At the start of May, impacted by the latest wave of layoffs at Microsoft, the .NET Micro Framework was transitioned under the Developer Division. At that time, Colin Miller, product unit manager, announced that the Redmond company was planning to open up the source code of the technology to third-party developers. A couple of weeks later Microsoft continues to struggle with the details of such a task. The company is by no means ready to start sharing the source code of .NET Micro Framework at this point in time.

“In terms of the availability of the source code and integration of community contributions, we are working down that road. There are licensing decisions, processes to set up, code to review, and much more,” Miller said. He indicated that Microsoft continued to be committed to the development of .NET Micro Framework. In this regard, the software giant will continue to reserve development staff especially for the framework, and development is ongoing even at the time of this article.

“We are continuing to do that now. There are frankly some 'uber' features that will be hard for anyone else to do - at least for some time. At the same time, we will make the source code for the platform available on the broadest license that we can. We will also define a mechanism for the community to contribute back that is well managed to insure continued quality of the codebase,” Miller added.

Still, Microsoft did not provide any specific details on the future evolution planned for .NET Micro Framework, outside of the fact that development would not be left entirely on the shoulders of the community. Miller did however promise that Microsoft would offer support for the solution moving onward.

“One concern that has been raised is that we will not maintain one of the key values of the Micro Framework - its integration with Visual Studio. I can assure you that now that we are in the same organization, there will be if anything a tighter bond. For example, when VS 2008 came out, we didn't ship a platform compatible with that until 9 months later. I don't think we will be able to get away with that in the future,” Miller stated.