Scott Hanselman

The .NET CoreCLR is now open source, so I ran the GitHub repo through Microsoft Power BI

February 04, 2015 Comment on this post [34] Posted in Azure | Learning .NET | Open Source
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The hits keep on coming, Dear Reader. Just as we announced a few months back, .NET Core is open source. We said it would run on Windows, Mac, and Linux, but then the work of doing it has to actually happen. ;)

Go check out the .NET Framework Blog. Today the .NET team put the Core CLR up on GitHub. It's open source and it's under the MIT License. This includes the Core CLR source, the new RyuJIT, the .NET GC, native interop and everything you need to fork, clone, and build your own personal copy of the .NET Core CLR. What a cool day, and what an immense amount of work (both technical and legal) to make it happen. Years in the making, but still lots of work to do.

The GitHub repo has 2.6ish MILLION lines of code. They say when it's all said and done.NET Core will be about 5 MILLION lines of open source code.

The .NET Blog did a nice pie chart, but honestly, I found it to be not enough. It basically was a big grey circle that said "other 2.2M." ;)

I'd like a little more insight, but I don't know if I have the compute power, or the patience, frankly, to analyze this code repository. Or do I?

I decided to import the repository into Microsoft Power BI preview. Power BI (BI means "Business Intelligence") is an amazing service that you can use (usually for FREE, depending on your data source) to pull in huge amounts of data and ask questions of that data. Watch for a great video on this at http://friday.azure.com this week or next.

I logged into http://powerbi.com (It's US only for the preview, sorry) and clicked Get Data. I then selected GitHub as the source of my data and authorized Power BI to talk to GitHub on my behalf. Crazy, AMIRITE?

Screenshot (10)

After a few minutes of data chewing, I'm officially adding "BI and Big Data Analyst" to my resume and you can't stop me. ;)

What does Power BI tell me about the .NET Team's "CoreCLR" GitHub repository?

Here's what Power BI told me.

image

Let's dig in. Looks like Stephen Toub has worked on a LOT of this code. He's super brilliant and very nice, BTW.

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Editing the query and looking at Dates and Times, it seems the .NET Team commits code at ALL hours. They are really feeling "committable" around 3 to 4 pm, but they'll even put code in at 4 in the morning!

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Here's a more intense way to look at it.

image

One of the insanely cool things about Power BI is the ability to ask your data questions in plain English. Given that my SQL abilities have atrophied to "Select * from LittleBobbyTables" this is particularly useful to me.

I asked it "issues that are open sorted by date" and you'll notice that not only did it work, but it showed me what I meant underneath my query.

image

What about issues closed by a certain person?

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I'm running around in this tool just building charts and asking questions of the repo. It's all in HTML5 but it's just like Excel. It's amazing.

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Open issues from last year?

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Average time to close an issue in hours?

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It's amazing to be running queries like this on something as significant as the now open-sourced .NET Core CLR. I didn't need to be an employee to do it. I didn't need special access, I just did it. I'm enjoying this new Microsoft, and very much digging Power BI. Next I'm going to put my Blood Sugar and Diabetes Data in Power PI and encourage others to do the same.

P.S. Check out the code for the Core CLR Hello World app. When was the last time you saw an ASCII Art Linux Penguin in Microsoft Source code? ;)


Sponsor: Big thanks to Infragistics for sponsoring the feed this week! Responsive web design on any browser, any platform and any device with Infragistics jQuery/HTML5 Controls.  Get super-charged performance with the world’s fastest HTML5 Grid – Download for free now!

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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February 04, 2015 14:40
I'd love to see the number of unit tests for the code base and the code coverage.

-- Lee
February 04, 2015 14:45
Hi Scott,
Thanks for being such an open source on Microsoft matters.

I noticed that some of the links in your RSS feed don't work properly.
It appears to me that the redirection doesn't support https urls and therefore we end up on feedblitz's "404 Not Found" page. It could also be solved by removing "http://feeds.hanselman.com/~/t/0/0/scotthanselman/~" from the links in the RSS feed.

(you remember RSS feeds? Those xml-ish versions of your blog's content, we raved about in the early 00s?)
February 04, 2015 15:51
Going "slightly" off topic. Is there a HTML/CSS/JS framework available public for making sides like the PowerBI site? Looks like a nice dashboard/admin theme..
February 04, 2015 16:19
Excellent ! I had no idea it was possible to grab data from a GitHub account like this.

Too bad it's US only for now. I'll definitively try PowerBI (desktop version) on an Azure SQL database to see what I can find out :-)
February 04, 2015 16:42
WOW!!! Sharing. :)
February 04, 2015 17:26
Thanks for the primer of Power BI. Looks worth looking into.

