oss
There are 26 entries for the tag
oss
In my last post, I talked about the MonkeySpace conference conference and how it reflects positive trends in the future of open source in .NET. But getting to a better future is going to take some work on our part. And a key component of that is making NuGet better. Several discussions at MonkeySpace made it clear to me that there is some pervasive confusion and misconceptions about NuGet. It also made it clear that there are some dramatic changes needed for NuGet to continue to grow into a great open source project. In this post, I’ll cover some...
At the end of last year, I wrote a blurb about the Open Source Fest event at Mix 2011. Imagine the typical exhibition hall, but filled with around 50 open source projects. Each project had a station in a large room where project members presented what they were working on to others. You could see the gleam of inspiration in the smiles of developers as they exchanged ideas and suggestions. I left this event completely fired up. This is the spirit we tried to capture with the MonkeySpace conference this year. And at least for me, it succeeded. I’m...
Changing a big organizations is a slow endeavor. But when people are passionate and persistent, change does happen. Three years ago, the ASP.NET MVC source code was released under an open source license. But at the time, the team could not accept any code contributions. In my blog post talking about that release, I said the following (emphasis added): Personally (and this is totally my own opinion), I’d like to reach the point where we could accept patches. There are many hurdles in the way, but if you went back in time several years and...
I recently gave my first talk on Git and GitHub to the Dot Net Startup Group about Git and GitHub. I was a little nervous about how I would present Git. At its core, Git is based on a simple structure, but that simplicity is easily lost when you start digging into the myriad of confusing command switches. I wanted a visual aid that showed off the structure of a git repository in real time while I issued commands against the repository. So I hacked one together in a couple afternoons. SeeGit is an open source instructive visual aid...
I’ve seen a few recent tweets asking about what’s going on with NuGet since I left Microsoft. The fact is that the NuGet team has been hard at work on the release and have been discussing it in various public forums. I think the feeling of “quiet” might be due to the lack of blogging, which I can easily correct right now! In this post, I want to highlight a few things: What the NuGet team has been working on How you can track what we’re doing And how...
In the ASP.NET MVC 3 Uservoice site, one of the most voted up items is a suggestion to include an empty project template. No, a really empty project template. You see, ASP.NET MVC 3 includes an “empty” project template, but it’s not empty enough for many people. So in this post, I’ll give you a much emptier one. It’s not completely empty. If you really wanted it completely empty, just choose the ASP.NET Empty Web Application template. The Results I’ll show you the results first, and then talk about how I made it. After installing my project...
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...
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...
We made a recent change to make it easy to update the NuGet documentation. In this post, I’ll cover what the change was, why we made it, and how it makes it easier to contribute to our documentation. Our docs run as a simple ASP.NET Web Pages application that renders documentation written in the Markdown format. The Markdown text is not stored in a database, but live as files that are part of the application source code. That allows us to use source control to version our docs. We used to host the source for the docs site...
UPDATE: We found an issue with 1.5 when running behind some proxies that caused an “Arithmetic operation resulted in an overflow” exception message and another issue with signed PS1 scripts. We’ve now posted an update (NuGet 1.5.20902.9023) that fixes the issues. I’m happy to announce the release of NuGet 1.5 just in time to make sure our roadmap isn’t a liar. I won’t bore you by repeating the details of the release, but instead direct you to the NuGet 1.5 release notes. If you are running a private NuGet.Server repository, you’ll need to update that repository the latest...
The moon goes around the earth and when it comes up on the other side, Hark! There’s a new release of NuGet! Well, this time it was more like one and a half revolutions, but I’m happy nonetheless to announce the release of NuGet 1.4. A big thank you goes out to the many external contributors who submitted patches to this release! Your enhancements are much appreciated! I’ve written up much more details about what’s in this release in the NuGet 1.4 Release Notes, but I’ll highlight a few choice things in this blog post. NuGet Self-Update...
Almost two years ago, I announced the launch of http://letmebingthatforyou.com/, a blatant and obvious rip-off of the Let me Google that for you website. The initial site was created by Maarten Balliauw and Juliën Hanssens in response to a call for help I made. It was just something we did for fun. I’ve been maintaining the site privately always intending to spend some time to refresh the code and open source it. Just recently, I upgraded the site to ASP.NET MVC 3, refactored a bunch of code, and moved the site to AppHarbor. Why AppHarbor? I’ve...
It’s a common refrain you hear when it comes to documentation for open source projects. It typically sucks! In part, because nobody wants to work on docs. But also in part because good documentation is challenging to write. What is good documentation in the first place? The following is a list of some qualities that make for great documentation. This list is by no means complete. Good docs are… Written for the right audience Comprehensive and accurate Easily browsable and searchable Written in...
On a personal level, NuGet has been an immensely satisfying project to work on. I’ve always enjoyed working on open source projects with an active community in my spare time, but being able to do it as part of my day job is really fulfilling. And I don’t think I’m alone in this as evidenced by this tweet from a co-worker, Matt Osborn who was contributing to NuGet on his own time from the early days. A big part of the satisfaction comes from being able to collaborate with members of the community, aka you, in...
