Microsoft launched the source sharing forum

On June 27, Microsoft officially launched a community of developers for a source sharing forum.

This is the result of Microsoft's CodePlex project. In fact, this is a forum to share Microsoft's source code as well as other developers' source code, said Jon Rosenberg, director of Microsoft's source code community program.

The developer has put this forum into trial since May 2006 but today it has just introduced it to the developer community.

" We want to create a place where the developer community can cooperate with us or send their feedback on Microsoft projects ," Rosenberg said.

CodePlex is not like other online communities, ready to allow developers to edit or develop different source code.

The source code posted to the forum will be published freely without following any license terms, Rosenberg said. Microsoft will also provide some of its source code within the Share Source Initiative (SSI) licensing plan. According to this plan to access the source code, it is necessary to comply with many different conditions.

Last October. Microsoft has made modifications and simplified license terms. So far Microsoft has announced 7.5 million lines of source code under the SSI license terms at www.microsoft.com/sharedsource .

Microsoft has also made it easier to simplify the CodePlex website interface for the purpose of engaging and attracting more developers. " This is a community-designed website rather than Microsoft's own property ," Rosenberg said.

The forum is primarily aimed at software developers. Up to now, there have been 35 source code development projects posted on CodePlex. More than half of them are projects other than Microsoft.

CodePles uses Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server to enable collaboration in source code development and error detection.

Users need to register before they can publish or edit the source code.

The CodePlex forum is available at www.codeplex.com .

Hoang Dung