Supporting Open Source Projects in the Microsoft Ecosystem

DasBlog, NUnit, iText
Ndoc or other sandcastle gui

Franz: I totally agree with Castle, but NHibernate is sponsored by JBoss, and NHibernate developers are paid for full time maintentnce of the project.

Definitely I would pick ZedGraph.

As someone who has developed multiple OpenSource projects on Windows, I have issues with .NET.

First off, are all the various .NET’s licenses one has to agree to in order to work under the system GPL compatible? Microsoft has been known to craft EULAs with the specific purpose of making them GPL-incompatable. I’m guessing there’s some way to do it, as a gcc-based Ada compiler has been ported (http://www.usafa.af.mil/df/dfcs/bios/mcc_html/a_sharp.cfm ). However, a quick search online indicates that the license associated with the Ajax controls, among others, is incompatible. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_licenses , the Ms-PL, Ms-CL, Ms-LPL, and Ms-LCL are all incompatible.

I’d have to read every EULA very carefully to be sure I’m legal. See the previous entry in this blog about people not liking to read EULAs.

Add to this Microsoft’s recent use of lawyers against volunteer developers ( http://haacked.com/archive/2007/06/01/did-microsoft-violate-testdriven.nets-eula-to-defend-its-own-eula.aspx ), and .NET just doesn’t seem all that friendly a platform to me.

+1 MbUnit
+1 RhinoMocks
+1 SharpDevelop
+1 PDFSharp (http://www.pdfsharp.com/PDFsharp/) more intuitiv then itextsharp :wink:
+1 Paint.NET
+1 Ajax.NET Pro

Another vote for the Castle project - not only is their code awesome, but the simplicity of their ideas seems to be contributing to some great discussions on .NET.

My two votes:

iTextSharp = Hey, I’ve had to go through and develop some weird things now and then – but nothing was as scary as being told I had to develop a C# program that created/edited PDFs in the period of a few weeks. Without iTextSharp I think I would have had a nervous breakdown.

Paint.NET = It’s just plain nice, works well, and saves me the money of having to buy something that is getting perpetually bloated (Paint Shop Pro) or something really expensive (PhotoShop) – when all I ever really need is contained in this fantastically free application.

Just throwing in what we use, ranking them seems unfair:
NAnt, NUnit, log4net, CruiseControl.net, NCover.

“there’s one central vendor, Microsoft”

We can change that. Please consider donating some of your new funds to the Mono Project (http://www.mono-project.com/Main_Page).

I’m working to get a fledgling open-source .NET project, Titan, off the ground. Can I vote for myself in the “up and coming” area? :slight_smile:

My nominations for established projects:

  1. NUnit
  2. NHibernate
  3. Castle Project (MonoRail specifically)

I also nominate Ayende for a some sort of contribution, if for nothing else the sheer volume of his work. Why is he not an MVP yet?

This is an excellent step forward. I hope Microsoft continue to respond positively.

The future is geospatial:
+1 SharpMap
+1 Proj.NET
+1 NetTopologySuite
+1 MsSqlSpatial
+1 NHibernate.Spatial
+1 LinqToGeo

Paint.NET all the way!

Like Doc Holliday said, "In Vino Veritas…"
That said, I am impressed w/ the nature of this ‘open’ discussion of open source, the length breadth and all occurring today. Thusly, I would advocate allocation to any worthwhile OSS blogging activity.
My only other encounter w/ OSS is CommerceStarterKit and Subsonic, and definitely my vote goes there.
Keep blogging your viewpoints I will continue to learn.

iTextSharp

http://itextsharp.sourceforge.net/

Paint.NET is a gorgeous piece of free software – by both definitions, in that it costs $0.00 (“free as in beer”) and is covered by the MIT License (presumably the X11 Licence) which the FSF considers to be GPL compatible.

It’s not a dev tool in the normal sense, but it’s immensely useful as a replacement for the standard Windows Paint program with pretty much all the features I can imagine needing from more expensive tools like PhotoShop. I think it deserves recognition and money.

Not earth shattering, but this was the first one that comes to mind and my department is actually using it.

http://www.ifdefined.com/bugtrackernet.html

Just thought that I would comment - advertising for the Axosoft product was actually reasonably good placement… specially as I am looking at Mercury ‘Quality’ Center crash for the 2nd time at 7:54am. Grrr…

I nominate Paint.NET. Great UI and great potential. Maybe enough momentum behind this can set it on the path towards replacing GIMP as the FOSS Photoshop contender (assuming, of course, it runs on Mono and assuming the eventual acceptance of Mono).

Quote:
“Many highly popular open source projects have contributed so much to the .NET community, and they’ve gotten virtually no support at all from Microsoft in return. I’d like to see that change. In fact, I’ll go even further-- I think it must change if Microsoft wants to survive as a vendor of development tools.”

I agree; but I think someone should explain to them that suing MVPs isn’t a good start to “giving back” to developers. Referencing the Visual Studio Express fiasco over plugins, for the people out there who missed it Just my $0.02.

That being said, I bought a student copy of Expression Studio last week. The VS team creates great tools, (I suspect they’re all geeks, VS has a very geeky underpinning with a lot of polish on top) but with Management suing developers (MVPs nonetheless)… well, there’s a reason I also bought a copy of Flex Builder 2 at the same time. Eclipse is great, but Macromedia/Adobe are just as bad as Microsoft.