What is the Open Source Club?
The Open Source Club (OSC) is a group of volunteers who contribute what they can to the specified open source project each month. If you’ve ever wanted to contribute to an open source project, but didn’t know where to start or didn’t have much time, this is your chance.
Even if you just spend 20 minutes just writing up a bug report, a “how-to” user guide, or a blog entry about the tool, it counts! It’s about making the most of the time you have right now to contribute.
Project for March: Rawr
Rawr is a program for comparing and exploring gear for characters in the MMORPG, World of Warcraft. It has been designed from the start to be fun to use, and helpful in finding better combinations of gear, and what gear to obtain. (.NET, WinForm, C# 3.0, XML)"
The Rawr project is looking for
- Issue Tracker management - going through the issue tracker, sorting out bugs from what should be on the discussion boards, figuring out which bugs are still reproducible, and so forth
- Writing documentation for the end user
- Software Testing – for those familiar with World of Warcraft
- C# and .NET WinForms developers to fix bugs and help with features
- Blogging about Rawr and getting the word out
If you have time to help, go to the Rawr project and jump in. Contact Astrylian for any help getting started.
Special thanks to Rawr for volunteering to be our first project!
We’re looking for projects!
If you’re a project owner that could use an extra set of eyeballs on your project, or if you know of a cool project that could benefit from this, please let us know.
Projects must meet the following criteria:
- Uses an OSI-approved License
- Is active on CodePlex
- The project owner wants to participate =)
If interested or want to nominate a project, contact Sara Ford.
Why did we started the OSC?
We started the Open Source Club because we want to help Open Source projects become as successful as possible.
Why a “club?”
It’s been our experience that many consumers of open source software would like to contribute back some way. It’s just a matter of finding the right project with the right needs at the right time, which can at often times be challenging. There’s also a matter of time commitments. Even if a potential contributor finds the perfect project, he or she may not have enough time to commit to finishing the task. Thus, projects are left without contributions, and potential contributors are left wishing they could have helped.
One solution is to harness the potential of as many contributors as possible and focus their combine efforts into just one project at any given time. For example, imagine if 20 people wanted to contribute just an hour once a month to a project. That would be the equivalent of nearly 3 full-time days of contributions to a project.
Similar to a book club model, the Open Source Club will announce a project for the month. Then people in the community can choose how to assist that one project in whatever way makes sense for him or her.
How is a project chosen?
Since we’re just getting started, the OSC Leadership Team (Jim Holmes, Leon Gersing, James Avery, and Sara Ford) will select the project of the month.
Thanks to Jim Holmes, Leon Gersing, and James Avery for sharing these ideas with me, knowing good and well I would be “called to action” to make these great ideas happen!
On Thursday, we deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software.
Project subdomain URLs
All project pages are now in the form of projectname.codeplex.com. A few months ago, we introduced this feature at the project homepage level. Now, we’ve implemented it site-wide.
Separate RSS feed for release reviews
We’ve heard feedback that there was too much noise in the RSS feed for release updates. We created a separate RSS feed for reviews, so moving forward, you can get updates when new releases come out without any of the user reviews.
We deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software on Friday, Feb 6. Work items in the issue tracker now have a custom field where you can add or edit whatever text you want, in case you need additional fields not already supported. You can search for your Custom field text in both the basic and advance views.
Behind the scenes, we focused on miscellaneous fit and finish work to some of the new features that came out late last year.
A couple of weeks ago, I attended CodeMash 2009 in Sandusky, Ohio - my second time attending as Program Manager for CodePlex. The first year, I spent 2 days sitting non-stop with project owners and site visitors, collecting feedback about the site. Their feedback would play a significant role in determining the priorities for upcoming features. Now that a year has past, we wanted to share with you how CodePlex has grown.
| Site Traffic | 2008 | 2007 | % increase from 2007 |
| Visits | 19,493,502 | 8,891,178 | +119% |
| User Hours | 2,804,898 | 1,237,356 | +127% |
| Unique Visitors | 9,811,365 | 4,532,440 | +116% |
| New Registered Users | 66,553 | 38,651 | +72% |
| New Projects | 4,542 | 2,130 | +113% |
New Features
Over 2008, we had 12 new releases of the CodePlex software, with the following top 9 features:
- Subversion client support – server hosted SVN Bridge allowing SVN clients to “just work” against the CodePlex TFS servers
- Site redesign – new look and feel, upgraded UI. The end of the nuclear waste green era.
