December 2011 Blog Posts
Happy New Year’s Eve everyone! And by the time you read this, it’ll probably already be the new year. To my friends across the international date line, what is 2012 like? The rest of us will be there soon.
New Year’s Eve has always been one of my favorite holidays. It brings a collective time for reflection on the past year and anticipation and hope for the year to come.
And for me, New Year’s Eve has an extra special meaning because exactly ten years ago on New Year’s Eve, I met this woman at Giant Village. A mutual friend suggested that we should meet since we were both attending this event. This woman was there with her brother, and I was there with a buddy.
I wonder what she’s been up to after all these years?
Just kidding!
I know what she’s up to. We met in 2001 and were smitten by the time 2002 arrived and have been together ever since. Ten years later, we’ve added to our funky bunch. We work hard hoping to keep these little munchkins alive. What a difference a decade makes, no?
So yeah, New Year’s Eve totally rocks in my book.
T’is the season for “Year in Review” and “Best of” blog posts. It’s a vain practice, to be sure. This is exactly why I’ve done it almost every year! After all, isn’t all blogging pure vanity? Sadly, I did miss a few years when my vanity could not overcome my laziness.
This year I am changing it up a bit to look at some of the highlights, in my opinion, that occurred in 2011 with open source software and the .NET community. I think it’s been a banner year for OSS and .NET/Microsoft, and I think it’s only going to get better in 2012.
We released NuGet 1.0 in the beginning of this year and it had a big impact on the amount of sleep I got last year. Insomnia aside, it’s also had a significant impact on the .NET community and been very well received.
One key benefit of NuGet is it provides a central location for people to discover and easily acquire open source libraries. This alone helps many open source libraries gain visibility. According to http://stats.nuget.org/, the NuGet gallery now has over 4,000 unique packages and 3.4 Million package downloads.
Scott Hanselman noted another impact I hadn’t considered in his DevReach 2011 keynote. To understand his observation, I need to provide a bit of background.
Back in April, Microsoft released the ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools update. This added support for pre-installed NuGet packages in the ASP.NET MVC 3 project templates so that projects created from these templates already include dependent libraries installed as NuGet packages rather than as flat files in the project. This allows developers who create a project from a template to upgrade these libraries after the project has been created via NuGet.
NuGet 1.5 adds this support for pre-installed packages to any project template that wants it. In the preview for ASP.NET MVC 4, we included libraries such as ModernizR, jQuery, jQuery UI, jQuery Validation, and Knockout in this manner. We expect other project templates in the future to take advantage of this as well.
The interesting observation Hanselman had in his keynote is that this is an example of Microsoft giving equal billing to these open source libraries as it does to its own. When you create an ASP.NET MVC 4 project, your project includes Microsoft packages alongside 3rd party OSS packages all installed in the same manner.
Additionally, the way NuGet itself was developed is also important. NuGet is an Apache v2 open source project that accepts contributions from the community. Microsoft gave it to the Outercurve Foundation and continues to supply the project with employee contributors.
Orchard Project
Before there was NuGet, there was Orchard. Orchard is an open source CMS system that was started at Microsoft, but also contributed to the OuterCurve Foundation.
What’s really impressive about Orchard is the amount of community involvement they’ve fostered. They’ve set up a governance structure consisting of an elected steering committee so that it’s truly a community run project.
They recently surpassed 1 million module downloads from their online gallery. Modules are extensions to Orchard that are installable directly from within the Orchard admin.
Umbraco
Umbraco is an independent open source CMS that has a huge following and a strong community. They’ve been around for a while, long before 2011. But in 2011, Microsoft hosted the redesigned http://asp.net/ site using Umbraco.
Micro ORMS
For a lack of better term, I think 2011 was the year of the mini-ORMS. While many refere to these libraries as micro-ORMS, they’re not technically ORMs. They’re more simple data access libraries. A non-comprehensive list of the ones that made a big splash are:
If you’re interested in seeing a more comprehensive list of Micro ORMS with source code examples of usage (Nice!), check out this blog post by James Hughes.
