Why should my project join the .NET Foundation?

The .NET Foundation provides several services to support the projects in our community.

Administrative Services the .NET Foundation provides for projects

If you're currently running a project along these lines, or if you 're interested in kicking off a new idea, please take a look at our New Project Checklist.

Management and administrative nitty-gritty

Project guidance and mentoring

New projects joining us will get mentorship on how to best run an open source community along with access to developers currently seeking .NET projects. We work with project leads to help ensure the project grows into a vibrant and welcoming community. And of course, we love to share best practices for managing a friendly, collaborative, and innovative open source workplace, wherever you may be.

IP and legal

Legal can be tricky. We can help. Projects in our organization will get assistance to organize and manage their IP assignments as well as infrastructure for tracking common, simple, Contribution License Agreements across all .NET Foundation projects. We can also help ensure that your collaborators respect the open source licenses and trademarks of projects assigned to the .NET Foundation. Need advice on legal issues? We offer support there as well.

Marketing and communications

The more people who know about .NET, the better for the ecosystem. We work with Amazon, JetBrains, Microsoft, Progress, and other industry leaders to improve your project 's exposure within the community at large. Your success is our success-we'd love to see you achieve the accolades you deserve!

Technical Services the .NET Foundation provides for projects

General services

We provide support services for our projects including Authenticode code-signing of binaries and installers, binary distribution management, forums, hosting, shared secret storage, online and phone conferencing as well as document collaboration facilities and access to software.

CLA management

Our automated CLA system has been working well for GitHub-based projects, with a very high rate of developers able to easily sign their Contribution License Agreements electronically. This service is offered with full automated notification to the project committers regarding the CLA status of a pull request author.

Secret management

Get a secure vault to store secrets related to your project (social media credentials, website logins, etc.). Share credentials securely between trusted maintainers on your project, or simply enjoy the peace of mind that they're safely saved

Code signing

We've implemented an automated service to Authenticode signing your release MSIs, EXEs, and NuGet packages with the .NET Foundation code signing certificate. The certificate is well known to Windows Smart Screen, so people can install your open-source application without warnings. It also allows for consuming applications knowing that the binary downloaded is the one created on your build server.

Hosting

We provide hosting for a number of .NET Foundation project resources in Microsoft Azure. We have a .NET Foundation Office 365 account with SharePoint Online, Exchange, and more.

Software

If your maintainers need access to certain software to enable them to work more effectively on their open source projects, contact us and we can talk with vendors on your behalf. Microsoft has sponsored a number of MSDN subscriptions for .NET Foundation project contributors over the past 12 months.

Azure DevOps

The .NET Foundation has a dedicated Azure DevOps instance, which allows projects to use as many agents in Pipelines as they need and provide storage for CI feeds with Artifacts.

Domain and DNS registration

Just let us know if you'd like the .NET Foundation to safeguard your project domain names or assist with DNS configuration.

What have we missed?

That's the bulk of what we offer, but who knows what might come up? We're always looking to expand our list of offerings to help you get your project done with the fewest hurdles. If there is anything we can do to help your project be more successful, please get in touch.