Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : 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.

Featured Project: Family.Show on Codeplex

jcannon — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:09:00 GMT

Over the course of the past year, we've highlighted various community and open source projects on Codeplex. This morning, I wanted to do the same with a very cool open source project that I came across over the weekend called Family.Show. Family.Show is a genealogy project that visualizes family mapping and relationships. The project was released in July 2007 and it's currently at version 2. While the project is backed by Vertigo Software, it is Open Source and licensed under the Microsoft Public License.

Here's a small screen grab from the project home page:

Over the weekend, I used some free time & a family BBQ to start building my own family tree. Frankly, while I'm impressed with the application and it's ease-of-use, I was more amazed at the interest and enjoyment everyone in my family experienced using it. Everybody from my 83 year old grandmother to my 19 year old sister were excited to explore and add to the family tree. It gives new meaning to the collaborative potential of open source :>

See above, the Cannon family tree (yikes) - but infinitely fascinating to self-described family historians. It's worth noting that Family.Show also supports the import/export of GEDCOM standard files, so your work can interchange with other genealogy software packages as well.

I encourage anyone interested to download & tinker with it. Additionally, here are some additional resources:

Visit the Codeplex project home page
Family.Show at MIX07
Watch a Channel9 Video with the core development team

-Jamie

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

Virtual Machine Additions for Linux 2.0

jcannon — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:41:00 GMT

A quick note to let our community know that Virtual Machine Additions for Linux 2.0 has been released - bringing the version number up to 2.0. For those unfamiliar with Virtual Machine Additions for Linux, it is technology layer designed to improve the usability and interoperability of running Linux operating systems as guests or virtual machines inside of Virtual Server. From the release notes, it looks like this version adds support for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. You can find additional information on running Linux as a guest operating system with Virtual Server on TechNet.

Qualified distributions now include:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1 (update 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (update 6)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9
SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10
Red Hat Linux 7.3
Red Hat Linux 9.0
SuSE Linux 9.2
SuSE Linux 9.3
SuSE Linux 10.0

Check out download details here.

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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

Windows Media Player Plug-in for Firefox

hjanssen — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 18:04:00 GMT

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog called ‘We're Writing Firefox Plug-ins? Interview with Ian Gilman and Thoughts on 10 Months at Microsoft’ (Who came up with that title anyway!)

In which I chronicled my first 10 months on the job. Also in there I mentioned Microsoft writing plug-ins.

Well today I am very proud to announce that we have released another official Microsoft plug-in. It shows another level of interoperability and eagerness in working with the Community to get this released.

This plug-in allows you to use Windows Media Player inside of Firefox. It is designed to support the following Windows platforms;

Windows XP SP2 (x86)
Windows XP SP2 (x64)
Windows Vista (x86)
Windows Vista (x64)

Port25 is hosting it, and you can download it from here; Windows Media Player Firefox Plugin - Download

It was put together by the Windows Media Player team, and special thanks go to Eric Anderson and Thobias Jones. (And all the other people in the Windows Media Player team). I also wanted to thank Mike Schroepfer and the Mozilla Foundation in helping us get this released.

From now on when you go to the plug-in site at Firefox, you will be automatically routed to Port25 to download and install the plug-in.

It is backwards compatible with the old 6.4 Windows Media Player. And among other things has the following new features;

New robust design that addresses all of the known issues with the old plug-in
Windows Media Player will now work with Firefox on Windows Vista
Support for the Windows Media Player OCX scripting interfaces

We will post some links to example code in the next few days to help people use some of the new features.

Install it, and to test it just go to Port25 and check out any of the videos.

New Codeplex Projects....

MichaelF — Thu, 29 Mar 2007 21:26:00 GMT

Project Name	Description	License
DSL TreeGrid Editor PowerToy	This project aims to provide a new capability that will allow you to very easily provide a custom ‘tool window’ specifically for your DSL language that edits hierarchical domain classes and relationships (embedded or referenced).	MS-PL
Project Helping Hand	Project Helping hand is an Outlook 2007 add-in that provides a way for MVPs to work with the MSDN forums at (http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/default.aspx?siteid=1) from a rich client.	MS-PL
Live in a Box	A packaged experience of Windows Live technology, in a box. This project familiarizes you with the following, using a slew of sample applications which you can walk through in an hour - it's the fastest way to learn about Windows Live.	MS-PL
Crash a Party	This sample mashup uses the Windows Live Contacts Control and Virtual Earth to place your Windows Live Contacts on a map. It allows you to map your contacts, choose a place to meet, and then send customized driving directions in e-mail to each of your contacts and it also incorporating data feeds from third-party event calendaring sites.	MS-PL
POX.NET	POX.NET is a set of utility classes that assist in creating POX (Plain Old Xml) clients and servers in .NET 2.0. This library leverages classes within .NET 2.0 and does not require any additional add-ons. With POX.NET you can create a POX client and server with a few lines of code.	MS-PL
Windows Installer PowerShell Extensions	Exposes Windows Installer functionality to PowerShell, providing means to query installed product and patch information and to query views on packages.	MS-PL
EFS Assistant	The EFS Assistant is a tool shipping as part of the "Data Encryption Toolkit" Solution Accelerator from the Microsoft Solution Accelerators team (http://www.microsoft.com/det).	MS-PL

