Scott Hanselman

What a stunningly fabulous idea so elegantly executed. Ohloh (blog) (Phil turned me on to it) analyzes open source software. Not deep source analysis like Fisheye, but broad analysis that answers so many of the questions being asked like: Is it actively developed? Is it just one guy or a bunch? Is it well commented?

It says that DasBlog is about 13 Man Years of effort and would cost about $726k to write from scratch.  It's about 54k lines of code.

Subtext, a Fork of .Text managed by my other arch-nemesis Phil (I have a baker's dozens arch-nemisi (nemisissies?) Just kidding.) has 81k lines of code and would cost $1.1M over 15 Man Years.

What's really interesting is looking at more important projects like FireFox. Looks like only 50k lines of code? I wonder if that counts the rendering engine or if it's really that tight?

One odd problem/artifact, there's two DasBlog's listed. I'm not sure if this is because we had a CVS repository then moved to SVN, or what. We'll get the older one deleted.

As an aside, the flash-based charts they are from Maani.us and they are slick slick slick. A very inexpensive and permissive license and they consume a fairly intuitive XML format as their datasource. Hook those babies up to an HttpHandler and you've got great looking charts for your ASP.NET (or whatever) page.

Additional aside: There is a small transparency problem with the charts showing up with a gray background under Firefox 2 RC3, but I'm not sure if that's Flash's problem, Firefox's problem, or Ohloh's.

The real question that Ohloh may be able to shed some light on over the coming months is "Is Open Source a Crap Idea?" Seriously, though, it's interesting to see the levels of involvement, although there's no way to show the dozens of patches that were submitted to the DasBlog project by the community that were committed to the repository by me "glucopilot."

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I can't say it's rich in content, but it was fun to host. At the Patterns & Practices Summit last week I was able to host a panel on Open Source in the Enterprise. The panelists were Ted Neward, Patrick Cauldwell, Rocky Lhotka and Chris Sells. Chris was done remotely, so we did a Live Messenger Video Call and put Chris' disembodied head in the form of my laptop on a chair and lashed a Logitech Quickcam where his head should have been. Then we swiveled Chris around as needed so he could see what was going on. Dennis Mulder has some pics, one of which is shown below. Chris the flat cardboard standup with the laptop between Patrick on the far right and Rocky, second from the left seated.

Chris released the Genghis WinForms Project under a Shared Source license, Rocky released CSLA under a custom license, Patrick works with a variety of Open Source components at Corillian, as do I. I work on DasBlog, an Open Source project, and Ted comes to us from the Java site of things, so it was a fairly diverse group considering that we were on the Microsoft Redmond Campus.

BizCoder had a review:

Scott Hanselman and Ted Neward are fun to watch, their cocky arrogance makes you just love them and hate at the same time. The quote of the summit for me was Scott’s line to an attendee’s question about if their methodology was similar to one of Fowler’s patterns “I don’t read Fowler… I use success as my metric”. I have great respect for Fowler, but Scott’s pragmatism was a great reminder that a balance between theory and practice is essential.

It is true, Ted does feed my snarkiness a little bit, but a fun time was had by all; the goal being to provide edutainment. As for the "success as a metric" comment, that was kind of an inside joke from when I used the same line at Chris Sells' XmlDevCon 2004. BizCoder does (fortunately) nail my actual point, though, that success means many things, not just adherence to a religion or pattern.

Unfortunately there's no video of the event, but there were some interesting audio moments. It was recorded as a webcast that you can view online. The webcast was brought to you by CodePlex.

Patrick and I also presented "Contraxploitation" at the PNPSummit, a modification and update of our TechEd 2006 US talk that I'll also be presenting at TechEd 2006 Europe in Barcelona (It's ARC308 if you'll be there). We have made considerable improvements since then and now have the Indigo contract generating. I should have the demo with me in Europe.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I installed a fresh Windows Vista RC2 install, rather than upgrading from RC1, and I wanted to try installing a bunch of stuff like Visual Studio 2005 from ISO images, rather than from DVD media. Robert McLaws recommended Magic ISO Maker, a free tool for mounting ISOs, for earlier builds of Vista.

However, version 4.0.6 of Daemon Tools claims full Vista Support for mounting ISOs, and I love me some Daemon Tools, so I ended up trying to use them under RC2. However, I got a warning for Daemon tools under RC2, so I tried Virtual Clone Drive and it worked great. It associated itself with .ISO files, so installing Visual Studio was just as easy as double-clicking the ISO - it auto-assigned the Drive Letter and started the Autorun.info process. I assume Daemon will get up to date in a few days.

Aside: I only wish Iomega would get their sh*t together. My Rev Drive is still a doorstop under Vista RC2. In fact, it's the ONLY piece of hardware I have that isn't working properly under this new build.

There's a great (and expanding) list of software that is compatible with Vista RC2 here. Here's a few good ones to know:

Defragmenting

• DisKeeper Pro V10 (32-bit)

Drive Mounters

• Virtual Clone Drive (32 Bit)
• DAEMON Tools v4.06 (32-bit)

AntiVirus

• McAfee VirusScan Enterprise v8.5i Beta IV Refresh (32-bit)

There's many more of your updated favorites, so check the list out.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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There's some free chapter excerpts up at the Wrox site from Professional ASP.NET 2.0 Special Edition. Go check them out! There will be a more coming in the next few weeks, watch for them.

• Generating Custom XML from SQL 2005
• FileUpload Server Control
• SqlDataSource

Also, note that there's a 50% off sale on Wrox/Wiley books at BookPool.com right now. You can get the Special Edition for only US$29.95 which is pretty cheap. It's $32.99 at Amazon, but the shipping is free, so you'll have to do the math on the shipping and see which is cheaper for you.

There's another Pro (not fessional) ASP.NET 2.0 from Apress that's $40.94 at Amazon. I'm reading it now to compare it to our Wrox/Wiley verison. It's lead by Matthew MacDonald who knows his stuff. I enjoyed his Pro .NET Windows Forms 2.0 book, so I'll be seeing how this competing book reads as I wade throught it.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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