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by Peter Galli on January 26, 2009 06:52pm
CodePlex, Microsoft's open source project hosting Web site, has grown by leaps and bounds over the past calendar year. Visits to the Website more than doubled to top 19-million in 2008, while new registered users were up more than 70 percent to over 66,000 and the number of new projects more than doubled to 4,542 over the year.
That brings the grand CodePlex total to more than 120,000 registered users and 7,500 projects.
According to a blog by Sara Ford, the Program Manager for CodePlex, there were 12 new releases of the CodePlex software over the year, with new features including Subversion client support; an upgraded UI; Silverlight hosting; an AJAX Source code browser; and Search improvements.
The top five Open Source projects created in 2008, by page view count, were WPF, the main site for updates on the WPF roadmap and the portal for accessing the WPF Toolkit and the WPF Futures releases; the Silverlight Toolkit, a collection of Silverlight controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle; the CompositeWPF, designed to help users more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation and Silverlight client applications; MVCSamples, prototype and sample ASP.NET MVC Sample applications; and the Unity Application Block, a lightweight extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection.
Also, earlier this month, DotNetNuke Corporation, the creator of the industry-leading DotNetNuke development framework, decided to leverage the CodePlex infrastructure for its core product distribution. DotNetNuke said it would utilize CodePlex for download infrastructure, bandwidth, and metrics reporting for its core product offerings. Until now, DotNetNuke had been leveraging services from SourceForge.Net.
So, what's next you may ask? Well, Sara and the team are eagerly waiting for your feedback and suggestions.
by Peter Galli on January 26, 2009 08:48pm
Microsoft has released more source code under an OSI-approved license: this time it has made the source code for the Web Sandbox runtime available under the Apache 2.0 open source license.
The Web Sandbox project explores how to advance the web platform to improve security, isolation, quality of service and extensibility capabilities for web developers and website users.
More information on the licensing details, as well as comprehensive documentation for experimenting and integrating with the Web Sandbox, can be found here.
But, while developers are being encouraged to help define and refine the Web Sandbox, it is not recommended for those developers creating production sites as it is still under development.
The Web Sandbox was created in response to limitations found in the current web platform, and is designed to explore potential solutions. Having a more secure and robust architecture as a foundational building block will help drive the next wave of Web innovation.
The Sandbox is a framework that works on most modern browsers that support the"ECMA-262, 3rd Edition" (JavaScript) standard, and provides the same features in all modern web browsers. No browser add-ons or changes are required to leverage this technology. Beyond security, the Web Sandbox normalizes the different browsers and provides consistent W3C DOM support.
Since the initial release of Web Sandbox at PDC 2008, the team has received a lot of useful feedback from the web security community, and has also been collaborating with a number of customers, partners and the standards communities, all of whom want to adopt the technology when it is ready.
The goal? An open and interoperable standard that will help foster interoperability with complementary technologies like script frameworks and drive widespread adoption of the Web Sandbox.
This move is good news for Microsoft and the open source communities. But, it is important to note that while an Apache license is being used, the Web Sandbox project is not an Apache Software Foundation project and is not sponsored or endorsed by the ASF.
Microsoft does, however, already have an active relationship with the ASF. In fact, last year the company announced it had become a sponsor of the ASF so as to help enable the Foundation pay administrators and other support staff so that its developers can focus on writing great software.
Sam Ramji, the senior Director of Platform Strategy at Microsoft, also delivered a keynote address at ApacheCon in New Orleans last November.
Microsoft's Interoperability Technical Strategy Team already participates as a code contributor to the Apache Stonehenge incubator project; the company has also contributed a patch to ADOdb, a popular data access layer for PHP used by many applications and which is licensed under the LGPL and BSD; while Microsoft's Powerset team contributes to HBase, an open-source, column-oriented, distributed database written in Java.
For those of you who love .Net and have an interest in Web standards and Interoperability at Microsoft, then listening to the interview with Jean Paoli, the General Manager of Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, with .NET Rocks!, is a must.