- Silverlight hosting – okay, technically not deployed within 2008, but who’s counting =D
- Project statistics – see daily statistics of page views, downloads, and visits
- Ratings and reviews – rate and review project releases
- Project Discussions mailing lists – get notifications and discuss projects via e-mail alongside the online discussion boards
- AJAX Source code browser – easily browse source code before download with file tree view and source code syntax highlighting
- Search improvements – added sort by relevance or ratings, search by development status or license type, and search term highlighting
- Discussions rich text editor – write Discussions posts using a WYSIWYG editor
Top New Projects of 2008
These are the top Open Source projects created in 2008, by page view count:
- WPF - This is the main site for updates on the WPF roadmap and the portal for accessing the WPF Toolkit and the WPF Futures releases.
- Silverlight - The Silverlight Toolkit is a collection of Silverlight controls, components and utilities made available outside the normal Silverlight release cycle.
- CompositeWPF - The Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight is designed to help you more easily build enterprise-level Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Silverlight client applications.
- MVCSamples - This project is for prototype and sample ASP.NET MVC Sample applications.
- Unity - The Unity Application Block (Unity) is a lightweight extensible dependency injection container with support for constructor, property, and method call injection.
- White - Automate windows applications
And as for 2009?
We’re waiting to hear your feedback! Let us know what we can do.
Yesterday, we deployed the latest version of the CodePlex software with support for
As a project owner, you can now put a Silverlight app on your project pages. The wiki markup is
{silverlight:url=http://yourdomain.com/yourapp.xap,height=400,width=600}
Special thanks to Justin Angel (Silverlight Toolkit) and John Stockton (Session Scheduler) for their assistance in creating Silverlight apps to host on their projects to help get the word out.
From http://silverlight.codeplex.com:
From http://sessionscheduler.codeplex.com
Wiki comment improvements
Also included in this release are improvements to the wiki comments. No more random comments on the homepage, but you can still leave comments on all other wiki pages.
In addition, you can now view all new comments across all wiki pages in a single place. Go to the Change History link for the wiki pages, and in the upper-right you’ll see the Latest Comments link.
We're excited to announce that DotNetNuke, the leading open source web application framework, has moved to CodePlex at http://dotnetnuke.codeplex.com.
We're looking forward to continue to work with everyone on the DotNetNuke team and welcome everyone in the DNN community to send us feedback on the CodePlex site.
For more information about DotNetNuke and the move to CodePlex, visit Joe Brinkman's blog or the official announcement.
Despite an unusual amount of snow wreaking havoc across Seattle and no one able to make it to the office, we were still able to deploy the latest version of the CodePlex software on Thursday, Dec 18, 2008, our last deployment of the year.
New look
Just go to CodePlex.com or any non-project page to check out the new look.
Personal Project URLs for projects
We’re introducing a shorter, more personal URL for projects, where your project name comes first, in the form of <projectname>.codeplex.com. You can now do http://xunit.codeplex.com alongside http://www.codeplex.com/xunit.
Note that you’ll still see us use the longer format throughout the site right now. We have plans to switch over to the new version in upcoming releases.
Bookmark source code files once again
Using the new source control browser, you can once again bookmark specific files.
Issue Tracker performance updates
We’ve done some work to improve the performance of the issue tracker. We’re hoping you will notice the difference.
Increased File Sizes for Releases
You can now attached files of 250mb in a release.
And snow!
Okay, we’re not really responsible for this one. Across the water is Seattle, but even on a non-snow day, you couldn’t see the city anyways =D
All CodePlex TFS Servers will be unavailable on Thursday, 18 Dec 2008, starting at 6pm PST for network hardware upgrades. We expect the servers to be back up by midnight PST.
The CodePlex website itself will stay online during this time, although the Issue Tracker and Source Code tabs will not be able to provide content until the servers come back online.
We apologize for any inconvenience.
Last week, I spoke at the Engineering Excellence / Trustworthy Computing Forum to Microsoft employees at the Microsoft Development Center Copenhagen about CodePlex. I’ve gotten into the habit of bringing the CodePlex banner with me whenever I travel, so here are a few shots from the trip.
