Microsoft is continuing its efforts to appeal to much more open-source developers to create their wares readily available on Windows. The newest part of that technique is CoApp, a brand new open-source package-management platform that 1 with the firm;s developers is beginning to assemble.The goal of CoApp is to assemble in a single location a “community-driven package-management system” and associated tools to encourage the development and maintenance of open-source applications on Windows,
Office Professional 2007, according to a March 31 blog post by Garrett Serack, Microsoft;s Open Supply Community Software Developer.Open-source developers need a better way to get current binaries, compilers and libraries they need to get their software working on Windows, Serack said. Consumers of open-source software on Windows need these things, too.“Clearly there is a strong need for a package management system,
Office 2007 Standard Serial cl��, along the same lines as apt, rpm, synaptic (and others) but built for the Windows platform, and compatible with Windows features,” Serack said. “I’m not interested in simply making a knock-off of the Unix-style way of doing things. Windows doesn’t store binaries in c:\usr\bin (/usr/bin) and libraries in c:\usr\lib (/usr/lib), so we’re not going to do things like that.”Serack explains more with the background of why he is creating CoApp in his post:“The biggest challenge to using/building/maintaining many Open Supply applications on Windows, is that Windows does quite a bit of things differently than Linux and Unix . Different filesystems, command lines, APIs, user experiences … well, pretty substantially everything. Regardless of personal opinions about it being the ‘right-way’ or ‘wrong-way’,
Office 2007 Pro Plus, it suffices to say that it is just simply different.“In order to build an Open Source application like PHP for Windows from scratch,
Office 2007 Pro Plus, I need to have a collection of libraries created from a fair number of different projects.”CoApp will handle multiple versions of binaries using WinSxS (side-by-side), including multiple copies with the same version with the same library, compiled with different compilers. It also will support both 32- and 64-bit systems; provide tools and methods for handling dependencies; allow for upgrades and patching of libraries and apps,
Office 2007 Pro Plus cl��, and extra.Serack has started putting together the specifications and tools for CoApp on Launchpad and the wiki at He said he welcomes contributions and feedback.Update (April 7): Serack is remaining a full-time Microsoft employee but he and his project are moving to the CodePlex Foundation, which is the Microsoft-founded and funded open-source foundation.
