CodePlex Editor Role

Ask Sara, I have been bugging her for a LONG time for this CodePlex feature. Actually, my team has been bugging her team for longer than either of us have been in these jobs.

Last week’s CodePlex release includes a feature known as “Editor Role”. If you look at the Project Role Matrix, you’ll notice two primary differences from what the standard logged-in user can do: they can create/edit wiki pages and they can’t rate releases. Developers and Coordinators can’t rate releases either – I guess the idea is that they don’t want members of the team rating their own releases (5 Stars! Again! Wow, we’re awesome!).

Until now, the only way to give members of the community the ability to edit the wiki also gave permission to edit work items, check in source code and make releases. We’re still working on getting Microsoft at large to understand the benefits of community collaboration aspect in open source, but in the meantime we just can’t give those permissions to people off the team. However, we would love to have contributions to our documentation wiki. [1] With the new Editor Role, we’ll be able to grant wiki editor access without any of the other permissions.

Of course, the whole idea of “wiki permissions” kinda flies in the face of the basic wiki design principles. So we’re going to be pretty liberal about handing out editor permissions. If you’re interested in editing the wiki, drop me a line and I’ll get you hooked up. 

Big mega-thanks to the CodePlex team for making this feature happen. I guess I’ll have to find something new to bug Sara about!

[1] You can tell we’re a real open source project because we’re begging for documentation help!

Strengthening the Microsoft Ecosystem with Source Code

Today was the Presentation Idol competition I blogged about a couple of weeks ago. Unfortunately, I didn’t win - but believe me when I say I was up against some serious competition. I think I was about in the middle of the pack – better than some but clearly not as good as others.

Since I made a big deal about asking for people ideas on how to present my topic of choice – external contributions to Microsoft Open Source projects – I decided I’d post my deck and my script. Yes, I said script. Usually, I don’t script what I’m going to say word for word like this. But with only three and a half minutes to present, I thought I’d be as precise as possible. You’ll notice some lines near the end are in italics – those are ones I planned on cutting if I was in danger of going over the time limit.

Feedback, as usual, is most welcome.

Hello, my name is Harry Pierson. I’m a program manager in the Visual Studio Languages group and I’m here to talk about what I would most like to do to improve Microsoft.

At Microsoft, we care an awful lot about the software ecosystem. Searching for the word “ecosystem” on Microsoft.com returns nearly eight thousand results. We talk about the ecosystem in our marketing and in our press releases.

In 2007, we commissioned a study of the global economic impact of the Microsoft ecosystem. In a word, it’s massive. It’s responsible for nearly 15 million jobs and drives over half a trillion dollars a year in tax revenue worldwide.

No wonder we care about the ecosystem so much.

But clearly, we’re not the only ones who care. Microsoft represents a fairly small percentage of the overall ecosystem. We earn just over 11% of the total revenue and account for half of one percent of the total employment within the ecosystem.

That means there are an awfully large number of people with a vested interest in the continuing success of the Microsoft platform.

With this vast ecosystem in mind, I want to talk about Open Source. Microsoft and Open Source are often portrayed as enemies. But in DevDiv, we have several high profile Open Source projects. I work on IronPython, which has been Open Source for over four years. More recently, the ASP.NET and Extensibility Framework teams have decided to release some projects as Open Source.

I believe we should have more Open Source projects at Microsoft. But more importantly, I feel that we need to go beyond the textbook definition of Open Source. Our Open Source projects are typically closed to external contributions. But for the ecosystem at large, Open Source isn’t just about the availability and distribution terms of the source code. It also implies a collaborative development model - parties working together across organizational boundaries, contributing directly to projects in question.

The thing I would most like to change about Microsoft would be to let members of our ecosystem contribute code to our Open Source projects.

I can tell you from personal experience, there are members of the IronPython community who would leap at the opportunity to contribute code. And their engineering prowess and real world would benefit the IronPython project tremendously. But the legal process for getting permission to take contributions is onerous. Worse, the legal stigma attached to code that isn’t 100% pure Microsoft intellectual property makes it nearly impossible for any other group inside Microsoft to build on it.

I realize the onerous legal process is there for a reason: to protect Microsoft’s interests. But improving IronPython and Open Source projects like it isn’t just in Microsoft’s best interest; it’s in the best interest of our ecosystem as well. We need a legal framework that protects Microsoft while allowing for code contributions. Developing such a framework will be a challenge. But competitors like Sun, Google and IBM have already demonstrated that it’s not insurmountable.

Half a trillion dollars annually. 15 Million jobs. 42% of the IT workforce. The Microsoft ecosystem is the envy of the industry. And Microsoft is in a unique position to harness the collective experience and engineering prowess of that ecosystem while simultaneously dispelling the myth that we are an enemy of Open Source.

