Microsoft Releases ASP.NET MVC Under the Apache License

mikejuk writes "Microsoft has announced that they are being even more open with their new approach to ASP.NET MVC. It is making ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Razor open source under an Apache 2 license. The code is hosted on CodePlex using the new Git support ... You can compile and test out the latest version, but if you do have anything to contribute you have to submit it for Microsoft's approval." To get code upstream Microsoft has to approve (pretty typical), but the git branch is supposedly tracking the latest internal release candidate branch (a bit better than Google does with Android, even). Things seem to have changed quite a bit since the days of Shared Source (tm).

Re:Now if they'd do the same thing with MFC and AT

[Short Circuit]

And most people who work with it would like for it to die. Which Microsoft has actually been working at facilitating in various ways, between the whole .NET ecosystem and now the ability to write Metro apps in C++ against WinRT, leaving the C API out of the picture completely.

Microsoft has made it entirely possible for many people who work with it to move on to different frameworks, but has responded to developer pressure to keep MFC alive and maintained. I doubt it's one of their priorities, but it's better than where things sat with the release of VS2008. VS2010 has improved MFC, and it sounds like VS2011 is marginally better, with its first-class support of C++.

And while I'd love to ditch having my code support anything older than Vista, that's just not going to happen any time soon. My code isn't written for the mass market, it's written for specced use cases, which includes things like supporting WinXP and even (at times) Win2K. If you're writing a new application every year, or doing a major refactor of your code every couple years, you can keep with the times and depend on bleeding edge libraries.

If you're working with a large legacy codebase with install sites over a decade old, you're not going to be jumping at Metro quite yet. It probably isn't going to be until Windows 9 before Microsoft stabilizes their new platform enough to be worth porting code forward. Look at 95 vs 98 vs ME, and then XP vs XPSP2 (which really could have been a new operating system...), and then Vista vs Win7. Microsoft tick-tocks between "what fresh hell is this?" and "Whew! That's a relief!".