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

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.

BizSpark Program Targets Startups

Peter Galli — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:49:00 GMT

The extremely popular and well attended Web 2.0 Summit starts in San Francisco today, where Microsoft officially launched its global BizSpark program, designed to help startups grow into successful businesses through software support, a vibrant global ecosystem that delivers superior business advantage, and opportunities for visibility through a new online database, the BizSparkDB.

BizSpark is available globally to privately held startups that are building a software-based product or service, that have been in business less than three years, and have less than $1 million in revenue.

It also provides startups with software, support and visibility early in their life cycle when those resources are most needed and least affordable. As such, Microsoft has decided that the $100 program fee will be made payable when the company leaves the program rather than upfront when joining.

Under the program, startups will receive speedy, easy access to Microsoft's current full-featured development tools, platform technologies, and production licenses of server products. They can use these immediately to develop and bring innovative and interoperable solutions to market with no upfront costs and minimal requirements.

Startups will also receive professional support from Microsoft and BizSpark Network Partners around the world. Network Partners are incubators, investors, advisors, government agencies and hosters who are vested in software-fueled innovation and entrepreneurship.

BizSpark members will also be informed about those programs of particular interest to startups, including the Microsoft Web Platform Installer and Microsoft Web Application Installer.

These offerings make it easier for developers to bring PHP and .NET Web applications to market faster, with a streamlined download, install and configure experience, as well as design and development integration and pre-packaged open source applications that run well on the Microsoft Web Platform.

BizSpark members will also get access to the community technology preview of the Azure Services Platform, which was announced last month at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles.

Azure is a new computing platform that will help developers build the next generation of applications, spanning all the way from the cloud to the enterprise datacenter, while delivering new experiences across the PC, Web and phone.

They will also get access to the community technical preview of the Live Framework, a simple, open and interoperable framework for developers to access and consume Live Services, a set of building blocks within the Azure Services Platform for handling user data and application resources, which includes Live Mesh technologies for synchronizing users' data and extending Web applications across multiple devices.

The BizSpark program is a really positive move, since most startups pretty much always needs help, even in the best of times. In times of economic hardship, they need all the help they can get, so they can deliver on their promise of great software innovation and job creation. Microsoft is doing its part to make sure that happens.

ASP.NET AJAX Released!

MichaelF — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 21:34:00 GMT

I wanted to take a moment to let the Port 25 community that Microsoft has officially released ASP.NET AJAX to the web under the Microsoft Permissive License (Ms-PL). Under this release developers are free to modify the Microsoft AJAX Library Scripts and can distribute derivative works per the terms of the Ms-PL.

As part of the release some improvements have been made:

Performance and scalability have been improved for shared hosting scenarios
Globalization fixes to ScriptManager and ScriptResource handler to support date and number parsing and UI culture fallback

This week we also released the ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions source code under the Microsoft Reference License (Ms-RL). This release was intended to help the community with debugging, maintenance and interoperability challenges with the additional hope that the transparency helps establish better coding patterns and guidelines.

You can find ASP.NET AJAX here.

Check back tomorrow when we'll post an interview with Steve Marx, Technical Evangelist for ASP.NET AJAX who talks about the release and shows us a demonstration of the technology.

Java and .NET Interoperability: JNBridge

MichaelF — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 20:57:00 GMT

Update: We thought we would try our videos on YouTube...would love to hear feedback on this implementation.
Sam interviews Wayne Citrin to discuss work his company, JNBridge, has done to provide interoperability between .NET and Java.

Wayne Citrin is the CTO at JNBridge. He is the architect of JNBridgePro, and has been engrossed in Java and .NET interop issues since .NET's beta days. Previously, Wayne was a leading researcher in programming languages and compilers, and was on the Computer Engineering faculty at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He was a researcher at IBM's research lab in Zürich, Switzerland, and has a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in Computer Science.

The JNBridge blog can be found here.

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