It’s time we make this change.

Thank you very much.

Microsoft and Open Source

In a couple of weeks, I‘m participating in an internal “Presentation Idol”competition. It’s a contest of presentation skills against impressive competition (I can’t name names, but rest assured it’s a strong group) being judged by Microsoft executives (again, I can’t name names, but this time it’s because I don’t know who’s judging) in front of what I assume will be a large technical internal Microsoft audience. To top it off, we each only get three minutes and thirty three seconds each to deliver our presentations.

So yeah, no pressure.

The topic we’re all presenting is “What is the one thing we should do to improve Microsoft?” For those who know me, it should come as little surprise that I picked a variant of “more open source” for my presentation. More specifically, I’m planning to present the following:

1. Any product Microsoft gives away for free should also be Open Source.
2. Open Source Microsoft products should accept contributions from the community.

I realize that many people consider this separation between “source availability” and “community contributions” completely artificial. Sure, the accepted definition of Open Source only addresses the availability and distribution of source code, but most Open Source advocates consider the ability to collaborate and contribute – what Wikipedia calls “Commons-based peer production” - a critical aspect of Open Source. For example, with respect to the announcement that ASP.NET MVC would be released under the Ms-PL, Keith Elder tweeted:

“Giving someone your source code is NOT open source. So although Asp.Net MVC's source code is out there for download, not open source.”

In what now seems like a huge coincidence, Keith and his co-host Chris “Woody” Woodruff interviewed me later that day for their podcast Deep Fried Bytes. As you might imagine, while we started with talking about IronPython, we eventually started discussing open source at Microsoft more generally. It was a great conversation, and we found lots of common ground.

Personally, I think Microsoft is making small steps in the right direction when it comes to Open Source. Not only have some high profile Microsoft projects go Open Source like ASP.NET MVC and MEF, but we’ve even started taking baby steps for including external intellectual property. Releasing ASP.NET MVC under Ms-PL is a big deal, but I think including jQuery “in the box” is a much, much bigger deal. It remains to be seen if it’s a one-time-only deal or if it’s a new trend inside Microsoft.

Obviously, I hope it’s a trend. Going from “include jQuery in ASP.NET” to “accept community contributions in ASP.NET” seems like a relatively achievable goal.

Now, here’s where I need your help.

I can easily fill three and a half minutes talking about Open Source community collaboration. But since my presentation is about taking contributions from the community, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and crowdsource it:

What is the elevator pitch *you* would make for including community contributions in Microsoft Open Source products?

Leave me a comment, send me an email, tweet it, whatever – I’ll be keeping an eye out for responses. Please remember that I only have three and a half minutes to present, so keep your ideas short and sweet.

Morning Coffee 171

• Big news for IronRuby out of OSCON. John and Jim have the details. Congrats to the IronRuby folks on reaching these milestones and paving the way for others (i.e. IPy) to follow some of the same paths.
• One of those OSCON announcements, is a project my teammate Jimmy Schementi has been working on: Silverline, which "let's you write Rails code that can run on the client".
• Shri Borde - the dev manager for IPy, IRuby and F# - tackles a tricky subject of static compilation of dynamic Python code. This came up on the mailing list recently as one of the outstanding requests for IPy to do is support custom attributes, which requires static compilation. Shri lays out some of the big issues with this approach. However, the community has been fairly clear on this, so it's obviously something we need to look at.
• I met someone from MS Research at the MS Product Fair who pointed me to the Institute for Personal Robots in Education, a joint effort between Georgia Tech and Bryn Mawr College and sponsored by Microsoft Research. Their Myro software (myro == my robot) is written in CPython, but there's an effort underway (aka Miro 3.0) to build a .NET version that uses IronPython. Must investigate.
• Seshadri shows how easy it is to extend C# types in IronPython. It's also shows how simple it is to host DLR code in your app - it's like 6 lines of code!
• Early reviews of IronPython in Action are good.  
• If you want to run an IronPython IDE in your browser with Silverlight, check out SilverShell from Dan Eloff.
• The XNA team has announced their business plans for community games. Basically, you set a price point between 200 and 800 points (aka between $2.50 and $10) and receive a "baseline" of 70% of the revenue the game generates. More details are available in the FAQ. This is pretty excited. I'd like to build some co-op kids games.
• Speaking of XNA, Caligari is now offering TrueSpace 7.6 for free . David Weller and Glenn Wilson provide an XNA viewpoint on the announcement, Chris Pendleton shows how to upload your models to VirtualEarth.
• Congrats to the CodePlex team on their latest drop, which features that a cool new feature - Mailing Lists! IronPython has had a Mailman mailing list for years, so I'm not sure we'll use this feature on IPy, but I'll investigate it
• Two PDC notes: First, Rick Rashid - VP of MS Research - will be delivering a PDC keynote. Second, the PDC team has put up a video podcast on Producing a Ginormous Conference in 10 Minutes or Less! It's the "inaugural episode" so watch for more Countdown to PDC video podcast episodes in the future.
• I recently discovered Chris Smith's F# blog. He's got recent posts on Mastering F# Lists and Guidelines for Readable F# code. For the F# novice, check out his F# in 20 Minutes posts (part one, part two)
• Pat Helland is moving to the SQL team. Good luck Pat!
• I like Nick Malik's formal definition of use cases, but I can't help be reminded of Charlie Alfred's Value-Driven Architecture article in Architecture Journal 5 where he said use cases were "easy to teach and explain" but that "if simplicity were the only goal that counted, we'd all still be walking or riding horses to get from one place to another."

