

This announcement is yet another example of Microsoft's continued commitment to openness and interoperability, and demonstrates the ever increasing use of web standards in our technologies.

Formerly known as Project Astoria, the ADO.NET Data Services defines a flexible addressing and query interface using a URL convention, and supports the usual resource manipulation methods for data sources, including the full range of Create, Read, Update, and Delete operations.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and the upcoming Visual Studio 2010 fully support ADO.NET Data Services, including the capability to create and consume data services directly from the development environment.

You can find all the technical details of this announcement on the Interoperability team blog here, as well as on the Noelis blog. You can also find a tutorial on this here.

The PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services

Peter Galli — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:00:00 GMT

Today, the DPE Interop team at Microsoft released a new open source project that bridges PHP and .NET using REST.

Specifically, the PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services was made available, which makes it easier for PHP developers to take advantage of the ADO.NET Data Services, a set of features recently added to the .NET Framework.

The PHP Toolkit for ADO.NET Data Services is an open source project funded by Microsoft and developed by Persistent Systems. It is available on CodePlex today.

These services, which were previously referred to by the codename Project Astoria, expose a wide range of data sources through a RESTful service interface.

There is full support for ADO.NET Data Services in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 as well as in the upcoming Visual Studio 2010, which includes direct support for both creating and consuming data services directly from the development environment.

Read more about all this on the Interoperability blog, and watch the Channel 9 video interview with Claudio Caldato, Senior Program Manager in the Interoperability Technical Strategy team, and Pablo Castro, software architect of ADO.NET Data Services.

This is yet another example of Microsoft's continued commitment to openness and interoperability as well as of its embrace of Web standards in its technologies.

MindTouch: Open Source Collaboration Built on .NET

Aaron Fulkerson — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 18:05:00 GMT

It has been a while since I last guest wrote at Port25, which is always a pleasure.

Today, I am writing about the latest MindTouch software release, codename Minneopa, which introduces three new innovative capabilities: the ability to capture and collaboratively edit video, the easy packaging of applications built on MindTouch for distribution, and the new capability to stage content.

However, if you are new to MindTouch, allow me to introduce the product. The canned statement reads as follows:

MindTouch Inc. is changing the way businesses share information, consume content, and collaborate. The company's open source platform, MindTouch 2009, combines the ease of use of a wiki with the scalability, security and integration capabilities of an enterprise portal, connecting enterprise systems, databases, web services, and Web 2.0 apps to create collaborative networks.

The gist, however, is that MindTouch offers an easy to use platform that looks a lot like a wiki, but behaves more like a portal with rapid application development capabilities. The architecture is unique and quite innovative because MindTouch is implemented in C# on .NET (or Mono) and consists of the following components:

A decoupled PHP client that provides a wiki like interface for collaboration, document management, mashups, and for creating composite and situational applications
Composition of more than 120 ReSTful web services
A web service orchestration engine
An acess control layer
An extensible HTTP message bus

To really appreciate the capabilities of MindTouch it is best to watch a demo as we' are truly defining a new category in collaboration.

This new Minneopa release of MindTouch buoy's our efforts to help those who are building collaborative networks on MindTouch. This is especially useful for developers, IT workers and business users to package their enterprise dashboards, composite applications and mashups for distribution.

For the collaborative video capabilities, we partnered with Kaltura, the developer of the world's first open source online video platform. The integration with Kaltura gives MindTouch users the built-in ability to collaborate, edit, publish and syndicate video directly within MindTouch. End users can record video and have multiple parties edit while retaining a complete version history -- all within a MindTouch page.

Download MindTouch Core, the free and open source edition that runs on Windows Server with IIS, Linux or even with a VMware virtual image, which should run in hypervisor without issue. Or download the native Windows Server version of MindTouch 2009, which is packaged in an easy to install Microsoft Installer (MSI) and supports Windows Server 2003/2008.

With the commercial edition, MindTouch 2009, users also benefit from a rich set of desktop tools, more features and a collection of adapters to popular enterprise systems and databases.

