Last week Microsoft continued down the path of making more of their development platform open source. ASP.NET had been made open source a while back. Last fall they released the .NET CoreFX portions of the .NET Framework, and now they add to that the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR). This is now available through the .NET CoreCLR Repository on GitHub.
https://github.com/dotnet/coreclr
What does the Core CLR do? It includes functions such as the Intermediary Language (IL) byte code loading, garbage collection, and the compilation of your .NET code to executable machine language code.
Rather than reiterate what has been said before, I suggest that you read the .NET Framework blog on the Core CLR project. They provide a lot of the details here.
.NET Foundation Projects
If you jump out to Github, you’ll find that the amount of .NET code available continues to grow. Many of these are being supported by the .NET Foundation. It is interesting to look at the list of project that the foundation is working on. Of course, these are open projects, which each contain a link to contribute. They include:
- .NET Complier Platform (“Roslyn”)
- .NET Micro Framework
- ASP.NET 5
- Entity Framework 6
- Microsoft Azur4e SDK for .NET
- NuGet
- .NET Core 5
- .NET SDK for Hadoop
- ASP.NET SignalR
- Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF, MEF2)
- System.Drawing (Mono)
- Xamarin.Mobile
- Windows Phone Toolkit
- Xamarin.Auth
- Umbraco
- And many more
The list goes on from there. The point, however, is that Microsoft is opening up a lot of the developer technologies. As a developer, you have the opportunity to jump in and not only see the code, but help build future releases.
Pretty cool!