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Looking at .NET Core on GitHub

Back on November 12, 2014, Microsoft announced their plans to place the .NET Core libraries on GitHub.  Microsoft’s Immo Landwerth has provided an update as to how this transition is going for the project via some insightful project data.  Landwerth states that Microsoft has invested a great deal in collecting telemetry from the project in an effort to know when something is about to break rather than find out after the fact when it is too late to take corrective measures.

Applying this concept to their open source movement, Landwerth observes that there are currently over 1,089 forks of the .NET Core project and over 250 pull requests since the November release.  Even more encouraging for those looking to see the libraries evolve faster, the number of external developers working on the project now exceeds the number of internal developers.

This is not to stay that external developers must shoulder the burden alone.  Landwerth and his team are tracking how quickly they respond to a reported issue and how long it takes for them to close these issues.  While the majority receive a first response in a matter of hours, in some cases it is over a week before the team responds—something Landwerth says they can and will improve on.

GitHub isn’t just being used as a code transfer method, it is also used to facilitate code and API reviews.  If a given piece of .NET code has been made public on GitHub, then all of the code review discussions take place on GitHub.  The API review process is described on the team’s wiki for those curious.

The .NET Core project has grown to over 500K lines of code, with 75% of the project yet to come.  Landwerth provided an Excel spreadsheet that details the state of all the APIs within the project.  While no specifics are available yet, the CoreCLR team should be providing an update soon according to Landwerth.

To those developers looking to contribute code, Microsoft requires a legal document called a Contributor License Agreement to be submitted electronically by anyone wishing to contribute material changes to the project.  This is to ensure that legally unfit code does not pollute the repository and that you are granting the use of your submission to the .NET Foundation. 

For a look at all of Microsoft’s projects on GitHub, check their landing page.

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