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.

We’ve been slowly but surely increasing the frequency of IronPython source drops. When I joined the team last April, we we only pushing the source about twice a month (sometimes only once a month). By last July, we were pushing source about once a week. Since mid-January, we’ve pushed out the latest source 131 times, which comes to about once a day on average since the start of the year. Big kudos to Dave Fugate, who’s primarily responsible for improving the frequency of our source code drops.

However, while we’ve been good about source code drop frequency, we haven’t been good about transparency. All those source drops have the same less-than-useful checkin comment “Latest IP sources migrated to CodePlex TFS”. If you wanted to know what was changed in a given changeset, you had to do the diff yourself.

But all that opaque code changes is a thing of the past now. Dave upgraded out source push script so that it emails a list of changes as well as the checkin comments whenever we update the source on CodePlex. For example, check out the source push announcement for our latest source drop.  Now we publish added, deleted and modified sources as well as the comments for any checkins included in the source drop.

As Dave said on the mailing list, please let us know if you have any feedback on these source update emails. I think they’re awesome (though I did have one small suggestion) but we want to know what you think.

Today is my daughter Rileyanne’s fourth birthday. She was born on 5-5-05 (at 5:25pm no less!).

Jules and I were picking out pictures for Riley’s “birthday ribbon” and we came across this one from her birthday party weekend before last. We had it a week early because my mother-in-law had surgery on her foot last week. It was a girls-only princess tea party, so I didn’t get to see her chasing bubbles in person. I loved this picture, but we ended up using one where you could see her face better. Still, I thought it was just too good not to share.

Happy Birthday big girl!

This is an amazing picture of an amazing save in yesterday’s Capitals/Penguins 3-2 nail biting victory. (video on YouTube) The goalie is Simeon Varlamov who played most of the season at Hershey for the Capital’s minor league team. But he got the call in game two of the Caps opening round series against the Rangers and has posted a 1.5 Goals Against Average since, including two shutouts.

Photo by Clyde Caplan. Used under a Creative Commons license.

For those who are interested, I just uploaded a bunch of changes to the PowerShell Scripts folder on my SkyDrive. Feel free to download them and use them as you need.

• find-to-set-alias – Brad Wilson enhanced this function significantly and broke it out into it’s own script. I had a small issue with his version where the folder search may only return a single value, so you can’t treat it like collection. My version wraps that command in @(…) so that you can always treat it like a collection.
• find-in-path – searches all the folders in your path for a given file name (wildcards supported. Very useful for “where is this app actually installed” kind of debugging.
• get-git-branch – returns the current git branch of a given folder. Got the idea for this originally from Ivan Porto Carrero.
• prompt – my powershell prompt. Pretty basic, but it now shows current git branch.
• elevate-process – create a new PowerShell window or run an app as an administrator. I alias this to su on my machine. I recently reworked the “run an app” part of this script, so it will search the current folder and then the path to run the app you specify.
• _profile – this is my main profile script, which I share across multiple machines via Mesh. I reworked all my alias setting to use the new find-to-set-alias and moved setting the color of the command window to the top of the script.

Update: I just updated elevate-process again, adding a special clause to handle .bat and .cmd files. cmd.exe seems to ignore the working directory setting, so if your batch file relies on being run from the folder it’s in, it’ll break with elevate-process. That’s annoying. So if you elevate a batch file, the script runs cmd.exe directly and executes the specified batch file after first changing to the current directory. Ugly, but it seems to work.