First published on MSDN on Mar 24, 2017
Over the last few years, we have made significant investments in making Azure a more open and flexible platform for developers. Azure open source projects on GitHub have grown to over 1,800 repos with over 9,000 contributors. Today, we are excited to announce that the Service Fabric .NET SDK is now also open source on GitHub. This includes Reliable Services, Reliable Actors, Service Remoting, and ASP.NET Core integration.
We've had a lot of success with our
service-fabric-issues
repo as a place for discussions, reporting issues, and working with the community. By opening up the .NET SDK source in its own set of repos we hope to work even closer with developers in the community by providing more targeted areas of discussion, feedback, and of course, opening the source up for contributions.
We've also heard from a lot of you about the importance of having an open source SDK to work with, and we couldn’t agree more. When you're building a framework of your own on Service Fabric, integrating with other tools and frameworks like Autofac, or just building services and applications, having access to the SDK source code makes life a lot easier. Code is documentation, and having access to it is very valuable.
Head over to our new Service Fabric home repo at
https://github.com/Azure/service-fabric
where you’ll find links to all Service Fabric open source projects, documentation, samples, information on our development process, and how to contribute.
The road to open source
Service Fabric started as the platform powering some of our most-loved cloud services. Since we discovered that our customers were grappling with similar complex problems in building distributed applications, we released Azure Service Fabric to the world, and ever since we’ve heard from our customers about how it enables them to build mission critical, highly scalable services. Keeping up with the momentum, we made the decision to open source the SDK, but because of the way Service Fabric evolved it is deeply rooted in internal Microsoft tools and processes. We've spent a good chunk of time removing those internal dependencies from the .NET SDK to bring you open source projects that you can build using nothing but the most basic, freely available tools.
Where we are now
So far in this journey we are in the beginning stages and in learning mode. We’re starting by open sourcing a small portion of Service Fabric and growing from there. Although we were able to separate the .NET SDK source code from internal dependencies, our development process still relies on internal tools, and so we will continue to do our own development in a private repo for the time being. At each SDK release, we will push our latest changes back out to GitHub.
At this stage, we're accepting code contributions on a limited basis, and we encourage you to continue to join us on GitHub to share ideas and report issues. We're looking forward to working closer with the community to make Service Fabric better for everyone.
