.NET Summer Hackfest is a .NET Foundation sponsored, community run open source hacking party. We've got a series of three sessions, each two weeks long, and we've just finished the second session. You can read more about the overall event and how to get involved here.

Session 3 just kicked off this Monday with some great projects. If you've been waiting to get involved, this is the last session for .NET Summer Hackfest 2017, so now is the time!

Humanitarian Toolbox

Humanitarian Toolbox builds open source projects for humanitarian (e.g. disaster relief) organizations. They've got a great history of hosting .NET hack events and know how to build sustainable open source projects, so I'm thrilled to have them aboard!

This is a very mature project with an experienced team to help you get up to speed with contributing to a .NET open source project, so if you're new to .NET open source, this is a great way to get started. It's real software that's being used by the Red Cross to save lives. This is an amazing opportunity to use your programming abilities to do something really worthwhile while learning some cutting edge skills (they're running on .NET Core 2.0).

Here's a video from the project kickoff during the Humanitarian Toolbox Community Standup from this Tuesday:

And here's all you need to get started.

MvvmCross

MvvmCross is an MVVM framework for cross-platform solutions, including Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android, Windows and Mac. We'll be converting it to .NET Standard and looking at documentation and up-for-grabs issues.

The MvvmCross has really put some work into planning this project out. Here's their information page overviewing their goals, how to get started, and their in-person events. Over 60 people have registered to participate in this hackfest project so far!

If you're near Amsterdam, register for the MvvmCross and Xamarin HackDay event on September 2. This looks like a great time, including some local speakers and some exciting special guests.

Here's the video from the team's HackFest Kickoff event which tells you everything you need to get started:

Akka.NET

Akka.NET is a port of the JVM Akka distributed actor framework and it supports a large range of capabilities, runtimes, and plugins. Akka.NET is used in everything from Xamarin apps to WPF to large-scale distributed systems running on top of Azure and Amazon. And they just joined the .NET Foundation. :-)

Akka.NET is used in a lot of high performance, mission critical installations, and they're doing some pretty advanced, high-performance stuff. This is a tremendous opportunity to work with a great team on some pretty advanced software.

Here's their overview page which tells you everything you need to get started.

ImageSharp

ImageSharp is a new, fully featured, fully managed, cross-platform, 2D graphics API designed to allow the processing of images without the use of System.Drawing. Using a modern, generic API that focuses on making common tasks easy to perform but gives you the tools for complex operations ImageSharp is a great alternarive and can be used in device, cloud, and embedded/IoT scenarios.

In my personal experience, working with imaging and graphics can be really fun, but it can also be pretty hard to learn on your own since you're working with some complex APIs. This is a great project to get going with graphics programming, as you'll be working with a  very experienced team.

Here's how to contribute to the ImageSharp hackfest.

.NET Summer Hackfest is a .NET Foundation sponsored, community run open source hacking party. We've got a series of three sessions, each two weeks long, and we've just finished the second session. You can read more about the overall event and how to get involved here.

In the next post, I'll be sharing more about how you can get involved in our final session for this event. This post is all about calling out the the exciting things our Session 2 projects accomplished.

DotVVM: An Open Source MVVM framework for Web Apps

DotVVM is an innovative MVVM (model-view-viewmodel) front-end web framework that offers a clean programming model, over 25 built-in controls, and support for both "classic" ASP.NET (OWIN) and ASP.NET Core. The DotVVM team had a pretty ambitious list of goals, and it's great to see all they got done in just two weeks!

Since the project core team is located in Prague, they hosted an in-person event. In just one day, they:

• Got a good start on a Visual Studio Code extension
• Created a prototype to enable using React components as DotVVM controls, dramatically increasing the number of controls available to DotVVM developers
• Created a property to allow globally enabling or disabling all controls on a form

See the DotVVM blog to read more about their hackfest event, as well as this summary of all they've accomplished in the past two weeks.

Brighter: A Lightweight Command Processor and Dispatcher

Brighter is a Command Processor & Dispatcher implementation that can be used as a lightweight library in other projects. It can be used for implementing Ports and Adapters and CQRS (PDF) architectural styles in .NET. The team saw several new contributors, got a bunch done and has a few issues still being worked on. Bringing new contributors on to projects who could continue to participate after the session ends was one of our goals, so it's great to see that happening!

The Brighter team hosted a meetup in London, which looks like it was both a productive and fun time.

Thanks!

A huge thanks to the project leaders for organizing, and to those who showed up. It's fun to see some contributors participating in both sessions so far!

Today we're happy to announce that Progress Telerik UI for UWP is joining the .NET Foundation.

The Telerik UI for UWP suite is a collection of over 20 high quality controls for the Universal Windows Platform, including complex controls such as Grid and Chart. Telerik has It was released to the community as open source earlier this year, and we're excited to welcome the project to .NET Foundation. You can read more about both the Progress Telerik UI for UWP project and why they're excited to join the .NET Foundation on their announcement post.

The development team is excited to continue building this project with the .NET open source community. To help get you started, they're offering 20 special edition t-shirts to new contributors to the project – see their announcement post for details.

Today we're really excited to welcome Akka.NET to the .NET Foundation. You can read their post on joining the .NET Foundation here.

Akka.NET is a C# and F# implementation of the popular distributed actor model framework originally developed on the Java Virtual Machine by Lightbend. Akka.NET allows you to build highly concurrent applications at any scale; it can run on mobile devices using Xamarin and (soon) Unity3d; it can run inside ASP.NET MVC and WCF applications to help build highly available distributed systems; and it's about to launch on .NET Core as well to help .NET developers build the next generation of high availability software.

