Microsoft Research hands off its Trident project to Outercurve

Another Microsoft-germinated project has left the building and is now under the auspices of the Outercurve Foundation.

The latest to go is Microsoft Research's Scientific Workflow Workbench -- codenamed Project Trident. On October 26, Outercurve announced that Microsoft Research had donated Trident to the Foundation. Some of the contributors to the project will be non-Microsoft employees and some are Microsoft employees. (The project contributors will still work for their respective employers, e.g. Microsoft, not Outercurve.)

Trident provides scientists with graphical tools for creating, managing and sharing workflows. Trident is built on top of Microsoft's Windows Workflow Foundation plumbing.

Outercurve -- the group formerly known as the CodePlex Foundation -- is making Trident the first of the projects to be part of its newly minted Research Accelerators Gallery. Trident will be available under the Apache 2.0 open-source license.

In other Outercurve/Microsoft-related news, the team behind the Orchard content-management system -- created by Microsoft and spun out to the Outercurve Foundation -- released a new milestone build of that product.

The ASP.Net-based Orchard CMS offering is up to release 0.8, as of this week. New in the latest build is a theme engine based on the new "Razor" syntax in Microsoft's ASP.Net MVC. The 0.8 release also includes support for widgets.

Next up, before the end of this calendar year, is the 1.0 release of Orchard. From a new Outercurve blog post on the project:

"Remaining work items include support for fundamentals such as shared hosting requirements and performance, usability improvements to the Orchard admin panel, refinements to the developer and designer APIs based on early-adopter feedback, and a handful of additional features for authoring and managing a site’s content, such as support for mapping lists of content items to the front-end and improvements to localizability."

It will be interesting to see which Microsoft project ends up at Outercurve next. Microsoft has been offloading a number of its developer-focused efforts to the group, and the open-source community at large, in the past year.