Morning Coffee 159

As you might expect, these morning coffee posts are going to get more dev focused as well as more IPy focused.

• One of the cool things we showed @ PyCon was Django running on the latest drop of IronPython. IPy lead developer Dino Viehand posted a blog entry (for the first time in 28 months!) showing the basic Python DB provider for SQL Server he put together. Hopefully, we won't have to wait another two and a half years for Dino's next post.
• Speaking of IronPython, some of my new teammates pointed me to Michael Foord's Planet IronPython aggregate news site. Michael is IPy developer for Resolver Systems (the cool spreadsheet app hybrid I wrote about @ Lang.NET) and he's working on an IPy book.
• Still speaking of IPy, Jeff Hardy dropped his first release of NWSGI, an port of Python's Web Service Gateway Interface spec to ASP.NET and IPy. I can't wait to see NWSGI combined Django running on IPy like Dino demoed @ PyCon. Congrats Jeff!
• Scott Hanselman's post on Twitter reminds me that I recently started twittering myself. I haven't worked it into my daily routine, so it gets updated only occasionally, but after reading Scott's post, I'm thinking it's cooler than it appears on the surface. 
• In surprising news, Microsoft is going to start collaborating with IBM's Eclipse Foundation, to make it easier to it easier to write apps for Windows in Java. I would think this is a very cool thing, but apparently Ted Neward - who's knowledge of JavaWorld far eclipses (ha ha) my own - thinks "the skin here is just too sensitive" and that this move might cause more controversy between MS and Java. However, he seems to imply the controversy would be between MS & Sun (Eclipse is obviously named as a jab @ Sun) rather than between MS & the Java community.

Morning Coffee 154

• Did you see yesterday's Dilbert cartoon? Classic.
• MIX isn't the only Microsoft conference this week. It's also time for the annual MS Research TechFest conference. It actually started yesterday, with a keynote from Rick Rashid and Craig Mundy (available on demand). I'll be heading up there later today and will blog everything I saw that is public, like I did last year. In the meantime, you can check out some cool MS Research projects on the TechFest video page.
• Speaking of MS Research, they've published the Singularity source code (for academic and non-commercial purposes) on CodePlex. Singularity is research OS "focused on the construction of dependable systems". I've wanted to play with this, but I've never had the time. Frankly, that hasn't changed, but now that it's available to the community, I'm hoping I can live vicariously thru other people hacking around with it.
• Some announcements coming out of MIX won't be a surprise to anyone:
  • The IE Team blog has been discussing IE8 quite a bit of late, and the folks of LiveSide are reporting the IE8 Readiness Toolkit is already up (download links aren't live yet). There are also a bunch of developer whitepapers on Code Gallery. Update: the install links are live.
  • Scott Guthrie already announced that Silverlight 2.0 would go beta at MIX, and Neo @ SilverlightExamples has all the links for the runtime, docs and the SDK.
  • Scott also already announced a new preview drop of ASP.NET MVC, which you can get from the ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions download page.
• Here some primarily "new" news from MIX:.
• I'm not sure which team owns it, but I'd say the biggest previously-unannounced news was SQL Server Data Services (aka SSDS), a "highly scalable, on-demand data storage and query processing utility services." In other words, SQL in the sky. There's a free beta sometime this month you can sign up for. Very cool, though no word on what it's going to cost. If you're interested in this, I'd keep an I on the Data Platform Insider blog.
• John Lam announces the Dynamic Silverlight extension that lets you run DLR languages on Silverlight. Given that they talked about this last year, I'm not sure it's really "news", but John provides lots of gory details so it made the cute. But are they really using "DSL" as the acronym for this? Guys, that acronym's already taken.
• Mary Jo Foley has a scoop on Silverlight for Nokia Symbian mobile phones.
• There's a new beta of Expression Studio 2 as well as a separate Expression Blend 2.5 preview for Silverlight 2. Soma has the details. This isn't really a surprise, but I hadn't seen any news on new versions of all the Expression Studio products.

