Here Microsoft teams are reaching out to broad developer audiences with new, developer-focused technologies well before they are officially released. Our goal is that many of these technologies will eventually be incorporated into Microsoft products in some form or another. Others may be retired or released into the shared-source community. Some projects highlighted here are already in a released state but they have new concepts within them that we are trying out, to see how developers react to them for possible inclusion in other Microsoft products. Some are in prototype packages that will evolve into larger, well known products.

By and large, the prototypes hosted here are just that—prototypes. They are developed by teams of Microsoft employees looking at eventually merging each technology into a product, but they are mostly in very early stages. So they won’t all work perfectly, and they won’t be hosted here forever. Please play with them, stress them, tell us what you think, but do not use them in production scenarios at this time.

The labs are structured to encourage community feedback. We hope that you will take the time to evaluate these new technologies and discuss them through our forums with the developer community and Microsoft product groups.

The prototypes are useable, but as we said, they’re not products. Over time, we may enhance these prototypes based on your feedback, as we test the ideas further, but these are free and there’s no official support. Please don’t use them in production scenarios at this time.

We hope to release a new labs project every couple of months or so. Sometimes it’ll be longer. Sometimes it will be in a technology that really interests you. Sometimes that technology will really interest your co-workers or even your kids! We hope you become a regular visitor and participate in the discussions.

Experiment, evaluate, and then join us in the conversation.