ASP.NET and Open Source
I just came back from the Microsoft MVP Summit 2013. I was surprised and excited to learn there are a large number of open source projects from both inside and outside of Microsoft. There is also a strong support for open source frameworks in Visual Studio. I am glad to see that the Microsoft ASP.NET team has done a great job supporting open source and the community is going strong.
Open source projects from the ASP.NET team
Those who interested in the open source projects from the ASP.NET team should first visit http://aspnet.codeplex.com/. This site is a portal to many ASP.NET features that Microsoft has opened the source code.
Next, readers should visit http://aspnetwebstack.codeplex.com/. This site is the home of the latest source code of MVC, Web API and Web Pages.
The following are several open source projects that have been incorporated into Visual Studio:
- http://nuget.codeplex.com/: Nuget is now distributed with Visual Studio 2012.
- https://github.com/SignalR: SignalR is a framework for building long polling application by Damian Edwards and David Fowler. As of ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2, SignalR is part of ASP.NET and a Microsoft supported project. Don’t forget to change the namespace if you are using an earlier version.
The following projects are considered experimental:
- http://owin.org/: A specification of standard interface between .NET web servers and web applications.
- http://katanaproject.codeplex.com/: An implementation of OWIN.
Projects from outside of Microsoft
If you think there are no needs for another framework since ASP.NET MVC is already great, you would be surprised to find out some open source alternatives have actually attracted many followers:
- http://nancyfx.org/: Look at what they have built and number of contributors.
- http://mvc.fubu-project.org/: Another MVC framework that has a large number of contributors.
- The OWIN home page (http://owin.org/) has links to other projects.
Open Source Client-Side MVC or MVVM frameworks supported by Microsoft Visual Studio
Microsoft ASP.NET and Web Tools 2012.2 comes with a single page application (SPA) project template that uses KnockoutJS. However, Mads Kristensen also built projects templates for several other highly popular JavaScript SPA libraries and frameworks: Breeze, EmberJS, DurandalJS and Hot Towel. Visit http://www.asp.net/single-page-application/overview/templates for download links.
Don’t forget to install Mads’ Web Essentials extension for Visual Studio 2012. You will be pleasantly surprised by the number of features that this extension adds to Visual Studio 2012.
Final Notes
I gathered these links for myself and others. If I missed any links, please post a comment or send me a note. I will be glad to update this page.