Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Community, Downloads

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.

Eclipse4SL Release Candidate Hits the Streets

Peter Galli — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 22:34:00 GMT

The feature complete Release Candidate for Eclipse4SL, an open source, feature-rich RIA application development environment for Microsoft Silverlight in Eclipse, has been released, and can be downloaded here.

This new and important milestone includes a number of new compelling features, including full implementation of the XAML Editor with auto preview; resource and project management; wizards for adding Silverlight project items, including support for JavaScript; and extensibility.

Guidance will also be given in the coming weeks on building Silverlight applications accessing Java Web Services using REST, SOAP and other standards

As planning is ongoing, the next few weeks will be focused on the final sprint to Spring 2009, which includes support for the Mac and an improved C# experience.

Dominic Sartorio on SpikeSource and Open Source Interoperability

Community Contributor — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 23:33:00 GMT

First, many thanks to Microsoft’s Port 25 Team for the opportunity to post today!

Today SpikeSource announced the availability of five additional PHP-based applications on the Windows Server 2008 platform. Gallery, Mantis, Moodle, PhpBB and WebCalendar are available for free download from www.spikesource.com. We welcome you to take a look and to offer your feedback!

Similar to the previous applications we released on Windows Server (Drupal, Alfresco), SpikeSource delivered these as turnkey “SpikeIgnited” applications, with all components needed to run the application available in a single one-click-install distribution. We have also included a variant of our SpikeNet update service optimized for Windows Server 2008.

“That’s great”, you might say, “SpikeSource has ‘Ignited’ a few more apps, so what’s the big deal?” We believe the big deal is that these applications also run on a stack of other Microsoft products in addition to Windows, namely, IIS/Fast-CGI and SQL Server Express, with which many open source products have historically not interoperated well. Quite a bit of engineering went into assembling this “WISP” stack and building/testing these PHP applications, and this know-how is an important step towards improving the interoperability between the worlds of Microsoft and open source.

Why do this? Because customers want it. Throughout SpikeSource’s history, nearly 50% of our customer’s request Windows versions of our open source applications, and most of them also care about interoperating with IIS, SQLServer, Sharepoint, ActiveDirectory and so forth. Our experience is representative of the industry. Ask any commercial OSS ISV with a server-side application, and they’ll tell you the same thing, with similar numbers.

Also, last December, the Open Solutions Alliance (www.opensolutionsalliance.org) published a report (pdf) summarizing the results of its customer outreach efforts. One of the key findings was that customers want better open source and Microsoft interoperability, and moreover, they felt this was the issue that the industry has collectively done the least to address. While there has been a lot of unfortunate history that has gotten in the way of this, ultimately customers don’t care as much about grudges as they care about everything simply working. Together, SpikeSource and Microsoft’s open source lab are doing something about it.

The release of these five PHP applications is just a first step. By taking five commonly used PHP applications and making them run better on a Windows stack, we took a step towards better interoperability, and we also built some technical expertise that we intend to leverage more broadly and share with the community in the future.

So, stay tuned, and we welcome your input. What other types of open source applications are important to run well on Windows? What specific technical issues do you have that you would like to see us solve? What more can we do? Please send us your feedback!

Dominic Sartorio
Sr Director, Product Management, SpikeSource
President, Open Solutions Alliance

Community Projects on Codeplex

jcannon — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:58:00 GMT

Heading into a long (and quiet) weekend for many folks in the US, I thought I would highlight some useful open source and shared source projects on Codeplex, particularly after reading eWeek's gallery of the Top 25 Most Active Open Source Projects on Codeplex. There's some practical tools in the article - including an open source blogging engine, SQL sample applications and a cool mapping application. What many folks may not know is that there are over 2,000 projects available on Codeplex. Check out, among others:

IronRuby also released last month (it lives on RubyForge) - John Lam has more details here. If you're interested in learning more, I would also recommend checking out our Sourceforge landing page that highlights open source projects and programs at Microsoft. While you're on Sourceforge, we have some interesting projects over there as well - including the WiX Toolset and the OpenXML/ODF Translator.

Enjoy the weekend (and the downloads).
-Jamie

Virtual PC 2007 Released as a Free Download

MichaelF — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 17:22:00 GMT

Just a quick note to let Port 25 readers know that yesterday Microsoft released Virtual PC 2007 as a free download.

With Virtual PC one can run multiple os's on a single physical machine which should be compelling for those developers needing to test and debug across multiple platforms. From community feedback I know a number of readers are generally interested in virtualization and I'd be curious to hear about your experiences after giving this a try.

Ben Armstrong's Blog is a good resource for information regarding Microsoft and Virtualization (Here is some info on Linux and Virtual PC from his blog).