.NET Rocks! is an internet audio talk show for those interested in developing on the .Net platform, and the interview with Paoli is part of a six-part series titled, "Ignite Your Coding: Web Development Series."
In the interview, Paoli draws upon his experience as a co-creator of the XML 1.0 standard to discuss XML, web standards, and the role of interoperability within Microsoft.
The interview, which can be found here, is hosted by Richard Campbell , Microsoft Regional Director and Carl Franklin, MSDN Regional Director for Connecticut.
Enjoy!
I spent the entire week last week enjoying some good weather and southern hospitality in the Carolinas. On Tuesday Mar 15 I had the pleasure of being invited to present at the Charlotte Enterprise Developers Guild organized by Bill Jones (special thanks to SystemTec for sponsoring the evening). On arrival I found the best dressed group of developers I have seen in a long time and felt compelled to apologize for my jeans and Converse. They sure keep it classy down South – something us Northwesterners could probably stand to learn from.
The focus of the talk (and subsequent discussion) was Java and PHP on Windows Azure. I was pleased to learn that the group consisted of a healthy mix of developers writing Java code, PHP code, and .NET code. In fact, close to 50% of the folks in the room indicated that they use multiple runtimes in their local data centers and are used to interacting with multiple codebases consisting of different languages. We had a great conversation about what it means to move to the Cloud and the approach Microsoft is taking to building an open an interoperable platform that will provide a robust general purpose platform for languages and runtimes far beyond .NET. I got a lot of great feedback on the Eclipse and ANT tooling that was recently announced and have opened some new discussions on additional work we are exploring enable additional Java developer workflows / build systems including Apache Maven. Stay tuned on this!
I also had the pleasure of attending the 4th Annual POSSCON (Palmetto Open Source Conference) in Columbia, South Carolina where Microsoft was a sponsor. The speaker lineup was great and there were a number of interesting sessions on the agenda particularly related to open source in mobile applications which seemed to be the hot topic of the event. I was pleased to finally meet such OSS icons as Jim Jagielski of the Apache Software Foundation, and attend a number of great sessions by other well known OSS advocates including William “whurley” Hurley, Bob Sutor of IBM and Jon “maddog” Hall.
My colleague Gianugo Rabellino had the opportunity to present a keynote at the event and took the opportunity to showcase a lot of open source work that is underway both in Microsoft and the Windows ecosystem. He described the change underway in Microsoft toward greater openness and discussed the future of collaboration between Microsoft and the the many Open Source communities on objectives we all share as technologists.
My best booth award (from a coolness factor point of view) goes to my new friends at RepRap.org who are working on building self replicating open source 3D printers. This is a sweet mashup of open source software, open hardware design, commodity component architecture and pure geekitude. We had a great debate about the future of self replication and when we were done my head hurt but it was a blast.
The conference had around 500 attendees and I even somehow became the mayor on Foursquare despite only checking in twice. It was a great time and I look forward to seeing what is in store next year at POSSCON 2012.
Craig Kitterman Sr. Technical Ambassador @craigkitterman http://craig.kitterman.net
by MichaelF on January 29, 2007 04:15pm
In December, Jamie posted a call for questions in the spirit of Festivus one of our favorite secular non-mainstream holidays (aye, we be talkin like pirates on September 19th too matey). Here is the result, or at least the first part of it.
We didn't get to all of the questions in this first pass, but we will be posting the continuation of this conversation early next week. Let us know what you think, if you enjoyed this we'll be happy to do it more regularly.
-michael
by MichaelF on March 20, 2007 08:40pm
1/Podcast_3A00_-Accessing-VS-Team-Foundation-Server-from-Mac_2C00_-UNIX-or-Linux-through-Eclipse.aspx" target=_blank mce_href="http://port25.technet.com/archive/2006/07/21/Podcast_3A00_-Accessing-VS-Team-Foundation-Server-from-Mac_2C00_-UNIX-or-Linux-through-Eclipse.aspx">Martin Woodward from Teamprise regarding their suite of client applications that provide cross-platform access to Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.
