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Balder - looking for developers and other contributors

Balder is a very ambitious project - or at least with all the ideas I have in my head for the project, it is very ambitious. In order to fulfill its ambitiousness (is that a word?), we’re looking at getting contributions to the projects.

There are multiple ways one can contribute, you could fork the project at Codeplex and commit to your own repository and request pulls from your fork. You could work on your own local repository, do changes and create bundles with changesets that you can post on the forum or email us and we’d look at the changes.

The last option is the new job opening for the project. We will not let everyone in on this option, in fact we’d prefer to have you go through the forking process - and we’ll be very happy to help you go down that path and get you started contributing like that. The reason we’d prefer that is to have a bit more control over what goes into the repository and what doesn’t. If you constantly deliver quality work, we can upgrade the trust level and let straight into the main repository.

So, what are we looking for getting help on.

Well, just about everything. There is a lot of work needed to be done, and the roadmap for the first half of 2011 shows a little bit of it.

In addition to the roadmap, there are a few other things we need focusing on as well :

**Blend support
**Full designtime support in Blend and Visual Studio 2010. The designtime support should utilize WPF and hardware accelerated graphics, to not slow down the designers of Blend and VS2010.

Desktop (WPF + Xna)
In order to fulfill the ideas behind the Blend support, full WPF support would be preferred. Full cross platform support between Silverlight and WPF is something of a dream for the project. Extending this to XNA is also part of that same cross-platform story.

OpenGL
Full support for OpenGL running on Mono

iOS
Utilizing the same OpenGL support just running on MonoDroid.

To mention but a few things.

There are also less hardcore things we need help on, such as creating tutorials, WebCasts, documentation, build scripts, more samples in the sample browser, code cleanup, unit tests, porting tests to Specs using MSpec. In addition, answering forum posts is also something that we need help on. The forum is very much alive and giving help and also providing feedback to development as well as registering problems with the issue tracker from forum posts are something that is very welcome.

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