Engaging with the broader .NET community and participating in open source can be extremely rewarding. There are lots of ways to get involved in .NET and open source, and many of them don't even require much effort or a huge time commitment.
Contribute to Discover .NET
This site is a community resource and as such it can't exist without your help. The .NET ecosystem is just too big for one person to maintain an up-to-date and comprehensive catalog of everything. If you know of a project, blog, or other resource that's missing, suggest it. If you notice missing or incorrect data for an existing item, most of them have edit links. Finally, consider opening an issue if you find bugs or have ideas about how the site could be improved.
Talk to fellow developers
There are several places on the web where .NET developers hang out:
- .NET Foundation Forums
- Reddit /r/dotnet and /r/csharp
- Lots of projects have their own chat rooms, for example the CoreFx Gitter
And if you've got the time, local meetups are a great way to extend those discussions into the real-world.
Contribute code
Perhaps the most direct way of engaging with open source projects is to find an issue that needs help and work on it.
The first step of this process, finding an issue, can itself be a little intimidating. Thankfully there are plenty of resources to help with that:
If you've never contributed code on GitHub before, there are lots of good resources to help with that too:
Improve documentation
Did you know the .NET docs are open source? That means you (yes, you!) can help improve the documentation that thousands of developers rely on every day. Guidelines on contributing can be found right here.
In addition to the official .NET documentation, most open source projects would also love to have a little extra help on their own documentation. Find one that interests you and then reach out to the maintainer(s) to see if they'd like help.