ASP.NET MVC, Web API, Razor and Open Source
I am a developer who has leaned towards .NET over the last few projects and one of the things that used to nag me is that the platform is a closed one (and the licensing fees can be a decent part of the cost). I was fairly certain I would migrate off it if the project ever took off seriously.<p>And after seeing the C# love on HN on the poll for favorite programming languages last week, I realized there must be many enamored .NET programmers who would use and evangelize it more but only don't due to it being a closed platform.<p>Also, a lot of us have great ideas to make the platform we're using better - and with Microsoft announcing they'd make Json.NET, a third party JSON library, the default JSON serializer over their home-grown DataContractJsonSerializer in the next version of ASP.NET MVC, I wondered if Microsoft was considering the unthinkable: start accepting community developed features into their platform, and perhaps open source it to make the scope for community contributions even larger.<p>There's a long way to go to fully realize this vision (I'd like for .NET itelf to be open source ;-] ), but this is just incredible news.<p>For those who want to understand which parts of the ASP.NET stack are open source, check out this diagram on Hanselman's blog that was very useful to me.<p><a href="http://www.hanselman.com/blog/VisualStudio11BetaInContext.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://www.hanselman.com/blog/VisualStudio11BetaInContext.as...</a>