Micro Web Frameworks and OWIN
Like pairing a good beer with the right steak, lightweight micro-web frameworks provide a good pairing with Micro-ORMS. It’s interesting that both of these picked up quite a bit this past year.
Some that caught my attention this year are:
- Named after Sinatra’s daughter, there’s the Nancy micro web framework.
- FubuMVC is billed as the project that gets out of your way.
- OpenRasta is a resource oriented web framework for building REST services.
Again, James Hughes provides a comparative list of micro-web frameworks complete with source code examples.
With the proliferation of web frameworks as well as lightweight web servers such as Kayak and Manos de Mono, the need to decouple the one from the other arose. This is where OWIN stepped into the gap.
OWIN stands for Open Web Interface for .NET. It is a project inspired by Rack, a Ruby Webserver interface, meant to decouple web servers from the web application frameworks that run on them.
This project was started as a completely grass roots project in 2011 but has seen amazing pick-up from the community and I believe will have a big impact in 2012.
Miguel de Icaza wrote a monster blog post about the year that he and the Mono (and Xamarin) folks have had in 2011. His post inspired me to write this less monstrous one. It’s a great post and really inspiring to see how they’ve emerged from the ashes of the great Novell layoff of 2011 to have a great year.
In the following image, you can see me teaching Miguel everything he knows about software development and open source while Scott acts surprised?
What really caught my interest in his post was the note about Microsoft using Mono and Unity3D to build Kinectimals for iOS systems such as the iPad. 2011 seems to be the year of pigs flying for Microsoft.
Xamarin is doing a great job of bringing Mono, and consequently C# and open source to just about every device imaginable!
Open Source Fest at 
Mix is one of my favorite conferences and I’ve attended every single one. And it has nothing to do with it being in Las Vegas, though that doesn’t hurt one bit.
This year was special due to the efforts of John Papa (who’s name makes me wonder if he ever goes all Biggie Smalls on people and sings “I love it when you call me John Papa”). This year, John put together the Open Source Fest at Mix.
This was an event where around 50 projects had stations in a large open room where they could represent their project and talk to attendees. The atmosphere was electric as folks went from table to table learning about useful software directly from the folks who built it.
This is where projects such as Glimpse got noticed and really took off. Would love to see more of this sort of thing at conferences.
Azure SDKs and GitHub
As I recently wrote on the GitHub blog, Microsoft is actively developing a set of Azure SDKs for multiple platforms (not just .NET) in GitHub. All of these libraries are Apache v2 licensed and actively being developed in GitHub.
It’s great to see Microsoft not only releasing source code under an open source license, but actively developing it in the open and ostensibly accepting contributions from the public. I look forward to seeing more of this in the future.
Last but not least, there’s GitHub. Full disclaimer: I’m an employee of GitHub so naturally my opinion is totally biased. But a bias doesn’t necessarily mean an opinion is wrong.
What I love about GitHub is that just about everybody is there. GitHub hosts a huge number of open source projects, including a large number of the important ones you’ve heard of. Quantity alone isn’t a sign of quality, but it can create network effects. When a site has such a large community, hosting a project there makes it easier to attract contributors because there’s such a large pool to draw from.
I’ve seen this benefit .NET open source projects first hand. Since moving some of my projects there, I’ve received more pull requests. Small independent projects such as JabbR have really attracted a passionate community at GitHub with large numbers of external contributions. Most of the credit must go to the efforts of the great project leads who’ve worked hard to foster a great community, but I think they’d agree that hosting on GitHub certainly makes it easier and more enjoyable.
What did I miss?
Did I miss anything significant in your opinion? Let me know in the comments. What do you think will happen in 2012? Does the number 2012 look like a science fiction year to you? Because it does to me. I can’t believe it’s just about here already. Have a great holidays!
