The group has announced its first non-Microsoft undertaking, the MVC Contrib project CodePlex Foundation, a Microsoft-backed open source projects initiative, has accepted its first non-Microsoft project, the foundation said on Wednesday.The MVC Contrib project, enabling developers to build and test UI elements on top of Microsoft’s ASP.Net MVC framework for model view controller-based Web development, has been contributed to CodePlex. MVC Contrib is led by Eric Hexter and Jeffrey Palermo of software development and consulting firm Headspring.[ Last week, InfoWorld’s Paul Krill reported that Microsoft is moving forward with version 2 of ASP.Net MVC. ] “By contributing the MVC Contrib project to the CodePlex Foundation, we are stepping up to help bridge the gap between corporations and the open source community,” said Hexter, who is Headspring’s director of open source software initiatives, in a statement released by CodePlex.Microsoft-contributed projects at CodePlex include the Orchard Project, providing applications and reusable components for ASP.Net, and ASP.Net Ajax Library, for building database-driven Web applications to execute entirely in a browser.Formed last September, CodePlex Foundation is intended to bring together open source communities and software companies for the purpose of increasing participation in open source projects. This story, “CodePlex open source group moves beyond Microsoft,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Follow the latest news in software development at InfoWorld.com. Software DevelopmentTechnology Industry