Microsoft Open Sources Web Sandbox, and CodePlex is Maturing
by Sam Dean - Jan. 28, 2009Comments (0)- Related Blog Posts
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If you run a web site or a blog, and the ever-growing collection of content, components and advertisements gives you security concerns, Microsoft has opened up the source code for an application that could be an answer: Web Sandbox. "The Web Sandbox project explores how to advance the web platform to improve security, isolation, quality of service and extensibility capabilities for web developers and website users," writes Microsoft's own Peter Galli. Web Sandbox is released under an Apache 2.0 license, following the company's move to join the Apache foundation. Microsoft claims that the project has benefitted from much input from the security community. Along with this news, Matt Asay notes that Microsoft's CodePlex repository of open source resources is showing signs of more maturity.
As Peter Galli notes:
"CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting Web site, has grown by leaps and bounds over the past calendar year. Visits to the Website more than doubled to top 19-million in 2008, while new registered users were up more than 70 percent to over 66,000 and the number of new projects more than doubled to 4,542 over the year."
He also cites the top five open source projects created in 2008 found on CodePlex: WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation), the Silverlight Tookit (a collection of controls and components for Silverlight), CompositeWPF (for building enterprise Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight apps), MVC Samples (for prototye ASP.NET MVC applications), and the Unity Application Block (an extensible dependency injection container).
I'm in agreement with many others that Microsoft's attitude toward open source is slowly maturing. As seen from the top projects on CodePlex above, tools for developers are big attractions on the site. Microsoft should seize the opportunity to leverage new tools from developers, and improve its relationship with the FOSS community. Hopefully the company's new open source chief Sam Ramji will continue to push for this. There is still much ground to cover. Â
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