Some Thoughts on Microdependencies, NPM, and Node
Unless you've been hiding under a rock, you've heard about the controversy over left-pad in which a Node developer, angry over a trademark dispute, pulled all of his packages from NPM. It turns out that one of these packages, left-pad, was actually a dependency for a bunch of other packages and so builds everywhere came grinding to a halt. Now everyone has an opinion on the topic, many of which are very thought-provoking. I figure what the heck, since everyone else is writing about it I might as well too.
Announcing @dotnetissues
As more and more of the .NET framework, runtime, etc. get put in the open on GitHub, the community has the opportunity to participate in the day-to-day evolution of core parts of our platform. However, given the large number of projects (which is great!) and the volume of interaction, it can be hard to keep up. This is especially true because of the all-or-nothing notification model in GitHub. If you watch a repository, you will get notified of every since action including comments, commits, etc. What I wanted was a way to get notified of new issues so that I could keep an eye on things and then elect to subscribe to additional notifications for just the ones that interested me.
LINQPad.CodeAnalysis Is Now Part Of LINQPad
Just a quick note that most of the functionality in LINQPad.CodeAnalysis can now be found in LINQPad 5 (as of 5.02 beta). When using LINQPad 5, the syntax tree and syntax visualizer are both found under the "Tree" tab after executing a query. This tab is available for any query and you can also dump a SyntaxTree or SyntaxNode explicitly by calling .DumpSyntaxTree() or .DumpSyntaxNode(). The integration in LINQPad 5 is also tighter than a plugin allows and lets you highlight the original query as you highlight nodes in the syntax tree as well as other UI improvements. I'd like to thank Joseph Albahari for making this integration possible and for tweaking things to provide the best possible experience:
Announcing Wyam
I am very proud to announce my newest project, Wyam. It's a static site and content generator built from the ground up to be modular and flexible.
Announcing LINQPad.CodeAnalysis
LINQPad.CodeAnalysis is a library that contains a set of .NET Compiler Platform helpers and utilities for LINQPad. Because it is so low ceremony but also has advanced functionality like debugging, data source connections, and advanced output and visualization, LINQPad provides an ideal platform for quickly experimenting, exploring, and working with the .NET Compiler Platform.
Open Source Obligations
With the Thanksgiving holiday just around the corner here in the US, we traditionally consider everything that we're thankful for. I have the typical list that includes my family, friends, health, etc. but I've also been thinking about how thankful I am from a professional perspective this year. From the very top on down, there has never been a better time to be a developer. With abundant conferences, meet-ups, online social networks, resources, and open code, we developers are in the midst of a global community that is larger, more active, and more heterogeneous than ever before. This is certainly true for developers on any technology stack, but recent events have made it particularly apparent to those working on the .NET platform. I am specifically thankful for the abundance of open source code and other resources made possible by the many selfless contributions of others. However, there are many different opinions with respect to the way in which we should be participating in the open source processes. These convictions are only strengthened by the fact that there are very real financial, time, and personal implications for those involved. I've seen a number of recent discussions on Twitter and elsewhere regarding the obligations of the various participants and I'd like to examine this issue in a little more detail. This post is going to be very opinionated and I invite you to disagree with me. With open source software becoming increasingly vital to commercial enterprise, it's important to have an open and civilized discussion about these topics.
A Survey of .NET Static Site Generators
There is a lot of demand and a lot of active development around static site generators. If you're not familiar with them, these tools take markup or other simplified content and turn those resources into a full static website (HTML, CSS, etc.). There are a number of great static site generators out there, and it seems like a new one is released nearly every week. However, for this survey I am going to focus on the state of static site generation in the .NET ecosystem.
Announcing RazorDatabase
On multiple web projects recently I've needed to display content that relies on metadata about other content. One example is displaying a list of recent news releases with summaries on the home page of a site. Another example would be something similar for blog entries. You can extend this idea even further by considering metadata oriented pages like a list of tags for all the blogs on a site, or a list of all news articles that pertain to a specific subject.