Microsoft used last week’s Build conference to announce the .NET Foundation. Although the group is not yet a complete organization, Microsoft promises to solidify it into a foundation for strengthening the future of the .NET ecosystem of open-source projects.
The .NET Foundation board will include developers from outside of Microsoft as well. The initial board of directors will include Xamarin’s Miguel de Icaza, IdentityMine’s Laurent Bugnion, Umbraco’s Niels Hartvig, Compiled Experience’s Nigel Sampson, Glimpse’s Anthony van der Hoorn, and GitHub’s Paul Betts.
“The .NET Foundation will help accelerate the adoption of .NET across every platform and computing form factor—servers, mobile devices and desktops,” said Miguel de Icaza, cofounder and CTO of Xamarin. “We look forward to working with Microsoft and the entire .NET developer community to increase the rate of innovation.”
The .NET Foundation will initially govern 24 .NET open-source projects, six of which are coming from Xamarin. Among Microsoft’s contributions will be Hadoop-focused APIs, the .NET compiler platform (codenamed Roslyn), and ASP.NET MVC.
Xamarin will be contributing its MimeKit and MailKit projects, as well as Xamarin.Mobile and Xamarin.Auth.
“Open source is a huge deal to the health of every developer community; getting developers involved and building things together makes for better products and better developers, and I’m super excited to see Microsoft expanding their support of open-source projects,” said GitHub’s Betts.
The .NET Foundation is still in the initial stages of its formation. It will be reaching out to new participants and board members over the coming months.
