Some Thoughts On Feelings In Open Source
It's been a while since I've posted anything about open source communities, but that doesn't mean I haven't continued to think about them. It's an issue that's near and dear to me and I spend a lot of time considering different aspects of open source. I'd like to take a moment to talk about one of those in particular: feelings. More specifically, why they matter in open source and some ideas on how best to incorporate them into our open source interactions.
Announcing AzurePipelines.TestLogger
In today's episode of "what crazy niche has Dave gotten sucked into this time?" I announce a new test logger for the Visual Studio Test Platform designed to publish your test results in real-time to Azure Pipelines. This means that you can run dotnet test from your build script on Azure Pipelines and feed your test results directly to the test summary for your build without having to rely on post-processing like the PublishTestResults Azure Pipelines task.
Code From Your Phone
I've long been a fan of mobile development workflows. I've also been interested in the convergence of .NET Core on Linux and containers as a way to enable rapid, self-contained .NET development environments. It turns out that updates to mobile tools, improved container hosting, and a little elbow grease can create a very nice mobile development setup that includes the ability to easily work with GitHub and git, edit files, and run builds and unit tests all from your phone or tablet (assuming your phone or tablet is running iOS - someone else will have to figure out how to do this on Android).
Announcing Discover .NET
After what seems like an eternity in development, I am thrilled to announce the launch of Discover .NET. The site is an attempt to improve discoverability in the .NET ecosystem by collecting information on topics like projects, issues, blogs, groups, events, and resources.
Announcing NetlifySharp
Netlify is an awesome static site host with tons of developer-friendly features including a comprehensive API. Today I'm announcing NetlifySharp, a new .NET API client for that API that lets you control your Netlify sites from .NET.
Wyam 1.0
After a little over two years of development, I'm thrilled to announce that Wyam 1.0 is now released! Wyam is a .NET static generator that unapologetically places an emphasis on flexibility and extensibility. It's the static generator I wanted two years ago and I'm thrilled that so many have also found it valuable and interesting along the way.
Development On The Go
Fitting your open source side hustle into a busy schedule can be really hard. It seems like every time you get started on a new feature, doing issue triage, writing documentation, or any of the other multitude of activities that keep an OSS project healthy you're pulled away by family, work, or other personal obligations. I've always had a family-first mentality, so for me creating a healthy balance means making the most of every minute. More often than not, that means doing whatever work I can wherever I happen to get a free moment to do it. Not everything requires Visual Studio and a compiler. Creating documentation, responding to issues, reviewing pull requests, and writing blog posts can all be performed from your phone. In fact, I'm writing this blog post from my phone right now. Here's the tools I use to enable this kind of mobile open source workflow. Before I begin though, it's worth noting that both my phone and tablet are iOS so that's what I'm going to be writing about. There are probably very good counterparts on Android and Windows Phone, I'm just not aware of them.
Announcing A New Documentation Experience
When I started working on Wyam about 2 years ago, a primary design goal (probably the primary goal) was to create a general-purpose static generator that could be easily adapted to any sort of content, from the most complicated web site to output that isn't web-based at all. I was frustrated with both the lack of a popular and robust generator in the .NET ecosystem (why should Ruby and Node get all the fun?) and also with the limitations of the generators that do exist on other platforms. Nearly all of them favor strong conventions and patterns and while many are extensible, creating experiences that differ too greatly from what's expected becomes challenging fast (a notable exception to this is Metalsmith, which is similar in spirit to Wyam).
Integrating Wyam Into An ASP.NET MVC Site
I've seen an interesting static site use case come up a few times recently where someone wants to use a static generator along with an existing dynamic site. The idea is that they would generate certain resources statically at build-time of the dynamic site and then only rely on the dynamic runtime for pages that really need it. I've long suspected that Wyam would be great in this role, particularly for ASP.NET MVC sites given that it can read the same Razor layout files. I finally got motivated enough to give this a try and will detail how to do it in this blog post. It turns out it's not hard at all and works really well once you've gotten everything set up.
Announcing Scripty
I've written a lot of T4 templates, and while they work well enough for compile-time code generation, they're never much fun to write. Recently however I've noticed an even bigger problem with T4 templates now that Visual Studio is becoming less and less a required part of the build process (more on this in a minute). Thankfully, the Roslyn team has done an excellent job of packaging the Roslyn compiler into an easy to consume scripting package. By combining that scripting support with some Visual Studio extensibility, we can provide a code generation alternative that relies on Roslyn scripts written in plain old C# (VB.NET script support coming soon).