In developments more openly discussed on programmer forums and community groups than via corporate publicity channels, this week sees news of Microsoft transferring its WCF RIA Services to the Outercurve Foundation to exist as an open source project.
NOTE: WCF RIA (Windows Communication Foundation Rich Internet Applications) Services is Microsoft's offering to simplify the development of n-tier solutions for RIAs, such as Silverlight applications — a common problem when developing an n-tier RIA solution is coordinating application logic between the middle tier and the presentation tier.
The Outercurve Foundation was originally founded by Microsoft and is today focused on providing software IP management and project development governance to enable programmers to develop software collaboratively in open source communities.
The foundation will now maintain the project under the name Open RIA Services. Licensed under the Apache 2.0 licence, it will reside as part of its ASP.NET Open Source Gallery, where developers will also be able to gain access to resources focused on projects including NuGet, Orchard, DotNetOpenAuth, and xUnit.net.
Microsoft's open source CodePlex project site already has the http://openriaservices.codeplex.com/ URL established as it is now populated with resources to support future development.
