Running an Open Source project in .NET C#

Question

We have developed an application in C# .NET WPF Office which we are about to Open Source. I'd be interested in the objective factors that we can address to increase the likelihood of success. It's a domain application on top of the MS stack, so we would be particularly interested in any experience of groups doing this (as opposed to writing OS versions of .NET). We intend that there is (light) central management of the project. Our current intention is to develop a governance procedure supported by donations but we have an open mind.

I have 15 years' experience of OS using Java and see some objective problems in a .NET environment:

• There may be a financial cost to tooling which would deter volunteers. Any information on free or OS .NET tools would be very valable.
• the target distro is likely to be windows-only at present though we'd like to know what success others have had with distributing (say) Mono packaging.
• there may be licence problems and/or practice on Codeplex which needs to be addressed

Since C# is the top tag in SO we believe that there may be potential volunteers yearning for interesting OS projects and feedback on this would be useful.

(In our own case the use of .NET/C# is non-negotiable so please don't suggest we use Java, J#, Iron Python, etc. I can give more details of our own project (in chemistry, and MS-supported) if people are interested but I'd like to see the broad picture.)

Answer 1

• Visual Studio Express edition is free
• Use NUnit (or MbUnit etc) for unit testing
• NAnt is a free build tool, but MSBuild comes with the framework anyway
• I don't know of any licensing problems with Codeplex, but there are other options anyway (SourceForge, Google Code etc)

One downside of Visual Studio Express is that it doesn't support plugins, so you won't get integrated SCM support - but most people are likely to be happy to use TortoiseSvn, TortoiseGit etc.

Mono support for MSBuild has very recently improved with a new release of xbuild. I don't know what the packaging options are like.

Answer 2

As long as the license problems are solved, it's only a matter of marketing your project to the potential contributors. I am maintaining several Open Source projects on a Microsoft platform and get a lot of contributions from the community.

Answer 3

1) I'm not sure that tooling really is such an immense cost factor.

• Many development tools are OSS or free (e.g. CC.NET, SubVersion, various unit test frameworks, or MS SandCastle, to name just a few...).
• Some commercial vendors donate free licenses of their products to OS projects.
• Lately, the Codeplex Foundation (which is different from codeplex.com!) was established, which is intended to make life for OS projects easier. They might be able to help you with specific problems.

2) If you have a Windows-only distribution, that's not much of a limitation. Many OS projects in the .NET world are exclusively targeting the Windows OS. So I think you shouldn't care about that.

3) Regarding the license question: I don't know of any problem with Codeplex, but here's a list of all currently available OSS licenses. You might also consider an OSS hosting site other than CodePlex, Google Code and Sourceforge may be other options.

HTH!