Morning Coffee 95

• New version of dasBlog is out, the final version on ASP.NET 1.1 (unless this release "kills a kitten" as per Scott Hanselman). I don't have the time (make the time?)to run daily builds, but I do try and upgrade to new major releases in a timely fashion. I'm also moving hosters, so expect a little downtime around here at some point in the near future.
• Matt Winkler is doing a series on alternate WF execution patterns. His first is the N of M pattern. While I can nitpick some things in WF - especially the limitations of transaction flow - WF's support for variability and extensibility of execution patterns is fraking brilliant. (via Sam Gentile)
• Joe McKendrick is all excited about a SOA built without web services! We've been "doing SOA" since the EDI days without web services, so I'm not sure this level of excitement - with an exclamation point and everything - is warranted. But it is good to see people realize web services != SOA. Instead of web services, CERN is using JMS to move messages around. I don't know much about JMS, but I do know it supports async and durable messaging, two things I think are critical for enterprise services.
• I saw on LtU that there's a new paper on Singularity out. For those who don't know, Singularity is a MS Research platform designed for reliability instead of performance. But there's more than just a new paper. According to the project home page, "Singularity Version 1.0 is complete. We've shipped the Singularity Research Development Kit (RDK) to a small number of universities for their research efforts." I wonder if I can get my hands on that RDK?
• Jeff Atwood is starting to show ads on Coding Horror, but he's donating "a significant percentage" of the ad revenue back into the programming community. He's starting with $5,000 and Microsoft is matching for a total of $10,000 to be donated to open source .NET projects. Go tell Jeff which projects you think he should donate to. Castle seems to be an early favorite.
• On Monday, Nick Malik posted what he called the Simple Lifecycle Agility Maturity Model (aka SLAMM) as a way of measuring your "agile factor". Surprisingly, the community response has been zilch. After Nick's comments on Agile last week, I figured someone would have something to say about it, even if only to slam it. (Slam SLAMM, ha ha.) Maybe nobody opened the spreadsheet and saw Mort has an agile factor rating of 71%? Personally, SLAMM seems like a rather coarse tool for measuring how agile you are, but coarse tools are better than no tools at all.

Morning Coffee 93

• The Washington Capitals unveil their new jersey tonight, though they have a picture on their web site. I've got mixed feelings, though I'm trying to reserve judgement until I see it "in action". I like that they're back to the traditional Caps colors. But the Caps have jersey change fatigue. They only had the screaming eagle jersey for twelve years, and they swapped out the blue jersey for the black one (that started life as a third jersey) somewhere along the line.
• Lawrence Lessig hangs up his IP spurs to go after the deep corruption of the political process. He points out that after a decade focusing on IP, he's learned all he is going to about these issues so he decided (among other reasons) that it was time to start fresh learning about something new. I keep telling my kids that "always keep learning" is one of the secrets to life. This move by Lessig is the embodiment of that principle. Good for him. (via John Lam)
• My old team keep chugging along. They've recently added "special coverage" sections on Agile Development and Enterprise Architecture.
• Miguel de Icaza details the three week "hackathon" (his words, not mine) they went thru to get a working version of Silverlight on Mono - aka Moonlight - in time for ReMix 07 in Paris. It's an impressive engineering achievement, to say the least. Also, it's nice to see the folks from Microsoft France invite Miguel to come be a part of their keynote. (via Larry O'Brien)
• Rob Bazinet points out VisualSVN in response to my question about SVN clients other than Tortoise. Like AnkhSVN, VisualSVN snaps into Visual Studio. However, where AnkhSVN is a native SVN implementation, VisualSVN depends on Tortoise. Scott Bellware wrote "VisualSVN takes a novel approach to bringing SVN into the Visual Studio IDE... it brings Tortoise into the IDE!". So it still sounds like Tortoise is the SVN client everyone cares about.
• Scott Berkun details a variety of immature development and management methodologies, including Development By Denial (DBD), Cover Your Ass Engineering (CYAE) and my personal favorite Asshole Driven development (ADD). Scott Hanselman suggests looking around and making sure you're not said asshole. I tend to be somewhat...how should I say it?...strong willed about the direction projects I work on should take. My current project is about driving a paradigm shift to service orientation, and I don't think you can't drive that kind of change without being somewhat strong willed. It's a thin line between strong willed and asshole and hopefully I come down on the right side of that line more often than not.