The OSS Strategy behind .NET Code

As I said in the previous chapter, .NET Core is open source. At the time of the announcement (October 31, 2016), this was a huge day in the history of Microsoft, and .NET in particular. The .NET team decided to open-source .NET Core mainly in order to leverage an enormous ecosystem of developers, and to lay the foundations for a cross-platform .NET.

In terms of laying the foundations for being cross platform, the goal was to unify the divided code base of Mono and the Windows implementation of the .NET Framework. This improves the developer experience by making a single cross-platform stack, allowing anyone to contribute. In terms of leveraging a broader audience of developers, it should be seen as the willingness of Microsoft to go where the developers are, and not to pretend to be followed blindly by new developers without any concrete reason.

One of the core tools, or platforms if you prefer, of these strategies has been GitHub, because it seems the majority of the .NET community is on GitHub.

Just like any other .NET project, the .NET team accepts contributions in what are open issues, “up-for-grabs” or simply new features that you, as a day-by-day user, may think are useful. Of course, PR are not automatically accepted; instead, they are reviewed and judged based on the following two criteria:

• Roadmap. All projects focus their energy on certain areas. In order to keep the focus and the momentum, it’s important that most of the work is aligned with the product’s roadmap.
• Quality. External folks have to meet the same quality bar that Microsoft employees have to meet. This includes having the right design, architecture, sufficient test coverage, and following the coding style.

The .NET Foundation

The .NET Core project is under the stewardship of the .NET Foundation. The .NET Foundation is an independent organization that fosters open development and collaboration across the Microsoft .NET development platform. The goal of the .NET Foundation is to promote openness and community participation, as well as encouraging innovation. You can read more here about .NET Core and its role inside the .NET Foundation.