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

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.

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."