Codeplex Update

MichaelF — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 21:47:00 GMT

Project Name	Description	License
ConferenceXP	ConferenceXP is a shared-source research platform developed by Microsoft Research that provides simple, flexible, and extensible conferencing and collaboration using high-bandwidth networks, and the advanced multimedia capabilities of Microsoft Windows. ConferenceXP helps researchers and educators develop innovative applications and solutions, featuring broadcast-quality audio and video, to support real-time distributed collaboration and distance learning environments.	MSR-SSLA (academic non-commercial dist)
Windows Vista Registry Shell Namespace Extensions	The Windows Registry Shell Namespace Extension allows Windows Explorer to view and interact with the Windows Registry data via Explorer windows. It demonstrates existing Shell extensibility points like IShellFolder2 and SHCreateShellFolderView and also demonstrates new concepts in Vista including the property system, property schema extensibility, and content indexing via Protocol Handlers.	MS-PL
SMS Notifier	Add a “reply with SMS message" to missed calls on Windows Mobile 5.0 devices	MS-PL
Disk Output Cache for ASP.NET	Disk Output Cache is an HTTP Module for ASP.NET v2.0+ that implements HTTP response caching on disk	MS-PL
Cache My Work	Utility that shows a simple checklist of currently open applications, and will restart apps selected the next time user logon to the computer.	MS-CL

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

Codeplex Project Update

MichaelF — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 21:29:00 GMT

Two updates this week but I also have some bigger news to report:

Starting February 10th, any registered user can start their own Codeplex Project! Check out the details here: http://www.codeplex.com/Wiki/View.aspx?ProjectName=CodePlex

Project Name	Description	License
Litware HR	The SaaS sample application is a fictitious HR application providing recruitment management software delivered as a service. The main objective of the sample application is to provide hands on guidance on the additional architectural requirements of SaaS.	MS-PL
Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 Analytics: Foundation	Provides UDM definitions, reports/KPIs, predictive analytics code samples, whitepaper, etc. to partners and ISVs as a foundation for building business intelligence solutions on top of Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0.	MS-PL

Codeplex Projects Update

MichaelF — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 18:41:00 GMT

In response to some requests from Port 25 visitors, this week I am going to start a weekly series of posts focused on new Codeplex releases. Because we haven't done this in the past, I'm going to look back about a month on this first post but moving forward I'll provide a weekly update. These updates are primarily going to focus on releases made by Microsoft but if you own a Codeplex project and you'd like to see it listed here, please shoot me a mail: michael.francisco@microsoft.com.

Project Name	Description	License
ASP.NET RSS Toolkit	ASP.NET RSS Toolkit gives ASP.NET applications the ability to consume and publish to RSS feeds.	MS-PL
Groove Web Services V12 Helpers	A C# .NET assembly that provides an abstraction layer for all of Groove 3.1 and Groove 2007 web services. The goal of the abstraction layer is to provide an easy to use API, with an object and eventing model, so that applications that interact with Groove can be built quickly and in a straight forward manner.	MS-PL
Smart Client Guidance (Patterns and Practices)	Site dedicated to the following patterns & practices offerings: -The Composite UI Application Block -The Smart Client Software Factory -The Mobile Client Software Factory -Updater Application Block -Offline Application Block	Patterns and Practices License (Modified version of MS-LPL)
Enterprise Library (Patterns and Practices)	The patterns & practices Enterprise Library is a library of application blocks designed to assist developers with common enterprise development challenges. Application blocks are a type of guidance, provided as source code that can be used "as is," extended, or modified by developers to use on enterprise development projects.	Patterns and Practices License (Modified version of MS-LPL)
Sharepoint Shared Services Search Provider Property Creation	A neat little command utility that lets you do four things when moving a DB from development to production. -Accept relevant inputs from the user -Export Managed Properties -Export Crawl Properties and relevant categories -Import Managed properties and map relevant crawl properties	MS-PL
SharePoint 2007 Shared Services Provider User Profile Importer	Designed and developed to allow users who do not have a well populated Active Directory to get information in to MOSS 2007 User Profiles	MS-PL
SharePoint 2007 Shared Services Provider User Profile Property Replicator	Designed to take custom user profile properties and export/import them into another MOSS 2007 server.	MS-PL
GAX Extensions Library (Patterns and Practices)	This library contains various utility classes to supplement those already included with the Guidance Automation Extensions (GAX) to Visual Studio 2005.	MS-PL
Swedish Reference Application	.NET application/solution that will be leveraged as a reference application for Swedish Developer events and discussions. The ambition is to create a common solution that easily can be modified to include new features as well as adopt to new technologies and recommendations and continuously update the source code and references.	MS-PL
WMI Shell Folder	A shell folder integrating a view of WMI into explorer.	MS-PL
Visual Studio Team Edition for Database Professionals Samples	Samples project for Microsoft Visual Studion Team Edition 2005 for Database Professionals	MS-PL
Web Service Software Factory (Patterns and Practices)	Integrated collection of tools, patterns, source code and prescriptive guidance. It is designed to help you quickly and consistently construct WCF and ASMX Web services that adhere to well known architecture and design patterns	Patterns and Practices License (Modified version of MS-LPL)
Darauk's Tools	Source code control for Darauk's projects, utilities, and tools.	MS-PL
PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library	Support for using the Microsoft AJAX Library on top of PHP. Previous version released as sample code.	MS-PL
ASP.NET Real World Controls	Real World implementations of custom GridViews	MS-PL

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

FastCGI and Zend Core 2.0

MichaelF — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 12:45:00 GMT

Following-up on the announcement of the Microsoft/Zend technical collaboration from October, we wanted to make sure the Port 25 community was aware of the first set of deliverables.

The technical preview of Microsoft FastCGI for IIS 6 and IIS 7 can be found here: http://www.iis.net/default.aspx?tabid=1000051

Zend Core 2.0, which includes the Windows version of the Zend Enabler technology can be found here: http://www.zend.com/products/zend_core

Combined, these solutions provide a 200-300% performance improvement for PHP on Windows offering comparable performance to PHP on Linux.

If you try this out, we'd be interested in hearing about your experience.

-michael