CodePlex outside the main entrance of the MDCC campus:
I visited a friend in Sweden for the weekend. She asked me what I wanted to see. Naturally, I said that I wanted to go to the IKEA. (yes, this is the flagship / original IKEA).
Now if I can only recover from the jet lag…
As mentioned previously from my PDC 2008 trip report, we had our first CodePlex Town Hall meeting.
The video is at http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Dan/CodePlex-Town-Hall-at-PDC-2008/
Thanks to Dan over at Channel 9 for filming and posting the video! And thanks again to Tamir Khason, Kevin Dostalek, and Joseph Guadagno for doing the demos!
We just finished deploying the latest version of the CodePlex software today.
Project Directory Search
The Project Directory has a new search UI. Highlights include drilling down on search results either on the tag or the release development status…
searching based on a release’s development status in the advanced search…
and the ability to search by license(s) in the advanced search.
Source Code Browser
We also released the source code browser that can be found in the Source Code tab.
Happy CodePlex’ing!
We are working on a new CodePlex feature to allow email notifications for work items updates and we would like your input!
When you subscribe to receive email updates for an issue (bug or feature request), what would you want to be notified of?
Take the Survey at http://tinyurl.com/6b69hq
Thanks!
update 2 dec 2008: The Town Hall video can be found at http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Dan/CodePlex-Town-Hall-at-PDC-2008/
PDC 2008 was the first time we had a CodePlex-branded booth, and it was the first time we did a CodePlex Town Hall.
I was very happy with how the CodePlex Town Hall turned out. I had never conducted a “town hall” before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. We got great feedback from our users about the new codeplex.com homepage designs and the documentation tab feature. And thanks to Channel 9, specifically Dan Fernandez, for not only hosting the event, but also for filming! Can’t wait to see it on Channel 9!
Thanks to Tamir Khason, Kevin Dostalek, and Joseph Guadagno for doing demos of their (or their favorite) CodePlex projects!
I closed the town hall by thanking everyone in the audience (we started with about 5 people and ended with 20-30) with the CodePlex fleece jackets. It is always fun to watch a rugby scrum break out over swag, as I told everyone to come up and grab one from the boxes. =D
The rest of the time at PDC, members of the CodePlex team worked the booth. We had a great time meeting with users, learning about their projects, collecting their feedback, and answering their questions.
The CodePlex t-shirts went fast on Day 1, and the found XL box of t-shirts went just as quickly on Day 2. The CodePlex stickers were a huge hit too, but there’s nothing quite like giving out t-shirts on the first day of a conference.
Considering I’m the Program Manager, I made sure to have women’s sized swag made, like the track jackets below that Tracy Bannon and I are wearing. It’s about time I have swag I can wear!
Today was another deployment day for us. This release of the CodePlex software introduces some new, small features across the board, along with some general bug fixes.
Release Development Status
Project coordinators can now label their releases in their development stages: Planning, Alpha, Beta or Stable, to help users decide which release best suits their needs. You may be thinking, “Can I search based on development status?” Yes, that would be a great feature to have. =D Definitely stay tuned.
CodePlex Home Page
Recently visited projects are displayed on the CodePlex home page, in the right sidebar between Your Projects and Your Tags.
Project Directory Sort by Ratings
One of the first questions I received after deploying the Ratings and Reviews feature asked about being able to sort by ratings. My response was, “Yes, that would be a great feature to have.” =D You can sort results in the Project Directory by ratings for the project.
Tag Cloud
The Tag cloud is expandable by clicking more tags from the CodePlex home page.
I’m curious how people like the new tag cloud, so please send me feedback. Previously we would show all possible tags in a very, very, very long list. I’m curious what people’s reactions are to this list.
Want to showcase your CodePlex project or your favorite CodePlex project at PDC? Channel 9 and CodePlex are sponsoring a CodePlex Community Meetup in the Channel 9 lounge area. We’re looking for volunteers to give 5 minute demos of their projects or how they are using their favorite projects.
After the demos, the CodePlex team will be demo’ing new features and collecting feedback, in a town hall / open space format.
We’ll have prizes to give out, and thank you gifts for those who demo projects.
If you can’t make it to the get together, we’ll be at the CodePlex booth towards the back of the Microsoft Pavilion hall on the left-hand side as you enter the Partners and Sponsors section all week. Come by and say hi. We ::heart:: our users.