Better Windows Development Environments - One project at a Time

Mark Stone — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:45:00 GMT

Discussions of the PC market usually break down into "desktop" vs. "server", as if these are the only platform categories. However, the developer's dev box -- call it a "workstation" to distinguish it from desktop -- is really a separate platform. Remember, when Linus Torvalds created Linux it wasn't because he needed a better
desktop operating system, or a better server operating system. What he wanted was something that could run the gcc compiler. He wanted a developer workstation he could use at home.

Of course the developer workstation market influences other markets. Developers who develop on a platform are more likely to develop for a platform. So winning developer mind share is often about giving them what they want in the way of development environment. And in this regard, open source developers are something of a
different breed.

Microsoft has a great set of developer tools; I've certainly known developers who swear by Visual Studio. But there's something of a disconnect between graphical tools favored by Windows developers and then command line tools favored by traditional open source developers; I've also known developers whose first order of business
with a new Windows workstation is to GNU-ify it.

Ironically, the Internet has a convergence effect, drawing these two camps together. Put developers online, and they can collaborate. Put developers online, and they can not only develop, but they can build, deploy, and test. The workstation has become not so much a computer as an environment. The developer's toolkit includes version control, build management, automated testing, and the need to do all these things as a team rather than an individual. Developer environments have evolved rapidly to adapt to these changes.

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) seems to understand this evolution as well as anyone, and a number of ASF projects focus specifically on tools for the developer environment (Ant, Buildr, Continuum, Gump, and Maven come to mind as a few examples).

What's interesting is to see the .NET developers following suit, and wanting these same sorts of tools for their development environment. What's surprising is that this .NET effort is very grass roots driven.

"Panday" is a Filipino word meaning "blacksmith", and can also be a reference to the graphic novel super hero of the same name (the graphic novel is also originates from the Philippines). This provides an appropriate metaphor for the name of the NPanday project on Codeplex.

The NPanday project is one of several affiliated with Microsoft's Open Source Lab in the Philippines, and is part of the effort to bring to .NET some of the capabilities found in other open source development environments. The aim of NPanday is integrate Apache Maven into the .NET development environment.This would enable .NET
developers to take advantage of Maven-compatible development infrastructure.

Projects like NPanday are important because they offer developers more choice of tools in a Windows development environment. The more familiar those tools are to open source developers, the more open source development will be done on and for Windows. NPanday is also an important project for interoperability, making it easier to integrate .NET development with other development done using Maven.

Because It's Fun

Mark Stone — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:15:00 GMT

We should never forget that a key motivator for open source developers is fun. For student developers -- where open source really starts -- this is especially true.

We’ve been looking at several potential student projects in Croatia, and for the past several months have been lending some support to the PlugBlog project.

In many ways this is a classic open source story. Croatia is not a large country (population 4.5 million), nor does it have as highly developed a technology sector as, say, Scandanavian countries of comparable size. Combine that with a distinctive language of Slavic origin, and you have an environment in which there is very little motivation for commercial software providers to offer Croatian localization. Thousands of languages and dialects world-wide struggle with this same problem: they simply lack the critical mass and market opportunity to warrant commercial software localization.

Into this breach steps open source. Several local blogging sites in Croatia do, of course, post blogs in Croatian. But bloggers would like to have the client tools to compose in Croatian as well. Given the popularity of Windows Live Messenger as an instant messaging client, there was a natural opportunity for open source development to create a localization pack enabling Live Writer composition in Croatian. This is precisely what PlugBlog aims to do.

One of the interesting twists on life in the era of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is how enabling SOA is of open source. Plugins for Live Writer can easily be open source independent of the source code status of Live Writer itself, because these plugins need only make web services calls to the Live Writer API. Indeed, a quick search of Codeplex shows more than 60 open source projects dealing with Live Writer. This is the kind of thriving little sub-community that SOA makes possible.

The developers working PlugBlog are students, and they are doing this work as a student project. As such, it has a clearly defined project plan and specific milestones for the project. The work they are doing will provide a valuable localized tool to Croatian bloggers, but it will also serve as an example of how other languages could integrate localization with Live Writer. This is all great, but you can’t stop developers from doing something just because its fun.

So I was surprised to see a check-in on this project that creates a connector for passing data from Skype to Live Writer. This wasn’t on the project plan. Talking to project coordinator Boris, he mentioned this was an extra they threw in in their spare time. Given the huge popularity of Skype in Eastern Europe this shouldn’t have been surprising, and indeed if anyone had mentioned it during project planning it almost certainly would have been part of the original design.

