When I originally created the Composite WPF Shell project on CodePlex, I initially put the project and source code under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). However, after a bit of reflection this week on the proper licensing model for this project another open source project that I’m going to be announcing shortly, I decided that the CDDL was not the correct license to use for the Composite WPF Shell project.

So to make things better and increase the ability (in my opinion) of using the Composite WPF Shell in a commercial project, I decided to change the licensing terms and make the Composite WPF Shell project available under the terms of the Microsoft Public License. You can view the new license terms here: http://www.codeplex.com/compositewpfshell/license.

What does this mean? MS-PL is a very friendly license that allows the software to be used under any commercial or non-commercial circumstances. Plus, MS-PL is compatible with GPL v3, so if you’re using that to build an open source WPF project, feel free to use my shell as well if you’re interested.

I just think that this is a better model and fits better with where I want this project to go and how I want the project to be used.

About a month ago, David Pallman, the leader of the Custom Application Development Practice Council at Neudesic, issued a call to action for more Neudesic consultants to give back to the community through open source CodePlex projects. So I answered his call, and I seem to be the only one at the moment. Nevertheless, I started the Composite WPF Shell project. Check it out.

The purpose of the Composite WPF Shell project is to capture a lot of the ideas, knowledge, and experiences that I’ve gained using the Microsoft Composite Application Guidance for WPF, or Prism, project. All of this knowledge is being incorporated into a starter shell project that can be used by others to build their composite applications. By starting off with my shell, developers will gain a lot of “out-of-the-box” features that they can reuse while focusing on delivering their application value and not spending a lot of time working on a shell. Hopefully I’ll also be able to convince clients to let me reuse it on their projects.

The Composite WPF Shell project has or will have a lot of features that others can learn from and build upon:

• Acceptance tests using FitNesse and FitNesse.NET. As more WPF functionality will be built, application automation will be added using the White framework on CodePlex.
• Full unit tests using xUnit.NET, including testing of user interface components in isolated application domains.
• Workflow is fully integrated into the shell application. All user interface functionality will be driven through workflows that run on the client.
• Integrated designer functionality will allow end-users to customize application workflows.
• An add-in and extensibility architecture that will provide support for third-parties to extend applications based on the shell.

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing a lot more about the development of this project and explaining how to build new applications using the common shell as the basis for your applications.