During the .NET Conference 2019, NEO announced that it has joined the Microsoft created .NET Foundation – making it the first blockchain project to join the organization. In a press release published on the neo.org blog, NEO said that together “NEO and the .NET Foundation will further empower millions of developers to build the foundation for next-gen Internet.”

The .NET Foundation is an independent, open-source, non-profit organization dedicated to promoting innovation and adoption of the .NET ecosystem. The NEO core is built in C#, which is heavily integrated with Microsoft’s .NET framework. The .NET Foundation provides a wide range of support for projects developing on the platform, including guidance and mentoring, IP and legal advice, marketing and communications, and technical services such as certificates, code signing, and access to software.

The .NET Foundation website claims that it currently has close to 12,000 contributors across 21 GitHub organizations and 556 repositories, with over 59,000 forks.

John Galloway, executive director of the .NET Foundation, said of NEO joining the organization:

“The .NET Foundation is very excited to welcome NEO as the very first blockchain platform to join our community. NEO is a pioneer in adopting the .NET platform, and we support them in building an innovative decentralized platform and developer community. NEO is joining the .NET Foundation at an exciting time of growth for the .NET Foundation, as well, and we’re very happy to have them on-board!”

The move further supports recent developments by NEO Global Development (NGD) Seattle, which is led by Microsoft alumni John deVadoss, Peng Huang, and Harry Pierson.

In pursuit of creating the “F5 experience” – a term often used by deVadoss to describe a seamless development experience – NGD Seattle’s first products are the NEO Blockchain Toolkit for .NET and NEO Express. Together these tools will enable developers to more easily write, debug, and deploy smart contracts on the NEO blockchain.

The capabilities include:

  • NEO Smart Contract Debugger – to debut a fully integrated smart contract debugging experience inside of Visual Studio Code.
  • NEO Express – to enable comprehensive end-to-end software development lifecycle scenarios for NEO2 and NEO3 with the ability to be managed from within Visual Studio Code and using command-line utilities.
  • NEO Smart Contract Compiler Enhancements – to enable a fully friction-free smart contract edit-compiling-debug-testing-deploy experience.
  • NEO-FX Library – to provide the Unified Programming Model for NEO, delivering a consistent and highly productive developer experience with a common set of fundamental types (such as large unsigned integers for hash values and elliptic curves for cryptography), domain models (such as blocks and transactions), and service abstractions (such as retrieving a transaction or invoking a smart contract).
  • NEO Visual DevTracker – to debut as an innovative developer-focused chain explorer and tracker fully integrated inside Visual Studio Code.

Speaking during the .NET Conference 2019, deVadoss, noted his excitement at joining the .NET Foundation:

“As the first blockchain project to join the .NET Foundation, we’re excited to come together based on our shared commitment to open-source, to developers, and to world-wide community collaboration. Based on our shared core values and principles, I am confident that this partnership will accelerate developer innovation to drive mass adoption of blockchain and build the foundation for next-gen Internet.”

NEO’s press release can be found at the below link:
https://neo.org/blog/details/4179

The .NET Foundation website can be found at:
https://dotnetfoundation.org

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