Open source C# is set to get a boost with the announcement of dotnet/csharpstandard, a home on GitHub for ongoing work to document the standard, to complement the official repository for C# language design at dotnet/csharplang and the dotnet/roslyn repository created for the compilers.

Announcing the development on the .Net blog, Microsoft’s Bill Wagner said the creation of dotnet/csharpstandard “completes” the move to open source, providing a public space for the ongoing work to document the standard for the latest C# language versions.

Moving the standards work into the open under the .NET Foundation makes it easier for the work to happen, Wagner claimed. “Everything from language innovation and feature design through implementation and on to standardisation now takes place in the open,” he said.

The move will make it easier for the language design team, the compiler implementers, and the standards committee to ask questions of each other, while those conversations will also be out in public for everyone to see.

Wagner points out that the ECMA C# standards committee is still responsible for creating the proposed standard for the C# language. What changes now is that the work now happens in the open, under the .NET Foundation.

“You can see work in progress on the standard text for C# 6. This work merges the draft spec currently hosted in the csharplang repository with the current C# 5.0 standard text,” he said. Work on incorporating C# 7 features is also taking place.

With the addition of dotnet/csharpstandard to the .NET Foundation, work can more easily be directed to the correct place. Thus, any issues that have been in dotnet/csharplang and dotnet/docs for the spec text will move to the new dotnet/csharpstandard repository over the coming weeks.

As a result of all this, the C# spec on docs.microsoft.com will soon be replaced with the version from the standards committee. This will take place once all C# 6 pull requests have been reviewed and merged in the standards repo, according to Wagner.