UPDATE: Egg on my face. This post was meant to list a few highlights and not be a comprehensive list of all that happened in open source in the .NET space. Even so, in my holiday infused malaise, I was negligent in omitting several highlights. I apologize and updated the post to reflect a few more significant events. Let me know if I missed some obvious ones.
My last post covered how to improve your Git experience on Windows using PowerShell, Posh-Git, and PsGet. However, a commenter reminded me that a lot of folks don’t know how to get Git for Windows in the first place.
And once you do get Git set up, how do you avoid getting prompted all the time for your credentials when you push changes back to your repository (or pull from a private repository)?
I’ll answer both of those questions in this post.
Install msysgit
The first step is to install Git for Windows (aka msysgit). The full installer for msysgit 1.7.8 is here. For a detailed walkthrough of the setup steps, check out GItHub’s Windows Setup walkthrough. It’s pretty straightforward. That’ll put Git.exe in your path so that Posh-Git will work.
Bam! Done! On to the second question. Make sure you set up your SSH keys before moving to the second section.
Using SSH with Posh-Git
One annoyance with Git on Windows is when pushing changes to a repository (or pulling from a private repository), you have to constantly enter your password if you cloned the repository using HTTPS.
Likewise, if you clone with SSH, you also need to enter your passphrase each time. Fortunately, a little program called ssh-agent can securely save your pass phrase (and consequently your sanity) for the session and supply it when needed.
Update: Mike Chaliy just fixed PsGet so it always grabs the latest version of Posh-Git. If you installed Posh-Git before today using PsGet, you’ll need to update Posh-Git by running the following command:
Install-Module Posh-Git –force
Unfortunately, at the time that I write this, the version of Posh-Git in PsGet does not support starting an SSH Agent. The good news is, the latest version of Posh-Git direct from their GitHub repository does support SSH Agent.
Since the previous step installed git.exe on my machine, all I needed to do to get the latest version of Posh-Git is to clone the repository.
git clone https://github.com/dahlbyk/posh-git.git
This creates a folder named “posh-git” in the directory where you ran the command. I then copied all the files in that folder into the place where PsGet installed posh-git. On my machine, that was:
C:\Users\Haacked\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\posh-git
When I restarted my PowerShell prompt, it told me it could not start SSH Agent.
It turns out that it was not able to find the “ssh-agent.exe” executable. That file is located in C:\Program Files (x86)\Git\bin. but that folder isn’t automatically added to your PATH by msysgit.
If you don’t want to add this path to your system PATH, you can update your PowerShell profile script so it only applies to your PowerShell session. Here’s the change I made.
$env:path += ";" + (Get-Item "Env:ProgramFiles(x86)").Value + "\Git\bin"
On my machine that script is at:
C:\Users\Haacked\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Microsoft.Powershell_profile.ps1
The next time I opened my PowerShell prompt, I was greeted with a request for my pass phrase.
After typing in my super secret pass phrase, once at the beginning of the session, I was set. I could clone some private repositories and push some changes without having to specify my pass phrase each time. Nice. Secure. Convenient.
The Start-SshAgent Command
The reason that I get the ssh-agent prompt when starting up PowerShell is because when I installed Posh-Git, it updated my profile to load in their example profile:
C:\Users\Haacked\Documents\WindowsPowerShell\Modules\posh-git\profile.example.ps1
That profile script is calling the Start-SshAgent command which is included with Posh-Git. If you don’t like their profile example, you can manually start ssh-agent by calling the Start-SshAgent command.
I’m usually not one to resort to puns in my blog titles, but I couldn’t resist. Git it? Git it? Sorry.
Ever since we introduced PowerShell into NuGet, I’ve become a big fan. I think it’s great, yet I’ve heard from so many other developers that they have no time to try it out. That it’s “on their list” and they really want to learn it, but they just don’t have the time.