Eric S. Raymond in the famous essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, states, Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers. This advice came from Eric’s experience of managing an open source project as well as his observations of how the Linux kernel was developed. But why? Why release often? Do I really have to listen to my customers? They whine all the time! To question this advice is sacrilege to those who have this philosophy so deeply ingrained. It’s obvious! Or is it? When I was asked this in...
Hi there, it’s time to shine the bat-signal, or better yet, the NuGet-Signal! The NuGet community needs your help! We’re wrestling with some interesting wide ranging design decisions and we need data to test out our assumptions and help us make the best possible choices. I won’t go into too much detail about the specific issue as I don’t want to bias the results of the following survey. I simply want to gather information about common practices by answering a set of questions that mostly have empirical answers. I think it’s a given that most Visual Studio solutions...
The changing of the year is a time of celebration as people reflect thoughtfully on the past year and grow excited with anticipation for what’s to come in the year ahead. Today, there’s one less thing to anticipate as we announce the final release of ASP.NET MVC 3 and NuGet 1.0! Oh yeah, this never gets old. Install it via Web Platform Installer or download the installer directly to run it yourself. Here are a few helpful resources for learning more about this release: What’s New in...
There are only 2 hard problems in Computer Science. Naming things, cache invalidation and off-by-one errors. I’m always impressed with the passion of the open source community and nothing brings it out more than a naming exercise. In my last blog post, I posted about our need to rename NuPack. Needless to say, I got a bit of angrypassionate feedback. There have been a lot of questions that keep coming up over and over again and I thought I would try and address the most common questions here. Why not stay with...
In my last post, I described how we’re trying to improve and streamline contributor guidelines to make it easy for others to contribute to NuGet.
Like all product cycles anywhere, we’re always running on tight time constraints. This helps us to maintain a tight focus on the product. We don’t want to the product to do anything and everything. However, we do want to deliver everything needed (along with double rainbows and unicorns) to meet our vision for this first release.
The best to meet those goals is to get more contributions from outside the core team. And the best way...
A couple days ago I wrote a blog post entitled, Running Open Source In A Distributed World which outlined some thoughts I had about how managing core contributors to an open source project changes when you move from a centralized version control repository to distributed version control. The post was really a way for me to probe for ideas on how best to handle feature contributions. In the post, I asked this question, Many projects make a distinction between who may contribute a bug fix as opposed to who may contribute a feature. Such projects...
When it comes to running an open source project, the book Producing Open Source Software - How to Run a Successful Free Software Project by Karl Fogel (free pdf available) is my bible (see my review and summary of the book). The book is based on Karl Fogel’s experiences as the leader of the Subversion project and has heavily influenced how I run the projects I’m involved in. Lately though, I’ve noticed one problem with some of his advice. It’s so Subversion-y. Take a look at this snippet on Committers. As the only formally...
There’s a great interview on the How Software is Built blog with Brad Wilson, a developer in Microsoft’s OfficeLabs team, but probably better known for his work on xUnit.net, CodePlex, and ObjectBuilder. What I particularly liked about this post was the insight Brad provides on the diverse views of open source outside and inside of Microsoft as well as his own personal experience contributing to many OSS projects. It’s hard for some to believe, but there are developers internal to Microsoft who like and contribute to various open source projects. Another reason that Brad gets a thumbs...
Oren Eini, aka Ayende, writes about his dissatisfaction with Microsoft reproducing the efforts of the OSS community. His post was sparked by the following thread in the ALT.NET mailing list:
Brad: If you're simply angry because we had the audacity to make our own object factory with DI, then I can't help you; the fact that P&P did ObjectBuilder does not invalidate any other object factory and/or DI container.
Ayende: No, it doesn't. But it is a waste of time and effort.
Brad: In all seriousness: why should you care if I waste my time?
Ayende’s response is:
...
Jeff Atwood writes a great summary of Open Source Licenses. As far as I’m concerned, there’s really only four software licenses to worry about (open source or otherwise). Proprietary - The code is mine! You can’t look at it. You can’t reverse engineer it. Mine Mine Mine! GPL - You can do whatever you want with the code, but if you distribute the code or binaries, you must make your changes open via the GPL license. New BSD - Use at your own risk. Do whatever the hell you want with the code, just keep the license...
A recent confrontational thread within the Subtext forums that I shared with Rob Conery got us into a discussion about the challenges of dealing with difficult members of an Open Source community. There are many approaches one can take. Some advocate not engaging disruptive community members. I tend to give everyone the benefit of the doubt at first. Rob often commends me for my paticence in dealing with users in the forums. Neither approach is necessarily better than the other. It’s a matter of style.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about running an Open Source project, it’s that it takes two key qualities.
First, you really...
When searching for source code in a particular language, what do the words being searched on tell you about that language?
Koders.com publishes an interesting Open Source Zeitgeist which focuses on search trends and patterns within open source code. This is very similar to Google’s Zeitgeist, but grouped by programming language and specific to open source code. This might help us gain some insight into answering the above question.
For example, compare this screenshot of the top Ruby, Java, and C# searches.
It’s hard to draw any conclusive conclusions based on this sample, but let me offer a few uninformed thoughts, and you can tell...