Microsoft Open Sources Entity Framework

Microsoft continues to make in-roads into open source development. Early last year it open sourced several development related tools, including NuGet and several libraries for its ASP.Net language. And by the end of the year the company announced sponsorship of projects to port both the Node.js development platform and the big data analytics tool Apache Hadoop to Windows. It’s even making Linux available on Azure, the company’s cloud computing platform.

And now it has open sourced Entity Framework, a framework that helps developers simplify data manipulation.

Entity is now part of Microsoft Open Technologies, a subsidiary launched earlier this year to house open source projects. You can find the source code for Entity on Codeplex, Microsoft’s answer to GitHub.

It’s another step in the right direction, but it’s nothing earth shattering. Microsoft is continuing to put its open source efforts into low risk developer tooling projects. Although representatives Microsoft’s partners in porting Node.js and Hadoop (Joyent and HortonWorks, respectively) have spoken highly of Redmond’s involvement in those projects, I’m not sure how community involvement the other projects have garnered. I’d still like to see Microsoft open source something bigger, something more core to the company’s business.