But here’s the dirty little secret about PowerShell. This might get me banned from the PowerShell junkie secret meet-ups (complete with secret handshake) for leaking it, but here it is anyways. You don’t have to learn PowerShell to get started with it and benefit from it!
Seriously. If you use a command line today, and switch to PowerShell instead, pretty much everything you do day to day still works without changing much of your workflow. There might be the occasional hiccup here and there, but not a whole lot. And over time, as you use it more, you can slowly start accreting PowerShell knowledge and start to really enjoy its power. But on your time schedule.
UPDATE: Before you do any of this, make sure you have Git for Windows (msysgit) installed. Read my post about how to get this set up and configured.
There’s a tiny bit of one time setup you do need to remember to do:
Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned
Note: Some folks simply use Unrestricted for that instead of RemoteSigned. I tend to play it safe until shit breaks. So with that bit out of the way, let’s talk about the benefits.
Posh-Git
If you do any work with Git on Windows, you owe it to yourself to check out Posh-Git. In fact, there’s also Posh-HG for mercurial users and even Posh-Svn for those so inclined.
Once you have Posh-Git loaded up, your PowerShell window lights up with extra information and features when you are in a directory with a git repository.
Notice that my PowerShell prompt includes the current branch name as well as information about the current status of my index. I have 2 files added to my index ready to be committed.
More importantly though, Posh-Git adds tab expansions for Git commands as well as your branches! The following animated GIF shows what happens when I hit the tab key multiple times to cycle through my available branches. That alone is just sublime.
Install Posh-Git using PsGet
You’re ready to dive into Posh-Git now, right? So how do you get it? Well, you could follow all those pesky directions on the GitHub site. But we’re software developers. We don’t follow no stinkin’ list of instructions. It’s time to AWW TOE MATE!
And this is where a cool utility named PsGet comes along. There are several implementations of “PsGet” around, but the one I cover here is so dirt simple to use I cried the first time I used it.
To use posh-git, I only needed to run the following two commands:
(new-object Net.WebClient).DownloadString("http://psget.net/GetPsGet.ps1") | iex
install-module posh-git
Here’s a screenshot of my PowerShell window running the command. Once you run the commands, you’ll need to close and re-open the PowerShell console for the changes to take effect.
That’s
Both of these commands are pulled right from the PsGet homepage. That’s it! Took me no effort to do this, but suddenly using Git just got that much smoother for me.
Many thanks to Keith Dahlby for Posh-Git and Mike Chaliy for PsGet. Now go git it!
Given how central JavaScript is to many modern web applications, it is important to use unit tests to drive the design and quality of that JavaScript. But I’ve noticed that there are a lot of developers that don’t know where to start.
There are many test frameworks out there, but the one I love is QUnit, the jQuery unit test framework.
Most of my experience with QUnit is writing tests for a client script library such as a jQuery plugin. Here’s an example of one QUnit test file I wrote a while ago (so you know it’s nasty).
You’ll notice that the entire set of tests is in a single static HTML file.
I saw a recent blog post by Jonathan Creamer that uses ASP.NET MVC 3 layouts for QUnit tests. It’s a neat approach that consolidates all the QUnit boilerplate into a single layout page. This allows you to have multiple test files and duplicate that boilerplate.
But there was one thing that nagged me about it. For each new set of tests, you need to add an action method and a corresponding view. ASP.NET MVC does not allow rendering a view without a controller action.
Controller-Less Views
The idea of controller-less views has been one tossed around by folks, but there are all sorts of design issues that come up when you consider it. For example, how do you request such a view directly? If you allow that, what if the view is intended to be rendered by a controller action. Now you have two ways to access that view, one of which is probably incorrect. And so on.
However, there is another lesser known framework (at least, lesser known to ASP.NET MVC developers) from the ASP.NET team that pretty much provides this ability!
ASP.NET Web Pages with Razor Syntax
It’s a product called ASP.NET Web Pages that is designed to appeal to developers who prefer an approach to web development that’s more like PHP or classic ASP.
