Microsoft extends open source push with developer productivity tools

Microsoft's open source push continues as the company has open-sourced its Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools and made them available on GitHub.

First released in 2010, the tools serve as extensions for improving developer productivity. "Making the current set of tools available to the community is important to us, and we hope it will also inspire developers with concrete examples of what can be achieved with extensions of their own," said Justin Clarebert and Michael Dick, Microsoft senior program managers for Visual Studio, in a jointly issued bulletin. Microsoft encourages contributions to the tools as well.