It is my pleasure to announce that today Microsoft forked Playwright Sharp!

Wait, did you give the project away?

No, I didn't. Because it was never mine.

It's our project

Playwright Sharp uses the MIT License. That means that Playwright Sharp is mine, and it's also yours, and it's also Microsoft's. It's ours.

You can do the same! You can fork the project and make it better.

Playwright team rocks!

They could just copy my code and ship it with a different name. But instead, they opened the doors of their team and embraced the Playwright Sharp project.

I think Playwright Sharp fits perfectly in the vision the team has for the product.

But, why?

I think it's what needs to be done to take this project to the next level.
The .NET community needs to grown in their relationship with the open-source. Aaron Stannard explained very well on his post The Next Decade of .NET Open Source.

When a .NET team needs to add a third-party tool to their toolbox, the management evaluates the long term support and the final decision tends to be: "I'd better use a tool from Microsoft than from a random Argentinian guy".

We developers also have some responsibility. The biggest risk for a .NET developer involved in open-source is Microsoft creating a similar project. And it's not Microsoft fault at all. But developers would pick Entity Framework over Nhibernate, the default ASP.NET DI over Windsor Castle, etc.

I love how Microsoft embraced open-source and became a big player in the open-source community. But I think the .NET community has a lot to learn yet.

Another reason to move the project is that, despite the relative popularity of Puppeteer-Sharp, I wasn't able to build a stable team.
My hope with this move is to serve way more developers compared to Puppeteer-Sharp and also get more people involved in the project.

Remember, it's not my project. It's OURS.

Are you leaving the project?

Hell no! The roadmap will now be aligned with Playwright, which will be great for Playwright Sharp. Arjun Attam is an awesome PM, and I hope he can help me take Playwright-Sharp to the next level.

The future

My dream is to make Playwright-Sharp a first-class automation tool for the .NET community, and there is no better partner than Microsoft to accomplish that.

Give some love!

So, Playwright Sharp has a new home: https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-sharp. Let's go there and give it some love ⭐️.

Happy automation!

Don't stop coding!