Aside: I’d like to go on record and say I hated that name from the beginning because it causes so much confusion. Isn’t everything I do in ASP.NET a web page?
A Web Page in ASP.NET Web Pages (see, confusing!) uses Razor syntax inline to render out the response to a request. ASP.NET Web Pages also support layouts. This means we can create an approach very similar to Jonathan’s, but we only need to add one file for each new set of tests. Even better, this approach works for both ASP.NET MVC 3 and ASP.NET Web Pages.
The Code
The code to do this is straightforward. I just created a folder named test which will contain all my unit tests. I added an _PageStart.cshtml file to this directory that sets the layout for each page. Note that this is equivalent to the _ViewStart.cshtml page in ASP.NET MVCs.
@{
Layout = "_Layout.cshtml";
}
The next step is to write the layout file, _Layout.cshtml. This contains the QUnit boilerplate along with a place holder (the RenderBody call) for the actual tests.
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title>@Page.Title</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="/content/qunit.css " />
<script src="/Scripts/jquery-1.7.1.min.js"></script>
<script src="/scripts/qunit.js"></script>
@RenderSection("Javascript", false)
@* Tests are written in the body. *@
@RenderBody()
</head>
<body>
<h1 id="qunit-header">
@(Page.Title ?? "QUnit tests")
</h1>
<h2 id="qunit-banner">
</h2>
<h2 id="qunit-userAgent"></h2>
<ol id="qunit-tests">
</ol>
<p>
<a href="/tests">Back to tests</a>
</p>
</body>
</html>
And now, one or more files that contain the actual test. Here’s an example called footest.cshtml.
@{
Page.Title = "FooTests";
}
@if (false) {
// OPTIONAL! QUnit script (here for intellisense)
<script src="/scripts/qunit.js"> </script>
}
<!-- Script we're testing -->
<script src="/scripts/calculator.js"></script>
<!-- The tests -->
<script>
$(function () {
// calculator_tests.js
module("A group of tests get's a module");
test("First set of tests", function () {
var calc = new Calculator();
ok(calc, "My caluculator is a O.K.");
equals(calc.add(2, 2), 4, "shit broken");
});
});
</script>
You’ll note that I have this funky if (false) block in the code. That’s to workaround a current limitation in Razor so that JavaScript Intellisense for QUnit works in this file. If you don’t care for Intellisense, you don’t need it. I hope that in the future, Razor will pick up the script in the layout and you won’t need this either way.
With this in place, to add a new test with the proper QUnit boilerplate is very easy. Just add a .cshtml file, set the title for the tests, and then add the script you’re testing and the test script into the same file.
The last step is to create an index into all the tests. I wrote the following index.cshtml file that creates a list of links for each set of tests. It simply iterates through every test file and generates a link. One nifty little perk of using ASP.NET Web Pages is you can leave off the extension when you request the file.
@using System.IO;
@{
Layout = null;
var files = from path in
Directory.GetFiles(Server.MapPath("./"), "*.cshtml")
let fileName = Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(path)
where !fileName.StartsWith("_")
&& !fileName.Equals("index", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase)
select fileName;
}
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<div>
<h1>QUnit tests</h1>
<ul>
@foreach (var file in files) {
<li><a href="@file">@file</a></li>
}
</ul>
</div>
</body>
</html>
The output of this page isn’t pretty, but it works. When I navigate to /test I see a list of my test files:
Here’s the contents of my test folder when I’m done with all this.
Summary
I personally haven’t used this approach yet, but I think it could be a nice approach if you tend to have more than one QUnit test file in your projects and you tend to customize the boilerplate for those tests.
I tend to just use a static HTML file, but so far, most of my QUnit tests are for a single JavaScript library. But this approach might come in handy when I get around to testing the JavaScript in the NuGet gallery.
Hubot stache me.