Today Teamprise announced that they are providing complimentary licenses for the Teamprise Client Suite to developers who plan to use the license to access Codeplex. This allows projects with developers on the Eclipse IDE along with anyone on the Mac, Linux or Unix platforms to use Codeplex for hosting their projects.
To obtain access to the client go to the sign-up page.
To provide some additional information on this release and Teamprise, Anandeep sat down with Martin to catch up.
Martin's Blog about this announcement can be found here.
by anandeep on March 30, 2007 09:32pm
Samir Chopra is an Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science at the City University of New York (CUNY), Brooklyn. He has a Master’s degree in Computer Science and a Doctorate in Philosophy and is interested in the intersection of politics and technology – specifically information technology.
Samir and I share more than our interest in Open Source (or Free Software as Samir prefers to call it!). Our fathers trained as Air Force pilots in the Indian Air Force in their teens and knew each other very well. In fact Samir (being the renaissance man that he is) has co-authored one of the most successful books on Indian Air Force history “The India-Pakistan Air War of 1965”. We contribute to an “open source” site on Indian armed forces history – you can read one of my articles (shameless plug!) on air war history here.
Samir is a Free Software proponent and recently he was invited to the Microsoft Technical Summit to exchange ideas with a wide audience from both within Microsoft and from all around the globe. I jumped at the opportunity to interview him about his forthcoming book “Decoding Liberation” and to debate with him our views of how software would evolve.
Samir’s site is http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~schopra/ (his co-author, Scott Dexter's site is http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~sdexter) and he writes a blog on Free Software which has the same title as his book.
An introduction to the book is here. Routledge has also given us permission to post the first chapter of this book which is available now for pre-order.
by MichaelF on April 13, 2007 09:21pm
In this interview Sam sits down with a veteran of the gaming industry, Star Trek Deck Plan Expert and Development Manager for the XNA Community Game Platform: Frank Savage. Sam and Frank discuss his background and how he ended up at Microsoft as well as the finer points of XNA. Included are demos of both games that have been developed using XNA as well as how XNA eases much of the work associated with game development allowing users to focus on the game itself.
You can download XNA Express Studio and the XNA Framework here.
by MichaelF on April 30, 2007 04:45pm
Mix 07 kicked off today with keynotes from Ray Ozzie and Scott Guthrie. Amongst announcements regarding media and Silverlight Scott Guthrie announced the release of a cross-platform version of the .NET framework within Silverlight Alpha 1.1. Included is a Dynamic Language Runtime that allows developers to use languages such as Python, Java and Ruby to program in Silverlight.
I could drone on about this but we decided to go sit down with two of the individuals who contributed to this effort: Jim Hugunin and John Lam instead. Jim, who we interviewed before, gives us some insight into this announcement including some information about new MS-PL releases to Codeplex tied to this announcement (Hint: IronPython 2.0).
Later today, we will post the second interview with John Lam.
by MichaelF on April 30, 2007 05:05pm
As promised in the first post today, here is the second interview regarding today's announcements regarding Microsoft's Dynamic Language Runtime and Silverlight. In this video Sam sits down with John Lam, who we interviewed during the LANG.NET Symposium in August (before he came to work for Microsoft), to discuss his work with Ruby and the DLR.
by billhilf on January 23, 2007 12:33pm
I can’t recall if I have ever blogged about this, but we certainly have shown interviews here on Port25 with Jeffery Snover, Architect of PowerShell. PowerShell is a command-line shell and scripting language for Windows: Think consistent syntax and standard utilities that make managing and administering Windows much easier. Powershell is not yet in the market (of course there are release candidates you can get here). But the community is growing.
