New forums, advisory council coming to .NET Foundation
In April of this year, Microsoft announced the company would be open sourcing a number of its developer-related technologies and created the .NET Foundation to oversee that work.
On October 14, officials connected with the .Net Foundation said they would be creating an advisory council and launching forums "to engage with the larger .NET community and to start the flow of ideas on the future of .NET, the community of users of .NET, and the community of contributors to the .NET ecosystem."
That announcement was shared by Xamarin founder Miguel de Icaza on his Tirania.org blog.
The new .NET forums will be at forums.dotnetfoundation.org and will be powered using the Discourse platform.
There's also a baseline proposal for the Advisory Council, about which the organization will be seeking public comments (via the .NET Forums).
As explained in a draft of the Advisory Council proposal, "Because of its close affiliation to Microsoft, the .NET Foundation has a long term goal to establish its own credibility through independence and impartiality. An Advisory Council where the majority of seats are held by external community members can help achieve this goal; especially if the Advisory Council is tasked with making real decisions and policy recommendations."
Company officials announced the culmination of a plan three years in the making to open source a number of the company's developer technologies at Microsoft's Build 2014 developer conference. At that time, officials also announced they would be partnering with Xamarin to create a new .Net Foundation, which would be responsible for the newly open-sourced bits.
Among the original 24 current and future technologies Microsoft and Xamarin contributed to the .Net Foundation are ASP.Net, the Entity Framework, a preview of the .Net Compiler Platform (codenamed "Roslyn"), the VB and C# programming languages, the .Net Micro Framework, and .Net Rx. Xamarin, a maker of cross-platform mobile development tools, is contributing its MimeKit and Mailkit libraries, Xamarin Mobile, Xamarin Auth and more. Since April, a few more technologies have been added to the core group, including the Salesforce Toolkits for .Net and the Open XML software development kit.