The .NET Foundation is an independent organization that supports open source development and collaboration within the .NET ecosystem. The .NET foundation supports the development of active projects within the ecosystem by evangelizing the technologies through organizing/sponsoring meetups and by active involvement in community-driven projects.
The .NET Foundation portfolio grew especially large due to the projects that were brought in by the acquisition of Xamarin.
Some of the most notable projects that are generally used in modern .NET applications, as well as cross-platform mobile applications, are as follows:
- .NET Core
- ASP.NET Core
- Roslyn
- Reactive Extensions
- Entity Framework
- Identity Server
- ML.NET
- Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms
- xUnit.NET
The .NET Core project is composed of the .NET framework implementation and the common language runtime for .NET Core (CoreFX and CoreCLR ). Additionally .NET Core tools such as the .NET Core command-line interface can also be found as separate repositories. The community is free to make contributions, as well as submit issue reports.
ASP.NET Core is the cross-platform implementation of ASP.NET. As a platform agnostic web development framework, applications created with it can be hosted on multiple platforms, as well as on Windows using classic .NET. ASP.NET MVC, Web API, web pages, and SignalR are some of the repositories under the ASP.NET Core project.
Complete implementation of Roslyn (.NET compiler platform for C# and Visual Basic) can be found on GitHub as part of the .NET Foundation group. Roslyn is the implementation of the compiler as a service paradigm and has various extensibility points, including customizable code analyzers.
Reactive Extensions for .NET is a library that provides developers with event-based asynchronous observable sequences and LINQ style query operators. Extensions can be used in .NET applications using the system's reactive namespaces and its children.
The Entity Framework is the recommended data access technology for modern .NET applications. The newest version of the Entity Framework was built from scratch using .NET, Core so that it can be used in cross-platform applications, from ASP.NET Core applications to device-specific scenarios such Xamarin and UWP.
OpenID Connect and the OAuth 2.0 Framework for Katana and ASP.NET Core are the components of identity server project. They provides tools that developers can use to enable authentication as a service, Single Sign-on (SSO), and federation gateways in their applications.
This project allows developers to include cognitive functions and AI-related implementations in their applications with .NET. The same open-source is used by the Hello feature on Windows 10. Developers can use this framework to integrate custom machine learning features into their applications without any prior knowledge about neural networks, artificial intelligence, or machine learning. This library also allows integration with other machine learning libraries such as TensorFlow, ONNX, and Infer.NET.
Miguel de Icaza, part of the board of directors of the .NET Foundation, publicly announced that Xamarin, Xamarin.SDK, and Xamarin.Forms, as well as the Mono runtime ports for iOS and Android, are to be part of the .NET foundation and open sourced in Evolve 2016. Even though these projects are not listed on the Foundation site, they can be found on GitHub under the common MIT license.