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A Deeper Look Into Open Source .NET Development

Rion Williams -

In November, Microsoft began an initiative towards bringing a large portion of its development technologies into the open source. The largest and most talked about of these was the acclaimed .NET Framework and Core. Since these announcements at Connect(), you can pay a visit to the many .NET-based repositories on GitHub and see any code changes as they happen, add issues as you discover them and more.

Code wasn’t the only aspect of the development process that Microsoft decided to make transparent. Design meeting notes, development team discussions, and code reviews are just a few of the supporting documentation that will be available to the public as well. So I thought I would write up a short blog post on how you can follow along more closely and get a glimpse of what is going on beyond the code.

Issues and Discussions on GitHub

In addition to just looking at some code, which can be entertaining on its own, Microsoft has also released the design-related discussions for many of the technologies as well which includes :

  • Complete Design and Development Meetings (e.g. Agenda, Discussions, Design Notes)
  • Requested Features and Enhancements
  • Code Reviews
  • Process Details (e.g. API Review Processes, Code Quality Processes, etc.)

This allows the public to see conversations between members of the development and design teams and even chime in (if applicable). If you want to take a look at what is going on with your favorite technologies or perhaps where they are headed, check out some of the existing design discussions below :

Follow Along

Although these are just two sets of meeting notes, the discussions will be held every week. If you want to take part in some of these discussions (if applicable) or you just want to see what is going on during that week,  you can watch the repositories on GitHub or occasionally check the search the Issues area of any of the repositories below for topics like ‘Notes’ or ‘Meeting’ :

A majority of the discussions take place in either the Roslyn or CoreFX repositories, but I would encourage you to dig around and see if you find anything that piques your interest within the other repositories in the .NET Foundation as well.