Microsoft Enters the Biotech Market with a Truly Open Source Project

Posted by Jonathan Allen on Nov 15, 2009

Sections

Architecture & Design,

Development,

Operations & Infrastructure

Topics

Biotech ,

.NET ,

Open Source

Tags

Microsoft Biology Foundation ,

Parallel Programming

Microsoft Biology Foundation, or MFB, is a bioinformatics toolkit built atop the .NET framework. This toolkit is based on the de facto standards established in the bioinformatics community through years of open development, code sharing, and cross-platform support. Keeping with the spirit of this tradition, MFB will be released under the Microsoft Public License.

With support for bioinformatics file formats, MFB should prove to be a huge time saver right out of the box. Microsoft is also offering “range of algorithms for manipulating DNA, RNA, and protein sequences; and a set of connectors to biological Web services such as NCBI BLAST.”

Microsoft is well known for building extension points into the frameworks; with their long tradition of closed-source software their tools would be useless without them. While MFB is no different in this regard, Microsoft’s attitude towards extensions has changed. They are soliciting third-party developers to contribute their code back to the Biology Foundation framework, though the exact details are no yet available.

In order to take advantage of the multiple CPUs and cores now widely available in both server and consumer grade hardware, there is also a “Dev10” preview. This builds upon the Parallel Extensions library that is being added in .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010.

In addition to the Beta of Microsoft Biology Foundation, Microsoft Research is working on two related projects.

• Microsoft Biology Tools are “are a collection of computational biology tools built in Microsoft Research; they are either built upon the MBF framework or have historically significant value in the same domain and may eventually be ported to integrate with the framework.”
• Microsoft Research Biology Extension for Excel is, as the name suggests, is an Office add-in that allows you to leverage MFB from Excel.

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   HELP

   by faez khan

   DEAR SIR, I AM FAEZ KHAN FROM INDIA, I AM DOING M.Sc.BIOINFORMATICS.. I AM VERY2 HAPPY TO SEE THIS TOOL.... SIR AS A STUDENT CAN I CONTRIBUTE TO IT....I WILL BE HAPPY TO BE A PART OF IT... I HAVE GOOD PRACTICE IN HANDLING BIOINFORMATICS TOOLS... I WILL BE WAITING FOR UR REPLY,,THANK U

   Reply

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   Re: HELP

   by Jonathan Allen

   Check out this link, it has all the downloads and the email address for the program coordinator.
   
   connect.microsoft.com/BIO

   Reply

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   Microsoft Biology Foundation 1.0 Released!

   by Michael Zyskowski

   You can find the final 1.0 version of the release at this site: research.microsoft.com/bio. Also, all development activities have been migrated to the open source forge on CodePlex.com: mbf.codeplex.com. Please see the information here to find out how to contribute/participate in this project. Thanks!

   Reply

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