But this too is part of the beauty of open source: user-driven innovation fills the gaps overlooked originally. I look forward to more Skype integration and more pleasant surprises from the Croatian team.

The Hidden Technology Decision-Maker

Mark Stone — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 15:00:00 GMT

On Monday Microsoft and SD Forum held the 3rd annual Open Source ISV Forum. In a day of interesting talks, I was particularly struck by Larry Augustin's talk. As an emphasizing example of the growth of open source projects partnered with a commercial endeavor, Larry mentioned DotNetNuke.

DotNetNuke is, of course, freely available for download and licensed under an open source license. But there is also a professional edition and a range of complimentary commercial services for those who want service, support, or customizations. The business model is classic open source: the free download seeds the market with potential customers, and as some of those run up against the limits of what they are willing to do on their own, they make inquiries about the professional edition. Thus open source creates an inbound channel of qualified sales leads, without the overhead and expense of a sales force working in the field.

This is a great business model, but it's important to think about the actual decision-makers in this adoption process. What's distinctive about DotNetNuke is that it's one of the few mature, open source Content Management Systems (CMSs) that is not written in PHP. It is, as the name implies, ASP.NET based. And this reminds me of a prdocut management position I was in some years ago when (a) the only mature CMS choices were PHP-based, and (b) PHP on Windows was not yet a viable alternative.

The company in question was in a typical position: they were not a technology company, but needed a strong web presence for their business and to connect to the online community of their customers. They had a home-grown CMS solution that wasn't scaling, wasn't secure, and wasn't stable. My product management team put together a good comparison chart of various CMS choices, many of them open source. I sat down with the web development manager to review the choices.

"Some of these are good systems," he said, "but I have a team of .NET developers, and these are all PHP-based. I don't have head count to go out and hire a PHP dev for this project."

Note the decision-making process at work here:

From an agreed list of candidate software, an engineering team will download something to "test drive";
One developer will do some testing and make a recommendation;
From a short list of recommended software a more thorough test will be done with a prototype or pilot project;
Finally a choice will be made, and money will be spent.

The person with the first vote in the process is not a CIO or any other traditional "IT Decision Maker". It's one dev, talking to his manager. If your software gets vetoed at that level, or -- worse -- never even gets a try-out, then your product isn't in the decision-making process.

A lot has changed in recent years. PHP is now much better supported on Windows, and .NET projects like DotNetNuke are available and much more mature. This is as it should be. For open source to spread to its full potential, it has to be available in the technology adoption decision-making process. And that availability starts with being available to the hidden technology decision-maker: that lone developer who will look at software written in a framework they understand for a platform they work with.

Expanding the interoperability of eclipse4SL: Mac support comes to the Eclipse for Silverlight project

Vijay Rajagopalan — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 18:15:00 GMT

In October 2008, when Microsoft announced the general availability of Silverlight 2.0, and, as part of Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to interoperability, Microsoft and Soyatec unveiled the Eclipse Tools for Silverlight (Eclipse4SL).

Today, Microsoft and Soyatec are expanding our interoperability collaboration by releasing a Community Technology Preview (CTP) of the eclipse4SL project that includes support for the Macintosh platform. Mac and Windows developers can now collaborate on Silverlight projects using the Eclipse or Visual Studio IDEs. We have also added several new features to the project that should please all developers like C# code generation and improved XAML auto-completion (check out our Interoperability Team blog for more details and a demo)

As an open source initiative sponsored by Microsoft (funding and architectural guidance) and led by Soyatec (development), the eclipse4SL project is released under the Eclipse Public License Version 1.0 on SourceForge.net and was submitted by Soyatec it to the Eclipse Foundation as an open Eclipse project. Since its inception the project has received lots of feedback and made significant progress. eclipse4SL has been among the “Top Rated” projects on www.eclipseplugincentral.com for weeks:

(Screenshot taken on 03/16/2009)

For more information, visit the Eclipse for Silverlight web site, or join the discussion at http://www.eclipse4sl.org/community/.

Vijay Rajagopalan, Principal Architect in the Interoperability Strategy Team at Microsoft.

