Microsoft will be handing over its WCF RIA Services to the Outercurve Foundation as an open source project. This service will help in developing n-tier solutions for rich internet applications (RIA), specifically those that employ Microsoft’s Silverlight. Originally founded by Microsoft, the open source organisation will manage Open RIA Services as part of its ASP.NET Open Source Gallery. This gallery is already an abode to various projects including NuGet, Orchard, DotNetOpenAuth and xUnit.net.
Microsoft has been working on the transfer process for some time and aims to complete the process by this summer. A website has already been created on Codeplex, which is a hosting platform for open source projects by Microsoft. Along with other open source projects that comprise ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web API, ASP.NET Web Pages, Windows Azure SDK and ADO.NET Entity Framework, Microsoft is believed to license the new project under the Apache 2.0 licence.
However, the firm will continue to provide support to WCF RIA Services 1.0, which was supplied with products including Visual Studio 2010 SP1 and Visual Studio 2012 earlier. But, certain changes seem inevitable to support in the upcoming version of the Microsoft development environment due to the move to open source. One of the biggest tasks planned at the moment is to handle and troubleshoot the clashes that are likely to occur due to the namespace change in Entity Framework 6.0.
