Subtext Awakens From Its Slumber

Subtext Submarine
Logo It’s been all quiet on the Subtext front for a while. While I think many open source projects face the occasional lull, Subtext was hit by a Perfect Storm of inactivity.

This was mostly because several of the key developers all ended up having job changes (and moves) around the same time. For me, the move to Microsoft and up to the Seattle area took up a lot of my time and energy.

I finally feel settled in so I fired up the old TortoiseSVN client and got latest from the tree excited to see what new goodness people checked in during my absence.

Ok, that’s not exactly true, but captures the spirit of the truth.

In any case, now that I’m mostly settled into lovely Bellevue, WA, I decided to spend a bit of time last week working on Subtext. I’m now swamped again, but I got a few key fixes in already which I’m happy about.

We decided to scale back the 2.0 release a bit. We were a bit too ambitious with the feature set and supporting two branches became way to time consuming. So we replaced the trunk with the 1.9 branch and all new development is in the trunk where it should be.

The next version will still target ASP.NET 2.0, but after that, we want to have fun with this so we’ll start to target ASP.NET 3.5. I won’t go into the feature list for 2.0 right now. The bulk of the work is on bug fixes, small tweaks and improvements, and infrastructure improvements. I feel like one of the best parts of Subtext is our build process and continuous integration server.

Since we decided to label the next version 2.0, we will be adding a few new hotly requested features. It should be a nice release. Sorry it’s been so quiet for so long, but the engine is back up and running full speed ahead.

Comments

14 responses

Torkel • April 8th, 2008
Any plans to convert it to ASP.NET MVC? Would be great to have one more open source web application that is using an MVC framework. But I guess that would be way too big a change.

Daniel • April 8th, 2008
I can't wait for the next version of subtext. I learnt a lot from the code in subtext. I would like to see the MVC framework used in the 3.5 target i think that would be a great way to show off some of the routing features.

Haacked • April 8th, 2008
@Torkel Yeah, we all want to rewrite it in MVC. I think it might be a good time for a rewrite of the core.
@Daniel I've been thinking of using the Routing *before* converting to MVC, to show what's possible with WebForms.

Scott Galloway • April 8th, 2008
Hey, if you need a hand with it let me know.

Simone Chiaretta • April 8th, 2008
Working on Subtext is lot of fun... especially that there is a renewed commitment from the key developers...
As for the build process... stay tuned for more enhancements :)

Joe Brinkman • April 8th, 2008
Glad to hear that development has resumed. Unfortunately I made the decision a week ago to switch to BlogEnging.Net. One thing that is tough in Open Source is that if a project appears to go dormant then users will eventually leave. While I certainly appreciate the desire, I fear the reality of Redmond will kick in again and SubText will once again run silent and deep. I would suggest that the best thing you could do for the project is to focus on identifying a team that can carry on in your absense.

SuperJason • April 8th, 2008
Please put some SEO optimizations in. If you would like more information, feel free to shoot me an email.

Si Philp • April 8th, 2008
I have started doing some skins which I will be submitting over the next couple of days (1 just submitted on skins site). Am looking forward to the next release :)

Haacked • April 9th, 2008
@joe brinkman I appreciate your perspective. I think I have identified people who can carry the banner in my absense. Simo, Steve, etc... Unfortunately, we all were slammed at the same time. :(
Since I do this for fun, I'm not bothered too much by people leaving. It'll be a fun goal to try and bring people back. :)

Joe Brinkman • April 9th, 2008
@Phil - Yeah... @#$!&^% life... always getting in the way. Hopefully we can catch up next week in Redmond. We need to follow up on our MVC chat from OpenForce.

Josh Stodola • April 9th, 2008
Are you sure those developers just didn't run over to work on BlogEngine.NET?

Tuna Toksoz • April 9th, 2008
Aghh, the sleeping dragon has just woken up!!! I was working on a blog application with MS MVC but, I have to be faster now. But i have almost no time nowadays.
May I ask here for developers to join me, or should I go and ask somewhere else?

Josh Coswell • April 9th, 2008
Thanks for the helpfull post.
Josh Coswell
http://riverasp.net

Scott • April 9th, 2008
I'm ruminating over the source code now. It's a little daunting. Right now, I'm just looking at the JavaScript story. There are a lot of little scripts tucked away here and there. I re-joined the mailing list, so I'm looking forward to finding out what everyone thinks needs to be done in terms of the UI.