On an unrelated note Mary Jo Foley wrote about Ian Murdock's visit to campus today and I have to say I'm really looking forward to his presentation. I mentioned it before but this is one of the things I really enjoy about this job: I get to meet all sorts of interesting and intelligent people (both in person and virtually) many of whom I'd never expect to meet as a result of working at Microsoft. Miguel de Icaza...Ian Murdock? Who would have guessed?

-michael

A Technical Look at ASP.NET AJAX

MichaelF — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 21:36:00 GMT

Following up on our post yesterday here is an interview Sam did with ASP.NET Technical Evangelist: Steve Marx.

Steve discusses the three components of ASP.NET AJAX and shows us a demo of the software formerly known as ATLAS running on top of PHP on Linux to demonstrate some of the front and backend extraction capabilities.

Video: A Technical Look at ASP.NET AJAX

If you are interested in looking a bit more deeply at ASP.NET AJAX, as well as the PHP support Steve released to Codeplex, here are some links he provided:

ASP.NET AJAX: http://ajax.asp.net/
Direct link to download the Microsoft AJAX Library: http://ajax.asp.net/downloads/library/default.aspx?tabid=47
PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library: http://codeplex.com/phpmsajax
Steve's Blog: http://smarx.com/

Photosynth on Firefox

Sam Ramji — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 06:00:00 GMT

Today I got an email from Adam Sheppard, who leads development of Photosynth. If you haven’t seen Photosynth yet… it may be because you use Firefox and not IE. That is no longer an obstacle for those curious about the next generation of photo-management technology.

It’s a visually stunning browser-based application which lets you explore a collection of photos by navigating through an inferred 3-dimensional model of the space the photos were taken in. For example – take 500 photos of St. Mark’s Square in Venice, turn them over to Photosynth’s feature extraction and 3-D processing engine, and you get this:

The first tech preview was built for IE only. Today the team has launched the Firefox version of Photosynth. As a Firefox user myself, I’m glad to be able to show this great application off at home. It’s a 5.5 MB install, and you’ll need to grant permission to labs.live.com as a plug-in source (at least temporarily).

Hats off to the Photosynth team for shipping a great application on multiple browsers! And Adam – let us know when we can put our own collections into Photosynth ;)

Cheers,

Sam

UNIX Interop in Vista Beta 2 and Longhorn Server

jcannon — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 17:06:00 GMT

Another guest blog this week from Identity Management Program Manager, Shamit Patel:
---------------------------------------------

Hi,
Last week, we released two new utilities to help customers achieve UNIX / Windows Interop. The first is a set of utilities and the SDK for the Subsystem for UNIX Architecture (SUA) in Vista Beta 2 & Longhorn. For those unaware, SUA is a native subsystem residing on top of the Windows kernel, just like the Win32 subsystem. It provides the basic infrastructure to run UNIX-based applications and scripts on Windows Vista (Ultimate and Enterprise) and Longhorn Server.

We've also released the UNIX-side components for Identity Management with UNIX. This essentially provides the utilities which enable password sync between Windows and UNIX environments. These are the UNIX-based utilities to enable successful synchronization.

I realize many of you may not be testing Vista or Longhorn, but for those who are, or have corporate testing, we would love to hear your feedback on the product, scripts and documentation.

View full post on Longhorn Server Identity Management for UNIX components and Vista Beta 2/Longhorn Utilities and SDK for UNIX Subsystem.
Download Utilities and SDK for Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications in Microsoft Windows Vista / Longhorn Server Beta 2.
Download UNIX Side Components for Identity Management for UNIX – Shipped with Windows Server codenamed Longhorn Server Beta 2.

Thanks all,
Shamit

Security and Directory Services for UNIX Guide Released

admin — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 18:23:00 GMT

We've got a quick guest blog before the holiday weekend on a new set of interoperability tools released this week by Microsoft, and in conjunction with some very talented folks in our partner, sales & services group. Welcome Luis Camara Manoel, Program Manager for in Communications & Collaboration...take it away Luis:

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(Luis Camara Manoel)

Hi all,
The Interoperability and Migration Solutions team at Microsoft is very happy to have just released the Windows Security and Directory Services for UNIX Guide. This guide details step-by-step instructions for providing security and directory services for mixed Windows and UNIX environments using Active Directory. The approach we followed here describes multiple options to achieve two different system end-states:

1. UNIX clients are enabled to use Windows Active Directory Kerberos for authentication while continuing to use a UNIX-based store for authorization.

2. UNIX clients are enabled to use Windows Active Directory Kerberos for authentication and use Active Directory LDAP for authorization.

We have also added some tools and templates to help plan, develop, deploy, and operate these solutions.

Although this release addresses AD integration only for Solaris 9 and for RedHat 9, it is pretty simple to see how it would apply to other UNIX and UNIX-like systems.

You can download the guide at http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=5118169 and please let me know what you think. I am very interested in finding out how the guidance is received.

Have a great holiday weekend,
-Luis