Better Tools for Web Development

Mark Stone — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 15:10:00 GMT

Several years ago I was helping a musician friend of mine set up a web site to use as a promotional site for his live performances. I opted for a simple, PHP-based Content Management System (CMS) that wouldn’t require any special knowledge for him to post new information, and would be – famous last words – easy for me to set up and maintain.

Not having done professional web development for some time, I quickly found myself on the phone to one of my PHP guru friends. After editing three configuration files (two for the web server, one for PHP itself), and adjusting to make sure we had the right version of PHP running with the right version of MySQL, we finally got everything working, and the CMS properly installed and configured.

This small example has several instructive lessons:

Getting software components working together properly is hard. The open source community takes real pride in tackling this challenge, having delivered tools like make, dpkg, and apt. Even so, simple cases can fail and mire you in complexity.
None of this is where web developers want to spend their time. The creative, innovative work is all done once you have the right components in place.
Absent perfect tools (which we’ll probably never have), you want to have the collective knowledge of your developer community working for you. Without my friend on the phone, I’d have had a much bigger problem on my hands.

So there’s something very liberating about seeing Microsoft offer better tools and facilitate better community collaboration so that web developers can spend more time on creative work and less on component complexity.

I’m referring specifically to the Microsoft Web Platform: Web Platform Installer 2.0 Beta (WebPI) and Windows Web Application Gallery, announced today at MIX ’09.

WebPI provides a single online destination and a single process for downloading and installing Microsoft’s freely available web products. By itself this may seem like no more than much-needed common sense, a good effort by Microsoft to help web developers get all the components they need working together more easily and more effectively.

What makes this development really interesting is the Web Application Gallery, an opportunity for web developers to participate and collaborate in a knowledge marketplace of shared components. In other words any web developer who follows certain basic guidelines can add their product to the Gallery, and be part of this ecosystem/community of shared web development activity. This is an opportunity not just to market your work, but share ideas and innovations with other web developers, and indeed let them build on your work.

Does that sound reminiscent of an open source community? It should. While there is no requirement that Gallery code be open source, the spirit behind this effort is very much one of collaboration. The Gallery is based on the idea that web developers collectively can advance their work more than each can individually.

Nor is this a playground strictly for Microsoft technologies. There are two supported web development frameworks in the Gallery: .NET and PHP. Opening up the world of PHP applications for Windows is an exciting prospect. There is at least the possibility that something like Word Press on Windows Server will be a point and click install. We aren’t there yet. WebPI installs SQL Server by default, and MySQL is still a manual install. Many web developers won’t – or shouldn’t – care about the difference, but to some it will matter.

But this is definitely a step along the right path, one step closer to making PHP an operating system-agnostic language. Because a PHP developer should care only about building great apps.

Brazilian Students Set Their Own Course

Mark Stone — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 19:05:00 GMT

I’m going to tell a story that starts in Indiana, but really it’s about Brazil.

Once upon a time “scientific computing” was nearly synonymous with “Fortran”. Today, though, just about any high level language can be used to write High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. These days that language choice also includes C#.

At Indiana University, the Open Systems Lab has pioneered work to implement Message Passing Interface (MPI) support for .Net, so that MPI applications can be written in C#. The project is MPI.Net, and you can find it on Codeplex. It is open source, about three years old, has reached a 1.0 release, and is compatible with two other important open source projects, OpenMPI and Mono. The principle developers behind the project are Andrew Lumsdaine at Indiana University and his former student, Douglas Gregor, who is now on the faculty of Rensselear Polytechnic Institute.

This is the kind of open source work that’s really exciting to see because of the way it expands choices for the developer and the end user. A C# developer should not be closed off from writing HPC applications if that’s what they want to do. And a research scientist should not have to think about whether their lab is running Linux or Windows Server. Both of these individuals are working enough layers above the operating system that somebody else’s operating system choice should not be a constraint.

So I was very excited to learn that students in Brazil at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul were doing work on MPI, and excited to talk with them about their work. One of their projects is MPI#, also open source and also hosted on Codeplex.

