Microsoft to open source WCF RIA Services

Microsoft is transferring its WCF RIA Services to the Outercurve Foundation as an open source project. WCF RIA Services is designed to make it easier to develop n-tier solutions for rich internet applications (RIA), such as those that use Microsoft's Silverlight. The open source organisation, which was originally founded by Microsoft, will maintain the project, which will be known as Open RIA Services, as part of its ASP.NET Open Source Gallery, which is already home to projects such as NuGet, Orchard, DotNetOpenAuth and xUnit.net.

Microsoft has apparently been working on implementing the change for some time and hopes to complete the process of open sourcing the project this summer. A web site has already been set up on Codeplex, Microsoft's hosting platform for open source projects. As with its other open source projects, which include ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API, ASP.NET Web Pages, Windows Azure SDK and ADO.NET Entity Framework, Microsoft will license the new project under the Apache 2.0 licence.

The company will continue to support WCF RIA Services 1.0, which was supplied with products including Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and Visual Studio 2012 and is also earmarked for inclusion in Visual Studio 2013. There will, however, be some changes to support in the forthcoming version of the Microsoft development environment as a result of the move to open source. One of the first tasks planned for the new open source project is to deal with the conflicts expected to arise as a result of the namespace change in Entity Framework 6.0.

(fab)