.NET Foundation
organization to improve open-source development around the .NET framework
The .NET Foundation is an organization incorporated on March 31, 2014, by Microsoft to improve open-source software development and collaboration around the .NET Framework. It was launched at the annual Build 2014 conference held by Microsoft. The foundation is license-agnostic, and projects that come to the foundation are free to choose any open-source license, as defined by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). The foundation uses GitHub to host the open-source projects it manages.
Anyone who has contributed to .NET Foundation projects can apply to be a .NET Foundation member. Members can vote in elections for the board of the directors and will preserve the health of the organization.
The foundation began with twenty-four projects under its stewardship including .NET Compiler Platform ("Roslyn") and the ASP.NET family of open-source projects, both open-sourced by Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. (MS Open Tech). Xamarin contributed six of its projects including the open source email libraries MimeKit and MailKit. As of August 2026, it is the steward of 556 active projects, including: .NET, Entity Framework (EF), Managed Extensibility Framework (MEF), MSBuild, NuGet, Orchard CMS and WorldWide Telescope.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “.NET Foundation” is organization to improve open-source development around the .NET framework. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Foundation, organization and improve, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “organization to improve open-source development around the .NET framework” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20020535. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2014 and 2026.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “.NET Foundation”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow .NET Foundation primary sources, .NET Foundation archive and Foundation research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “.NET Foundation”?
- Who created the surviving record, and for what administrative purpose?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “.NET Foundation” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.