MPI# builds on top of the work of MPI.Net, adding some functionality not yet present in MPI.Net. Specifically, quoting from the project description:

The goals of this project would be to build upon MPI.NET in order to complement it with the features that are missing, mainly regarding collective communication. Either they could benefit from C# native support for such communication, either they could be programmed on top of the provided MPISend/MPIRecv encapsulations. C# and .NET features such as fault tolerance or dynamicity support would be studied, in other to turn the MPI# implementation robust in large, dynamic and heterogeneous platforms.

Two of the students working on MPI# are Ismael Stangherlini and Fernando Afonso. They are graduate students in computer science, working on projects affiliated with the Brazilian Interoperability and Open Source Software Development Nucleous. When I talked to them about their work on MPI# I was curious what their communication with Indiana University had been like. Their response: they had never been in contact with Indiana University; they simply downloaded the code for MPI.Net and started working on their own.

That’s the magic of open source: that they can, in fact, just download the code on their own and start coding against it. They may make an important contribution to MPI.Net. Or their code may be entirely disregarded. Or they may move on to other projects and somebody else may or may not pick up where they left off. At this stage it’s too early to tell. But the fact that all of these scenarios are possible demonstrates why, as a methodology, open source is so nimble and adaptive. A top-down product development process, or a top-down standards development process can only execute on the innovations envisioned by the few at the top, and at the speed of the slowest decision-makers in the process. But a bottom-up open source process enables every innovation that anyone at the grass roots level can see.

Moonlight 1.0 Hits the Street

Peter Galli — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:42:00 GMT

Moonlight 1.0 is now available.

Moonlight is an open source project that gives Linux users access to Microsoft Silverlight content, and is available for all major Linux distributions, including openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu. This milestone release is part of the technical collaboration between Novell and Microsoft.

Microsoft has worked with the Moonlight team and Novell to enable interoperability between Windows and Linux platforms and extend the high-quality interactive Web and video experience for the benefit of the Linux community, said Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president of Microsoft's .NET Developer Division.

Microsoft has provided Novell with access to its test suites for Silverlight, and provides Linux end users of Moonlight with free access to the Microsoft Media Pack, a set of licensed media codecs for video and audio that bring optimized and licensed decoders to every Linux user using Moonlight. Windows Media Video (.wmv), Windows Media Audio (.wma) and MP3 files are supported through the Microsoft Media Pack.

A pre-release of Moonlight was made available on January 19, 2009 to allow Linux users to stream Barack Obama's Inauguration, and more than 20,000 Linux users downloaded Moonlight to watch that Silverlight broadcast.

"Microsoft Silverlight offers the most comprehensive and powerful solution for the creation and delivery of rich internet applications and media experiences, and is used by hundreds of thousands of developers worldwide," Guthrie said.

For his part Miguel de Icaza, the founder of the Mono project founder and vice president of Developer Platforms at Novell, said Moonlight brings the benefits of Silverlight's popular multimedia content to Linux viewers. "This first release delivers on the goal of breaking down barriers to multimedia content and creating parity in the user's viewing experience regardless of whether the user is on Windows or Linux."

DotNetNuke Moves to CodePlex

Peter Galli — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 22:31:00 GMT

DotNetNuke Corporation, the creator of the industry-leading DotNetNuke development framework, has decided to leverage the CodePlex infrastructure for its core product distribution.

DotNetNuke will utilize CodePlex for download infrastructure, bandwidth, and metrics reporting for its core product offerings. Until now, DotNetNuke had been leveraging services from SourceForge.Net. DotNetNuke is also currently the second most commonly downloaded project on CodePlex.

Last February, DotNetNuke Corporation announced the availability of the DotNetNuke Forge, the prime destination for open source collaboration on the DotNetNuke platform. The DotNetNuke Forge has grown in breadth and popularity over the past year and now represents a vital part of the DotNetNuke ecosystem.

The DotNetNuke Corporation researched the many open source project hosting services available, and decided that CodePlex provided the "most reliable and dependable infrastructure, cleanest user experience, most advanced project administration tools, and highest commitment to future innovation," said Scott Willhite, its Co-Founder and Community Director.

CodePlex Program Manager Sara Ford says Microsoft is excited about having DotNetNuke join the CodePlex community and, as the leading open source web application framework for ASP.NET, the CodePlex team is looking forward to partnering with them to promote open source development on the Microsoft platform.

The team is also looking forward to hearing the feedback from the DotNetNuke community for improving the open source development experience on CodePlex.