Today Akka.NET is used by large enterprises such as Bank of America, Balfour Beatty, Boeing, S&P Global, and others. And as one of the fastest growing projects on NuGet, we expect that trend to only continue into the future as more and more organizations turn to reactive programming and the actor model to help build their mission-critical systems.

Here's a short clip of Aaron Stannard, one of the project's founders, explaining why Akka.NET and other technologies like it are going to play a huge role in the future of .NET development.

If you're like to learn more about Akka.NET, you should check out the Akka.NET Bootcamp and their official project documentation.

Oh, and Akka.NET is also hosting a project for the .NET Summer Hackfest from August 21 – September 1, so that's another great way to get familiar with Akka.NET and meet the team!

Today we're happy to announce that ReactiveUI is joining the .NET Foundation!

ReactiveUI is a composable, cross-platform model-view-viewmodel framework for all .NET platforms that is inspired by functional reactive programming which is a paradigm that allows you to express the idea around a feature in one readable place, abstract mutable state away from your user interfaces and improve improve the testability of your application.

Most modern programming today is basically imperative, meaning it models the traditional fetch-execute cycle of a CPU: perform an instruction, fetch the next one, perform that one, and so on. For decades, programmers have had to mold their brains to fit the paradigm of the CPU. When teams rely on hoping that the behavior that emerges from a program is correct, and that reliance is based on nothing more than a programmer's correctness, you can find yourself in a sticky situation.  You can try and mitigate the costs of imperative programming with things like unit tests or integration tests, but why mitigate the costs when there's a better way?

The ReactiveUI team firmly believes reactive programming is fundamentally a better way to build your applications. Here's a great video that makes the point pretty clearly:

The ReactiveUI website has a lot more information to learn more about the project. They also have a slack community head on over to reactiveui.net/slack

We're excited to welcome ReactiveUI join the .NET Foundation. They've got a lot of exciting things planned and we're happy to be part of it!

.NET Summer Hackfest is a .NET Foundation sponsored, community run open source hacking party. We're almost done with Session 1 and ramping up for Session 2, so here's some info on what we've been up to and how you can get involved.

Here's the most important part: Session 2 runs from August 7 – August 18 and includes two exciting projects: Brighter and DotVVM. It's open to everyone, from absolute beginners to experienced .NET open source developers. Here's a great time to get involved with your .NET open source community!

Session 1 Progress: Keen IO SDK port to .NET Standard

We started with one project for the first session: porting the Keen IO SDK to .NET Standard. Keen IO is a really cool event data platform that's really developer friendly. At the free level, they give you $20 credit per month, which works out to 2 million streamed events. They also give discounts to OSS projects, and they've got open source API libraries for a lot of frameworks.

The team started with a straightforward porting goal, but I pushed them to include some stretch goals to keep them busy. They've made great progress, as you can see from the Kanban board below.

Some highlights for this project:

• The core SDK, tests, and build have been ported to .NET Standard
• The code is all running on Windows, Ubuntu and MacOS under .NET Core (hooray)
• Cross-platform Continuous Integration is set up on AppVeyor (for Windows) Travis CI (for Ubuntu and macOS)
• We learned a lot for the projects we'll be doing in Sessions 2 and 3 (my selfish goal for this project)
• We had a one on one call with Immo Landwerth to get some advice on some interesting .NET Standard issues
• The Keen IO dev team have been phenomenal hosts!
• Most important for me: we had some great commits from the community around the world, including several pull requests from Tarun and Don

Session 2 Projects Kicking off Monday, August 7: Brighter and DotVVM

If you've been keeping an eye on .NET Summer Hackfest but haven't got involved yet, now is the time! We've got two established .NET open source projects run by some well known .NET community leaders. Both are planning some local in-person community events as well.

DotVVM: An Open Source MVVM framework for Web Apps

DotVVM is an innovative MVVM (model-view-viewmodel) front-end web framework that offers a clean programming model, over 25 built-in controls, and support for both "classic" ASP.NET (OWIN) and ASP.NET Core.

Here's what they'll be working on and how you can get involved.

Also, if you're in or near Prague, they'll be running a full day Hackfest event at the Microsoft office in Prague on Friday, August 11.

Brighter: A Lightweight Command Processor and Dispatcher

Brighter is a Command Processor & Dispatcher implementation that can be used as a lightweight library in other projects. It can be used for implementing Ports and Adapters and CQRS (PDF) architectural styles in .NET. They'll have some smaller up-for-grabs issues for folks who are getting up to speed as well as some more ambitious work to implement abstractions to facilitate additional middleware such as Redis, Kafka, and Event Store.

We'll have some more information on how you can get involved in the Brighter hackfest within the next day.

Let's Do This!

This is your open source .NET Community! Now's a great time to show up and make an impact!

Beginners, here's a great chance to get involved and level up your open source .NET skills.

Community leaders, let's take this chance to build the development community you want to see.

Please join me in welcoming AutoMapper to the .NET Foundation!

AutoMapper has been a popular library in the .NET open source community for a long time. As their site says:

AutoMapper is a simple little library built to solve a deceptively complex problem - getting rid of code that mapped one object to another. This type of code is rather dreary and boring to write, so why not invent a tool to do it for us?

Thanks to Jimmy Bogard and the AutoMapper team for building and actively maintaining this project for so many years! Welcome!

You can read more about AutoMapper, including some a nice getting started tutorial, on their site.