[Post by Martin Woodward]

Being part of the .NET Open Source journey is undoubtedly a highlight of my career. There have been so many amazing moments. Some of my favourite include nervously biting my nails backstage as Anders Hejlsberg open sourced Roslyn live on stage, the initial open source release of .NET Core, and announcing partnerships with awesome companies like Red Hat, JetBrains, Unity, Samsung and Google. Of course, I'll never forget being appointed Executive Director of the .NET Foundation.

I've been working full time on the .NET Foundation for nearly two years now. I was recently offered a role with some exciting opportunities and new challenges back over in Microsoft and have decided to take them up on it.  This means I have had to make the tough decision to step down as Executive Director. However, I will still be helping the community as Vice President of the .NET Foundation and as a member of the voluntary Advisory Council.

I'm incredibly pleased to say that we've managed to persuade Jon Galloway to replace me as Executive Director. Jon is well known to the .NET community and an excellent ambassador for the platform. Jon and I have worked on open source .NET for many years, and more recently he has already been helping me with .NET Foundation duties.

Jon's been active in the .NET developer community for a long time, through tutorials (like the MVC Music Store tutorial), tech blogging since 2002, contributing to open source .NET projects, writing some popular books (including the Wrox ASP.NET MVC series), web development classes on Microsoft Virtual Academy, and StackOverflow (user id 5!). He loves bringing well deserved attention to new open source project and .NET community members, via the ASP.NET Weekly Community Standup, seven years of daily shout-outs on ASP.NET Daily Community Spotlight, his co-host role on the Herding Code podcast, and Twitter. He's really excited to continue to serve the .NET community through this new role!

Over the next few weeks we will transition roles as he comes fully up to speed with what is, in my opinion, possibly the best job in the world. Please give him a great welcome and offer him all the help and assistance you can. I wish Jon all the best in his new role of Executive Director. 

I also want to sincerely thank all of you out there in the .NET community. You have been the most incredible part of the journey, consistently making me smile with your warmth and good humour while constantly putting me in awe of your technical ability, energy and passion. I'm looking forward to continuing to work with you and to helping Jon in my Vice President role.  

-- Martin.

Congratulations to .NET Foundation Technical Steering Group member Samsung who have just announced a new version of their tooling for .NET Developers targeting the open source Tizen operating system which runs on over 50 million devices including TV's wearables and mobile phones. The new tooling has rich integration into Microsoft's Visual Studio environment including emulators TV as well as phone.

In this second preview, you can now use the familiar .NET Standard and Xamarin.Forms .NET API's to develop Tizen TV applications. Samsung Tizen TVs will begin shipping with .NET support once Visual Studio Tools for Tizen is officially released later in the year. The second preview also significantly increases the number of Tizen-specific APIs available for .NET developers such as Bluetooth, Smart Card, NFC, Map, Wi-Fi Direct, Telephony, Geofence Manager, and Account Service.

We're thrilled to see the great activity by Tizen developers from Samsung contributing to .NET Core and Xamarin.Forms along with the improvements to .NET support for Tizen that they have been contributing to the open source community.

For more information see Samsung's Tizen developer website or get involved through the Tizen .NET Forum.