More importantly: Love the XKCD reference!
February 04, 2015 17:56
Wow!!
I would love to run my customer's data through Power BI! I am most definitely going to check it out when it becomes available to the rest of us.
February 04, 2015 18:04
You have a way with expression my friend, such a gift. Thanks for sharing... AGAIN!
February 04, 2015 18:08
Looks great, but can't sign up :(

I keep getting the message "Sorry, that didn't work. There's a problem on our end. We're working on it, so try again later."

Is this still in alpha or beta?
February 04, 2015 19:10
With great power comes great responsibility. Personally scared by the idea that I could change the CLR...

"Got a bug?"
"Let me just recompile the CLR.... there you go"
February 04, 2015 19:25
Very cool demo, but: Deprecating DateTime.Now scares me.
February 04, 2015 21:25
I really liked this post. I had worked for many years in the CoreCLR team and can clearly see how the team can use this insight :). And Kudos to my previous team as well !!
February 04, 2015 21:32
@Eric, sorry you hit problems signing up for Power BI. Send me an email at support@powerbi.uservoice.com and we'll help debug your issue.
February 04, 2015 22:15
I could literally cry right now. I just spent 9 hours last night compiling stats on the DNN repo by hand after hitting a wall on a couple of different automation attempts. Well, I guess I can look forward to a much easier effort for my next DNN release.
February 04, 2015 22:45
Awesome Scott. But since you are great at (and excited about) reports and you can't do SQL anymore, it looks like it's time for you to get into management... ;)
February 05, 2015 3:54
Looked very cool and decided to give it a try. Sadly, after getting through the GitHub auth, loading the data failed on two separate attempts, with the same not-really-helpful error info (included below).

oops, something went wrong
Failed to store data for new tile
Activity Id 138424df-21eb-4185-9e26-73b195f2ba09
Request Id 687eec49-4af4-3664-abcf-e2edbffcec32
Error Code 400
Time Wed Feb 04 2015 18:50:26 GMT-0500 (EST)
Version 11.0.9165.681
Cluster URI https://wabi-us-east2-redirect.analysis.windows.net
February 05, 2015 9:20
@Ryan, Sorry you are having issues importing from GitHub. We would love to get to the bottom of this, please send us an email at support@powerbi.uservoice.com so we can figure out what is going on.

February 05, 2015 10:58
Even I didn't like their pie chart; thanks for drilling into to the 'other' section, because I was curious as well.

PowerBI is much more powerful than what you demoed here I presume, but thanks for the demo!
February 05, 2015 14:43
It's so cool that I can now run a Hello World console application and debug the CLR!
February 05, 2015 20:50
We've never had such an open view into the internals of .NET, so thank you Microsoft for finally going open-source, and thank you Scott for doing all these charts so we can understand it better.
February 05, 2015 22:59
They got ASCII Linux and Apple logos but no Windows one? #fail
February 06, 2015 0:12
Vesselin - Look again. ;) They programmatically create the Windows logo.
February 06, 2015 1:37
Love to see visual studio in linux and mac, little greedy is not it. cool job Scott as usual.
February 06, 2015 13:05
how much are Microsoft paying you to do free endorsement of POWER BI and praise for them ... ho you are a Microsoft employee ... so nothing...
February 06, 2015 14:07
ASDASD - (Nice username ;) I only talk about what is awesome on my blog. It's my blog and not my employer's. I've got well over a decade of blog posts to prove it. Power BI is insanely cool.
February 06, 2015 16:05
I think an important point that warrants further investigation is: Who or what is FiveTimesTheFun? That's a lot of fun!!!
And Power BI looks dope :)
February 06, 2015 18:52
it would be a nice idea to mix PowerBI with Bitergia (http://bitergia.com) tools ;)
February 08, 2015 13:13
Looks great, but unfortunately there is no way my organisation would allow their data anywhere near a cloud based service. Is this toolset going to be available to use on-premise?
February 09, 2015 7:10
Hi Scott, you probably have very little to do with it, but you may know people who know people who has to do with it - anyway, https://powerbi.com serves wrong cert, specifically a *.azurewebsites.net cert. So Chrome didn't want to let me in.
Screenshot: http://cl.ly/image/2j2k1D133x36/Image%202015-02-08%20at%207.09.22%20PM.png
February 09, 2015 7:12
Also, Power BI seems to be working fine from Canada as well.
February 09, 2015 14:05
Importing, analysing and reporting on huge amounts of data is cool I suppose, but to make it awesome it needs a button that automagically exports selected data, screenshots and charts to Sway! ;)
Col
February 10, 2015 2:59
Wow changing the microsoft logo paid off well now it can be displayed in Linux. Could you do a another article on Power BI how to integrate this with TFS data
February 18, 2015 15:43
Nice work Scott! Really like the integration of Power BI with github. By the way, conspiracy theories are like fashion these days. Don't try to respond to these, let them express their minds. You're way above that my friend. Thank you for what you do(you're one of the best at it!)
March 17, 2015 12:56
PVS-Studio: 25 Suspicious Code Fragments in CoreCLR. http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0310/

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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.