"The community is enthusiastic about the release of ASP.NET AJAX. Probably the best indicator that our licensing makes sense to developers is that when I visit with them around the world, I rarely get questions about it."
- Steve Marx, Technology Evangelist, Microsoft
Community, Creativity, and Learning
Microsoft provides a combination of resources that enable developers to learn, be creative, and solve problems collaboratively, using whatever approach they choose. This commitment includes programs and partnerships to help developers connect with one another to collaborate and exchange ideas, including source code collaboration sites, such as CodePlex, as well as online communities for peer assistance.
Microsoft also provides extensive online technical documentation and newsgroups to help IT administrators learn and solve problems together. These resources have been complemented by interactive blogs from individual Microsoft employees and source code access programs designed to meet a variety of customer needs.
Essentially a subset of the .NET Framework, Rotor was the first project with source code availability at Microsoft. In the fall of 2000, the Rotor team built a version of the commercial .NET Framework. They added an extensive test suite for the implementation: runtime, libraries, and two languages (C# and JScript .NET). They also developed virtualization layers that enabled developers to build and run the SSCLI on FreeBSD and Mac OS X. The result is an implementation of the Framework with the compiler, runtime, and test capabilities for the ECMA C# and CLI standards. Read the article: PDF (329 KB) | XPS (367 KB).
In 1998, Microsoft and MIT collaborated to explore the ways technology could improve education and campus life for university students. Their iCampus project produced a hive of creative work that demonstrated the virtues of giving students a measure of control over their own education. Read the article: PDF (388 KB) | XPS (360 KB).
In 1999, Microsoft employee Rob Mensching began to develop Windows Installer XML (WiX). A pioneering open source project for Microsoft, WiX is now used widely by development teams in various industries to build installations. Read the article:
PDF (322 KB) | XPS (362 KB).
In June 2007, the Machine Learning and Applied Statistics group (part of Microsoft Research) released the source code for a set of four software tools developed to advance AIDS research. By sharing the code openly and at no charge at its CodePlex project hosting Web site, Microsoft hopes to help speed the worldwide AIDS-research community toward a vaccine. Read the article: PDF (67.3 KB) | XPS (267 KB)
A thoughtful mix of licenses has proven to be valuable in enabling developers to code and distribute their applications in a way that they choose. There are many examples of how a mix of licenses can be beneficial, and ASP.NET AJAX is one example at Microsoft. ASP.NET AJAX is a new framework that simplifies and extends the development approach of using JavaScript and XML to create more interactive web experiences across browser platforms. Read the PDF (332 KB)
Microsoft Research (MSR) and the Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft have partnered with Penn State University to study usability design in open source projects. This summer, the lab is hosting a PhD intern looking at human computer interaction and computer usability at Microsoft and in open source. Read the PDF (258 KB)
