I meant to write this a couple months ago after I made a sarcastic remark about how saying “I take pull requests” was a fast way to end a conversation with .Net developers. That got retweeted quite a bit, but honestly, my experiences doing OSS work in .Net have gotten so very much more positive in the last couple years and this post might be warranted.

There’s a never ending stream of consternation and angst about the state of OSS development inside of the .Net community — and yes, I’ve been a part of that from time to time. One common perception is that OSS is not as vibrant in .Net as it is in many other technology stacks. Another complaint that I see frequently (and make) is that there sometimes seem like there’s a lot of “not invented here” type duplication between OSS projects in .Net.

A lot of that is probably true, and I think unlikely to ever completely change, but working on .Net OSS projects now is definitely far better than it was just a few years ago.

A quick rundown of my experiences and involvement for some context:

StructureMap has been around since 2004, and probably been widely used since about 2007/8. For whatever reasons, StructureMap has actually enjoyed a pretty significant uptick in contributions and development over the past couple years.

Marten is about six months old, but it’s already the busiest OSS community I’ve been a part of

Storyteller doesn’t have a lot of usage yet, but the early feedback has been encouraging

FubuMVC was a great learning experience and directly responsible for my current position and several personal relationships with other developers, but was a otherwise a massive failure as an OSS project and a tremendous opportunity cost for me

What I think is definitely better now

The most important difference in being an OSS author now as opposed to even just a few years ago is how much more pleasant my interactions are with users. In the past, it was all too common to deal with endless belligerence and an annoying sense of entitlement from users who were probably much more used to leaning on official support lines and documentation from software vendors. I still get a little bit of that once in awhile, but lately I’m seeing a lot more of:

Users acting as collaborators with me to solve their issues

Getting much clearer reproduction steps for their problems, often including failing unit tests to demonstrate their issues

Patience and pleasantness from users needing help

A willingness to take on pull request work to fix their issues and contribute back to the project

An obvious sense that the project is a community effort

Users helping each other in our Gitter rooms before I have a chance to respond

I think that GitHub and its like have definitely made OSS development a much more positive experience. I’d even say that Microsoft’s recent adoption and de facto endorsement of GitHub have definitely made git and GitHub skills much more common throughout the .Net community — and that in turn has made it much more common for users to be able to contribute back to OSS projects.

At least for Marten, we’ve been able to attract quite a bit of early interest and several active contributors and early adopters. It’s easily been the most positive OSS experience I’ve ever had.

I think it’s helped a bit that more .Net developers are comfortable and familiar with automated build and testing tools. I rarely see pull requests submitted without tests anymore, but that would have been a common occurrence a few years ago.

What’s still not great about .Net OSS

A large number of shops will simply not adopt anything that isn’t an official tool from Microsoft

I think that Microsoft still stomps all over the existing OSS projects in .Net by building direct competitors or not taking any cognizance of existing tools when they plan .Net framework changes. I should say that I don’t think this is purposeful, but I’ve never gotten the sense that the teams in Redmond have much awareness or visibility into the .Net OSS ecosystem

The unusual status of the .Net community being so centered on Microsoft and the tools that they provide out of the box just doesn’t leave enough Oxygen for community OSS projects

I think that the forthcoming CoreCLR / DNX / New Name? tooling is probably going to make a lot of the existing OSS projects go extinct. The runtime is very different in some aspects (it wasn’t that bad to move StructureMap up to the CoreCLR, but Storyteller will be much more work and Marten cannot work yet on the DNX runtime as we wait on Roslyn work). Even on top of waiting for your dependencies to support CoreCLR, I think that there won’t be enough interest or activity to bring a lot of tools forward. .Net OSS might be a lot better in the long term as .Net simply becomes a better platform for development

I think that ASP.Net Core and related efforts are going to take most of the .Net community’s attention for quite awhile

It’s still hard to get visibility for .Net OSS projects and that in turn makes it unlikely that a community coalesces around any one project. This is my working theory for why there are so many duplicated projects in .Net

There aren’t many venues, groups, or conferences dedicated to OSS efforts in .Net. Most .Net technical conferences tend to skew heavily toward Microsoft offerings

I think the MVP program skews the community toward official Microsoft tools and away from OSS projects

What about Microsoft being so much more involved in OSS themselves?

I honestly don’t know. It’s making much more developers aware of OSS in general, but I don’t know that it will really encourage folks to be more involved in community projects.

In Summary

My advice is yes, definitely get involved in .Net OSS projects or start your own if you enjoy doing that kind of work, you want to expand your technical skills, or want to make yourself more marketable. If you are making a big bet on the success of that project or have high hopes for it to be widely adopted, I think I’d advise you to set your sights much lower. You also have to realize that it’s very difficult for .Net OSS projects to gain visibility and widespread adoption.

I’d also discourage anyone from trying to compete directly with any tool from Microsoft itself. It can be done, but that’s an uphill slog. It’s probably a lot easier to either find niches where Microsoft tooling has not real entry, or focus on projects that try to add value to mainstream Microsoft .Net tooling. Then hope that Microsoft doesn’t start building their own version of your tool and send one of their celebrity programmers to conferences to sell it;)