Here’s some stuff I’ve found:
It’s great to see the community growth around Powershell, and I can’t wait to see this community grow even more after Powershell is generally available (and I love that a lot of this is happening on Codeplex). And remember, Powershell runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server “Longhorn”.
Cheers to the re-birth of the command line!
-Bill
by Sam Ramji on January 24, 2007 03:00am
Today I got an email from Adam Sheppard, who leads development of Photosynth. If you haven’t seen Photosynth yet… it may be because you use Firefox and not IE. That is no longer an obstacle for those curious about the next generation of photo-management technology.
It’s a visually stunning browser-based application which lets you explore a collection of photos by navigating through an inferred 3-dimensional model of the space the photos were taken in. For example – take 500 photos of St. Mark’s Square in Venice, turn them over to Photosynth’s feature extraction and 3-D processing engine, and you get this:
The first tech preview was built for IE only. Today the team has launched the Firefox version of Photosynth. As a Firefox user myself, I’m glad to be able to show this great application off at home. It’s a 5.5 MB install, and you’ll need to grant permission to labs.live.com as a plug-in source (at least temporarily).
Hats off to the Photosynth team for shipping a great application on multiple browsers! And Adam – let us know when we can put our own collections into Photosynth ;)
Cheers,
Sam
by hjanssen on January 25, 2007 11:50am
Whether deploying Windows in a Linux or UNIX environment, or vice versa, identity management can be a challenge. In order to explore this topic, Hank spent some time talking with Dustin Puryear author, consultant, featured speaker at TechX World and owner of Puryear Information Technology, LLC. Dustin specializes in solving integration challenges related to mixed environments and has penned a few books on the topic. Two of his books: Best Practices for Managing Linux and UNIX Servers and "Spam Fighting and Email Security for the 21st Century" are available as free e-books on his site.
In this podcast (Part 1 of 2) Hank and Dustin explore issues related to implementing Identity Management solutions and focus primarily on the importance of policies. While the act of deployment is by default important, without proper policies even the best solution can fall short. In the next podcast the conversation will focus on implementation strategies. If you have particular questions you'd like answered in the next podcast, please feel free to comment below.
by Bryan Kirschner on January 26, 2007 12:45pm
I started this chain of blogs about the law-and-open-source–analogy based on something Matt Asay had written that struck me as interesting—but didn’t sit with me as quite right. So it seems appropriate to tie up this set of blogs with something he wrote that seems to me to be entirely right, and helped frame a comparison about law-and-open-source that makes a lot of sense to me.
I previously blogged about the fact that legal knowledge actually seemed more “open” than “closed.” I also kicked around the idea that the supply of lawyers was especially “artificially” restricted. Without rehashing those discussions, I didn’t find those to be compelling as singular ways the legal domain was different from the software development domain.
Then I read a recent blog from Matt. Blogging about companies for whom it is an “open question” if they “are abandoning some of the community benefits of open source by having some of its technology proprietary,” Matt wrote that such companies are “trying to balance being a good community citizen with getting paid. It's not an easy problem to resolve” (my emphasis).
I read this statement as characterizing what a lot of companies and individuals—open source or not, in the software business or not—are trying to do. Specifically thinking about the legal analogy, here’s what struck me.
Among friends, family, and colleagues I happen to know a lot of lawyers (probably a result of both my wife and brother being lawyers rather than a character flaw on my part (lawyer joke)…). Thinking of this balancing act Matt describes, I realized that:
One lawyer I know, a litigator at a firm, recently made a change to a corporate (non-legal) job, in which he’s making about the same as he had been practicing law. In both cases, a pretty respectable overall salary.
Another lawyer makes literally half what he did as a litigator, working in a public (government) agency.
And one more lawyer I know makes literally a third of what he did, working for a non-profit doing public interest law.
And of course, lawyers always have the option of providing their services at no charge (pro bono)—the American Bar Association recommends 50 hours per lawyer per year.