Well the poll results are in and you guys were very close! I was taken aback at the intensity of the interest in where I would end up. Seriously, I’m honored. But then I thought about it for a moment and figured, there must be a betting pool on this. These folks don’t care that much.
Today is my first day as a GitHub employee! In other words, I am now a GitHubber, a Hubbernaut, a GitHubberati. Ok, I made that last one up.
If you haven’t heard of GitHub, it’s a site that makes it frictionless to collaborate on code. Some would call it a source code hosting site, or a forge, but it goes way beyond that. Their motto is “Social Coding”, and they mean it. They’ve turned shipping software into a fun social activity. It’s great!
Beyond a great product, they’ve built a great company culture. From everything I’ve seen and read, GitHub has figured out how to make a great work environment. They optimize for happiness and I believe that’s resulted in a great product and a lot of success. I’ll talk about that some more another time. For now, let’s talk about…
What will I be doing at GitHub?
According to my offer letter, my title is “Windows Badass”, but the way I see it, I will do whatever I can to help GitHub be even more awesome. It’s going to take some creative thinking because it’s already pretty damn cool, but I’ll figure something out. My first idea for adding more cowbell was rejected, but I’m just finding my footing. I’ll get the hang of it.
More specifically, I plan to help GitHub appeal to more developers who code for Windows and the .NET platform. For example, take a look at the TIOBE language index.
Now take a look at this chart from the GitHub languages page.
See something missing? Yes, oh mah gawd! LOLCODE is not there!!!
Ok, besides that. See something else missing? Despite the fact that TIOBE ranks it as the fourth most popular language, C# doesn’t make it into the top ten at GitHub. I’d like to change that!
I’ve always been a big proponent of open source on .NET. Pretty much everything I worked on at Microsoft was or became open source (I did work on a Web Form control that wasn’t open sourced, but we don’t talk about that much).
I will continue to work to grow a healthy open source ecosystem on .NET and Windows. I hope to see more .NET developers contributing to open source and doing it on GitHub.
This might include making the website more friendly to Windows developers, working on a Windows client for GitHub, and continuing to work on NuGet, among other things. One of the appealing aspects of GitHub to me was how much they got NuGet. Perhaps more so than many at Microsoft.
Why Bother?
You might wonder, why bother?
Well, there’s the simple business answer. The more open source developers there are, the more potential customers GitHub has. But we have larger aspirations than that as well.
When trying to build a case for releasing more software as open source at Microsoft, I once asked Miguel de Icaza, what’s in it for Microsoft? Why do it?
His response was something along the lines of bla bla bla bla. But there was one thing that he said that struck me.
A rising tide lifts all boats.
When I first read that, I thought he wrote “tilde” and I was really confused what a rising tilde had to do with anything.
But it makes sense to me now. As I wrote in a recent post talking about software communities,
The interchange of ideas between these disparate technology communities can only result in good things for everyone.
There are millions of .NET developers, but a disproportionately small number of them are involved in open source projects. If we increase that just a tiny bit, that increases the pool of ideas floating around in the larger software community. Ideas backed by code that anybody can look at, incorporate, tweak.
The nice thing here is I think a healthy .NET OSS ecosystem is a good thing for everyone. Good for GitHub. Good for Microsoft. Good for the software industry.
Am I moving?
GitHub is located in an amazing space in San Francisco. When I visited, Hubot pumped in Daft Punk via overhead speakers as people coded away. That alone nearly sealed the deal for me. The fine scotch we sipped as we talked about software didn’t hurt either.
But alas, as much as San Francisco is a great city, my family and I love it here in the Washington, so I will work as a remote employee. Fortunately, GitHub is well suited for remote employees. And this gives me a great excuse to visit SF often!
My little octocats agree, this is a good thing.
If you’ve been a fan of my blog or Twitter account, I hope you stick around. I’ll still be blogging about ASP.NET MVC, NuGet, etc. But you can expect my blog will also expand to cover new topics.
It’ll be an adventure.
