One of the easiest ways to contribute is to participate in discussions on GitHub issues. You can also contribute by submitting pull requests with code changes.
Start a discussion on the repository issue tracker.
For non-security related bugs, log a new issue in the appropriate GitHub repository. Here are some of the most common repositories:
Or browse the full list of repositories in the aspnet organization.
Security issues and bugs should be reported privately, via email, to the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) secure@microsoft.com. You should receive a response within 24 hours. If for some reason you do not, please follow up via email to ensure we received your original message. Further information, including the MSRC PGP key, can be found in the Security TechCenter.
Our team members also monitor several other discussion forums:
- ASP.NET Core forum
- Stack Overflow with the
asp.net-core,asp.net-core-mvc, orentity-framework-coretags.
We are always happy to see PRs from community members both for bug fixes as well as new features. To help you be successful we've put together a few simple rules to follow when you prepare to contribute to our codebase:
-
Start from an issue, not PR Over the years we've seen many PRs targeting areas of the framework, which we didn't plan to expand further at the time. In all these cases we had to say
noto those PRs and close them. That, obviously, is not a great outcome for us. And it's especially bad for the contributor, as they've spent a lot of effort preparing the change. To resolve this problem, we've decided to separate a bucket of issues, which would be great candidates for community members to contribute to. We mark these issues withhelp wantedlabel. You can find all these issues at: https://aka.ms/aspnet/helpwanted.Within that set, we have additionally marked issues which are good candidates for first-time contributors. Those do not require too much familiarity with the framework and are more novice-friendly. Those are marked with
good first issuelabel. The full list of such issues can be found at https://aka.ms/aspnet/goodfirstissues. If there is some other area not included here where you want to contribute to, first open an issue to describe the problem you are trying to solve and state that you're willing to contribute a fix for it. We will then discuss in that issue, whether we think it belongs in the platform and the best approach to solve it. -
Discuss the design with the team before actually working on a fix This can save you a lot of time. We've seen PRs, where customers would solve an issue in a way, which either wouldn't fit into the framework because of how it's designed or it would change the framework in a way, which is not something we'd like to do. To avoid these situations, we encourage customers to discuss the preferred design with the team first. To do so, file a new
design proposalissue, link to the issue you'd like to address and provide detailed information about how you'd like to solve a specific problem. We triage issues peridocially and it will not take long for a team member to engage with you on that proposal. When you get an agreement from our team members that the design proposal you have is solid, then go ahead and prepare the PR. To file a design proposal, look for the relevant issue in theNew issuepage or simply click this link:
By following the guidance provided above, you will greatly increase chances for your PR to be accepted and merged.
Here are some resources to help you get started on how to contribute code or new content.
- Look at the Contributor documentation to get started on building the source code on your own.
- "Help wanted" issues - these issues are up for grabs. Comment on an issue if you want to create a fix.
- "Good first issue" issues - we think these are a good for newcomers.
If you would like to contribute to one of our repositories, first identify the scale of what you would like to contribute. If it is small (grammar/spelling or a bug fix) feel free to start working on a fix. If you are submitting a feature or substantial code contribution, please discuss it with the team and ensure it follows the product roadmap. You might also read these two blogs posts on contributing code: Open Source Contribution Etiquette by Miguel de Icaza and Don't "Push" Your Pull Requests by Ilya Grigorik. All code submissions will be rigorously reviewed and tested further by the ASP.NET team, and only those that meet an extremely high bar for both quality and design/roadmap appropriateness will be merged into the source.
You will need to sign a Contributor License Agreement when submitting your pull request. To complete the Contributor License Agreement (CLA), you will need to follow the instructions provided by the CLA bot when you send the pull request. This needs to only be done once for any .NET Foundation OSS project.
If you don't know what a pull request is read this article: https://help.github.com/articles/using-pull-requests. Make sure the repository can build and all tests pass. Familiarize yourself with the project workflow and our coding conventions. The coding, style, and general engineering guidelines are published on the Engineering guidelines page.
- Tests need to be provided for every bug/feature that is completed.
- Tests only need to be present for issues that need to be verified by QA (for example, not tasks)
- If there is a scenario that is far too hard to test there does not need to be a test for it.
- "Too hard" is determined by the team as a whole.
Your pull request will now go through extensive checks by the subject matter experts on our team. Please be patient; we have hundreds of pull requests across all of our repositories. Update your pull request according to feedback until it is approved by one of the ASP.NET team members. After that, one of our team members may adjust the branch you merge into based on the expected release schedule.