Microsoft recently release the Managed Extensibility Framework on CodePlex under an open source license, the MS-LPL. There were some issues with the license selected for release, and it looks like Glenn Block spearheaded an effort to rerelease the MEF under a more permissive license, the MS-PL.
That’s pretty cool. From what I understand the MEF is this sort of service locating dll loading extensibility-fu framework. Here is a pretty simple introduction to it. It looks powerful.
Now, push that onto the stack, and think about JQuery being included in a release of MS software. Woah! Can you say, “Holy Crap!” because I can. Microsoft is including an open source library as part of various Visual Studio, ASP.NET MVC packages! That’s frickin’ huge! I can’t think of any other open source library ever included in a Microsoft release.
Now, push JQuery onto the stack and read this. Microsoft collaborated with leaders of the open source community to jointly design and develop CommonServiceLocator, a shared interface for service locators/IoC Containers. Everyone writes one of these interfaces/static gateway doohickies at some point in time, so a single one jointly developed by the people who wrote our IoC containers with an apparent nod of support from Microsoft itself makes my head spin.
It’s a lot harder to blindly hate Microsoft these days. In a time when Apple is treating their development community like complete fecal matter, we have to acknowledge and recognize efforts by Microsoft to reach out to us, listen to us, and attempt to give us the tools we need to do our jobs.