Technorati Tags:
GitHub,
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New Job
So my last day at Microsoft ended up being a very long one as the NuGet team worked late into the evening to deployan updated version of NuGet.org. I’m very happy to be a part of this as my last act as a Microsoft employee. This is complete re-write of the gallery.
Why a rewrite? We’ve learned a lot since we first launched, and our needs have evolved to the point where a rewrite made sense. The new implementation is a vanilla ASP.NET MVC 3 application and highly optimized to be a gallery with just the features we need.
For example, we made extensive use of Mvc Mini Profiler to ensure pages made the least number of database queries as necessary. Also, the site is now hosted in Azure!
What’s in this new implementation?
There’s a lot of great improvements. I won’t provide a comprehensive list, but I will provide a taste. Matthew and others will write about the improvements in more detail:
- Search on every page! This seems obvious, but we didn’t have this in the old gallery. That deficiency is now just a bad memory. Also, the search is way faster!
- Package owners are displayed more prominently. In the old gallery, the owners of the package weren’t displayed. Anywhere. Which was a terrible experience because the owners are the people who matter. A package owner is associated with an account. The “author” of a package is simply metadata and could be anyone.
- Owner profiles. Click on a package owner to see the package owner’s profile. Today, the only thing you see is a gravatar for the owner and the list of packages that person owns. In the future, we might include more profile information.
- Adding a package owner requires acceptance. In the past, you could add anyone else as an owner of your package and they’d immediately become an owner of a package. Now that we show the list of owners next to a package, that’s not such a good thing. In the new gallery, when you try and add an owner, the gallery sends them an email inviting them to become an owner. This way MyCrappyPackage can’t add you as an owner as a way of boosting their reputation at the expense of yours.
- Package stats are displayed more prominently. We wanted to make the package stats very prominent.
- Package unlisting. Packages can now be unlisted. This effectively hides the package, but the package is still used to resolve dependencies.
- Cleaner markup and design. The HTML markup is way cleaner and streamlined. For example, we reduced the CSS files from 20 to 1.
- Cleaner URLs. For example, the new package feed URL is now http://nuget.org/api/v1/. In the future, we’ll probably use content negotiation so we won’t even need versioned URLs for the package feed. The NuGet 1.5 client will continue to work.
- And it’s WAY FASTER! I almost forgot to mention just how much faster the gallery is now than before.
What about NuGet 1.6?
There are some features of the Gallery you won’t see until we release NuGet 1.6. We want to make sure the site works well before we deploy NuGet 1.6. Once we do that, you’ll also see support for SemVer (Semantic Versioning) and Prerelease packages in the Gallery.
Well, as I wrote before, today is my last day at Microsoft. Last night we had our office Holiday party in the observation deck and lounge of the Space Needle. The party was just fantastic and we were lucky to have a nice clear evening with spectacular views. What a great way to go!
I had a brief exit interview where I handed over my badge with an air of finality. However, I am still an employee until midnight tonight. So it’s not so final just yet. Which is a good thing as the NuGet team is working to deploy the new NuGet.org gallery tonight if all goes well. Once that’s been up for a few days and we’re comfortable with it being stable, we’ll release NuGet 1.6.
In the meanwhile, my office has been razed of all the good equipment including my crossbows that I bequeath to my co-workers that remain, much as they had been bequeathed unto me. Here, you can see a shot of my co-workers taking shots at me. Yes, that’s David Fowler of SignalR and JabbR fame, and Scott Hanselman, of the fivehead fame who needs no introduction.
I will miss working with all of my friends at Microsoft dearly, but seriously, I live 2 miles away, so don’t be a stranger all of a sudden. And to all of you who have supported me at Microsoft via comments on my blog, tweets on Twitter, and other encouraging means. Thank you!
But just because I’m leaving, that doesn’t mean you have to leave too. I’ll still be blogging here and tweeting on Twitter so do stick around as I begin my new journey at REDACTED GitHub!