.NET community was never known as a strong proponent of the open source software. Traditionally, it gravitates towards the full stack solutions provided by Microsoft or well-known vendors of the commercial components.

With introduction of NuGet, open sourcing .NET, Roslyn and intentional push to Open Source from Microsoft, situation seems changing. However, Open Source is not a way of life for the majority of the .NET developers. To verify that, I did a couple of OSS-related presentations for the local .NET user groups. I was not (unfortunately) surprised to see that besides some really well-known libraries, not many OSS projects are known for the attendees.

To spread the good words about existing .NET Open Source projects, from time to time I am going to introduce one OSS library which I found useful.

Project of the week

For the first week, instead of the library I’d like to introduce two initiatives – First Timers Only and Up For Grabs. Both projects aim to help to find a project for the first contribution and based on the tags assigned by the repository maintainers. The idea is to suggest a simple isolated feature/defect fix to help newcomers to learn the submission process.

If you are a project maintainer, check your repository and mark the appropriate stories with tags. If you never contributed to an open source project – it’s time to try!

Will talk next week.