Microsoft has changed over the last few years, and becoming more open is one of them. Microsoft has started many initiatives, support various Open Source projects, and even has open sourced a few of their own projects. Find out more about what's the world like in the Microsoft's Open Source Community and Ecosystem.
3. www.JustinLee.sg
Microsoft MVP (Visual C#/F#)
Software Development Consultant
Digital Strategy Consultant
Community Engagement/Relations
Technology Journalist (Tech65)
Value of Openness \n\nGianugo explained that the frontiers between open source, proprietary and commercial software are becoming more and more of a blur. The point is not about whether you run your IT on an Open Source stack or a commercial stack, the important thing is how you can assemble software components and build solutions on top of them using APIs, protocols and standards.  And the reality is that most IT systems are using heterogeneous components, he said.\n\n
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MonoDevelop (http://www.monodevelop.com/Main_Page)\nMonoDevelop is a free GNOME IDE primarily designed for C# and other .NET languages.\n
Banshee (http://banshee-project.org/)\nBanshee is a music organizational and playback tool.\n\nF-Spot (http://f-spot.org)\nF-Spot is a photo management application for the GNOME desktop.\n\nGNOME Do (http://do.davebsd.com/)\nGNOME Do is a crazy-delicious launcher tool that makes performing common tasks on your computer simple and efficient.\n\nPinta (http://pinta-project.com/)\nPinta is a paint program designed for simplicity and ease of use. It is modeled after Paint.Net.\n\nMonoUML (http://www.monouml.org/)\nMonoUML is a CASE tool designed for allowing all UNIX/Linux developers faster computer systems design using a friendly GUI application.\n\nSmuxi (http://www.smuxi.org/)\nSmuxi is a flexible open-source cross-platform IRC client for the GNOME desktop.\n
NClass (http://nclass.sourceforge.net/) \nNClass is a UML modeling application written in C#. \n\nPaint.Net (http://www.getpaint.net/)\nPaint.Net hasn't been fully ported to Mono yet (due to p/invokes), but we can still see it using the new 2.0 controls.\n\nmojoPortal (http://www.mojoportal.com/)\nmojoPortal is an open source content management system and web site framework portal for .NET on Windows or Mono on Linux and Mac OS X.\n\nGraffiti CMS (http://graffiticms.codeplex.com/)\nGraffiti CMS allows you to quickly publish and maintain dynamic content Web sites with little or no knowledge of Web programming.\n\nSecond Life uses Mono as an engine that accelerates the execution of user provided scripts by translating LSL scripts into ECMA CIL bytecodes and in turn letting Mono turn that into x86 machine code.\n\nUnity (http://unity3d.com/)\nGame Development Tool implemented using Mono.\n\n
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Project Hosting for Open Source Software using Team Foundation Server as the Source Control System.\nSimilar to GitHub.\n
Previously known as CodePlex Foundation.\n\nThe mission of the Outercurve Foundation is to enable the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities. In practice this means providing software IP management and project development governance to enable and encourage organizations to develop software collaboratively in open source communities for faster results.\n\nThe Outercurve Foundation projects release intellectual property under a standard open source license. Project leaders determine which open source license depending on the needs and constraints of the open source project in question. The only requirement on the license is that it is an Open Source Initiative approved license.\n\n
Package Library Manager for .NET projects.\nSimilar to ruby gems or debian apt-get.\n\nNuGet is a free, open source developer focused package management system for the .NET platform intent on simplifying the process of incorporating third party libraries into a .NET application during development. NuGet is a member of the ASP.NET Gallery in the Outercurve Foundation.\n\nThere are a large number of useful 3rd party open source libraries out there for the .NET platform, but for those not familiar with the OSS ecosystem, it can be a pain to pull these libraries into a project.\n
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http://blogs.technet.com/b/port25/\n\n
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End of the year. Technical Preview available right now\n
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Node.js v0.6.0 supports Windows Server with the help of Microsoft.\n\nThis comes some four months after our June 23rd announcement that Microsoft was working with Joyent to port Node.js to Windows. Since then we’ve been heads down writing code.\nThose developers who have been following our progress on GitHub know that there have been Node.js builds with Windows support for a while, but today we reached the all-important v0.6.0 milestone.\nThis accomplishment is the result of a great collaboration with Joyent and its team of developers. With the dedicated team of Igor Zinkovsky, Bert Belder and Ben Noordhuis under the leadership of Ryan Dahl, we were able to implement all the features that let Node.js run natively on Windows.\nAnd, while we were busy making the core Node.js runtime run on Windows, the Azure team was working oniisnode to enable Node.js to be hosted in IIS. Among other significant benefits, Windows native support gave Node.js significant performane improvements, as reported by Ryan on the Node.js.org blog.\nNode.js developers on Windows will also be able to rely on NPM to install the modules they need for their application. Isaac Shlueter from the Joyent team is also currently working on porting NPM on Windows, and an early experimental version is already available on GitHub. The good news is that soon we’ll have a stable build integrated in the Node.js installer for Windows.\n\n
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MVC Contrib is useful for developers looking to develop and test UI elements on top of the ASP.NET MVC framework\n\n