(Qualitatively I would have to say intrinsic job satisfaction among the lawyers I know is inversely related to total compensation against these four cases. The assumption here is that, for most people, being a “good community citizen” is in itself at least somewhat rewarding.)
Additionally, individuals have broad latitude in the US to represent themselves (pro se), generating a “do it yourself” supply of legal services.
For the sake of plotting everything on two axes, you could plot the total units of legal service delivered (y-axis) against the payment received by the “deliverer” for that unit (x-axis)—in this view paying someone else would be a negative payment while DIY would be a 0 payment. (I don’t know exactly the shape of the curve here…but it actually doesn’t matter much for the sake of the thought experiment.)
Now let’s think about open source code with a similar plot in mind. Lakhani and Wolf’s open source developer study found 40% of developers were being paid while developing code. So on the chart above they somewhere in quadrant 1.
Cutting the data a different way using cluster analysis, the authors show that 80% of the sample is essentially covered by work need/payment (cluster 1) or two clusters where “intellectually stimulating” and “improves skill” lead by a long shot as motivations among predominantly unpaid developers (see page 13 of the linked document). This is code in quadrant 2 of the chart. “Obligation from use”—that is, giving back, something that seems like a commitment to giving back through pro-bono work—is the far-and-away leading motivator in the fourth cluster.
If we plotted all the units of code—open and on top of it not-open—in the world, would the shape and motivational dependencies look much different from all the shape of all the units of legal service?
In quadrant 2 (no payment received by deliverer) in either domain would be a lot of things that “scratch your own itch” or are themselves stimulating and rewarding. In quadrant 1 would be whole lot of things for which these characteristics apply less or not at all (or perhaps inversely—they are painful or tedious or otherwise unrewarding…).
This brings me all the way back to the question of law, software, and “openness.”
I took issue with the idea the primary “problem” with the legal domain was it wasn’t “open” enough. I think the process of thinking through comparisons between law and software illuminates the fact there is no single magic bullet for increasing the supply of something—whether code or legal services—at lower cost. (Note I’m taking a macroeconomic and long-term view here: although I work for a company that sells software, in the grand scheme of things more-for-less is probably good for commercial interests and consumer interests alike; neither I, nor, I hazard a guess, whoever defined that product strategy for Microsoft feels “bad” that tens of millions of end-user developers can DIY hundreds of millions of lines of code using the Excel macro engine and Office object model. That product substantially “shifted the curve” and was a win-win overall.)
Making more knowledge—through exposure of raw artifacts like source code or judicial decisions—or pedagogical materials can shift the curve. So can increasing the supply of people who are trained to be developers or lawyers. So can decreasing the difficulty of delivering a unit of service or code (XNA is really interesting me in this respect….). So can make making delivering some unit of service or code more intrinsically rewarding (fun, tear-jerking, intellectually stimulating, guilt-assuaging….). So can making it more financially rewarding to deliver some unit of service or code.
Balancing being a good community citizen with being paid is a hard problem to solve because there is no one single formula for striking the right balance. But I find that to be a good thing: that translates, to be sure, into many opportunities to try to strike the right balance and fail—but also many opportunities for diverse individual, communal, and corporate co-exist, adapt, prosper—and surprise. A world where one size does not fit all may be messy but it is a lot more interesting.
by MichaelF on February 08, 2007 11:00pm
We get quite a few requests to provide more information about Powershell so Hank and I decided to go straight to the person who just finished writing the book on Powershell: Powershell in Action, Bruce Payette. Bruce was one of the founders of the Powershell team here at Microsoft and is an expert on not only Powershell but according to Jeff Snover, on any number of popular and obscure languages.
In this interview Hank and Bruce discuss Powershell and Bruce gives us a demo. While we couldn't show everything here, if there is interest, we can go back and have Bruce show us specific scenarios and examples. Let us know if there is anything you'd like to see...
Check out the link above to see Bruce's book and read a couple of sample chapters.
Attachment: payette.mp3