Garrett Serack: Open Source Development at Microsoft

After playing with Windows8 a bunch yesterday, all I have is a scene from “The Princess Bride” running thru my head: Inigo Montoya: MY NAME IS INIGO MONTOYA! YOU KILLED MY START MENU! PREPARE TO DIE! [Inigo corners Count Rugen, knocks his sword aside, and slashes his cheek, giving him a scar just like Inigo's] [...]

My pappy always used to tell me “There are three kinds of men: The ones that learn by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of ‘em have to pee on the electric fence.” … somedays, I’m surprised how often I get to pee on the damn fence. So, here I am writing [...]

I’d like to introduce a new member of our team; Tim Rogers.   Tim is a new full time employee at Microsoft who started this week, and as he just found out yesterday (his first day in the office), is going to be working as a full-time test resource for CoApp.   Tim has a [...]

  We’re nearing the point where we’re able to take open source projects and produce happy-shiny packages for them—uh yeah, nearing.  It’s gonna be a couple more weeks shaking out the tools that generate new Visual Studio project files for a given project and wire all that stuff up. The good news though, is that [...]

I’ll be in Canada tomorrow at the Vancouver Linux User Group meeting. I’ll be talking about Microsoft, Open Source and CoApp. If you are interested in showing up: Time: 7:30 PM-10 PM Where: iQmetrix offices 250 Howe Street – Suite 1210 Vancouver, BC V6C 3R8 CANADA I’d love to have ya’ll out! And, Pizza & [...]

It has been an extreme amount of time since I’ve done a status update—we’ve been working hard here, honest!  Under a stack of what seems like a million little things, blogging has taken a backseat to development in recent months, but I’m hoping to correct that (and have some others do some blog posts too!) [...]

I recently moved the CoApp source repositories from Launchpad to github, and I wanted make sure that I preserved all the commit history along with it. Fortunately, it’s not too terribly difficult to move from one to the other (provided you jump thru the hoops to getting fast-import working on bzr for Windows). Fixing Bzr [...]

Just a quick update today—we’ve moved the source repositories for CoApp from Launchpad to Github. While I liked a lot of the things about Launchpad, the website is feeling slower and slower some days, and Bazaar, while offering the features that I like, isn’t getting the attention (and developer resources) that git is.  Combined with [...]

In my last post, I showed how we’re binding event handlers to the Task after it’s already been started. This of course, is probably not what you want, as it’s possible to lose some events if the task starts up quick enough. So, the CoTask task factory also lets you pass the event listeners as [...]

During the development of CoApp, I’ve enthusiastically embraced the .NET 4.0 Task Parallel Library (aka, the TPL).  It’s a set of APIs that make developers more productive by significantly simplifying the process of adding parallelism and concurrency to applications. I got religion around this last fall when I saw the PDC presentation that Anders Hejlsberg [...]

(cross-posted from the mailing list) As I mentioned in my last post, CoApp’s design relies heavily on the use of Symbolic Links (symlinks)—a feature which is implemented fairly well in Windows Vista and beyond, but is missing in earlier versions of Windows. Cygwin tried to work around the limitation by using shortcuts (.LNK files), which [...]

(cross-posted from the mailing list) When CoApp packages are installed, they install into a predetermined location based on the package metadata—this ensures that all packages play by the rules, and allow us to use Windows features to support things side-by-side installation of applications (ie, havin’ two versions of the same application installed concurrently), and also [...]

The following is the instructions on how to build the current CoApp bits: 0. You need to have the following tools installed in order to build CoApp: Visual Studio 2010 (I’m told that VS 2010 Express will work) Windows SDK 7.0 or higher — http://bit.ly/bOoxJT Windows WDK 7.1 — http://bit.ly/cU1lvH Bazaar for Windows 2.2.0 — [...]

I’m moving to a new blog host right now… should have stuff up and running pretty quickly.   G

The question occasionally comes up regarding how to create Zip files from C# without using GPL (or LGPL) code.   If license isn’t an issue, the simple answer is always is to use ZipLib (http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SharpZipLib/) which is a wonderful, and well known library for manipulating zip files. The other solution is to grab WiX  3.5 (http://wix.codeplex.com/) [...]

(cross-posted from the mailing list ) It’s been suggested a few times over the last several weeks that CoApp won’t provide any value for the .NET community. With the emergence of several alternative projects to provide a form of package management (NPack...

(cross-posted from the mailing list) It’s been suggested a few times over the last several weeks that CoApp won’t provide any value for the .NET community. With the emergence of several alternative projects to provide a form of package management (NPack, OpenWrap, nu-net, and others), I figured I’d better make some time to explain how [...]

I wrote this a couple years ago, and I ended up in a #cls10 session related to it, so I thought I’d post it unedited. Feel free to destroy it.     Idea:    A self-regulating community meritocracy model for collaboration and cooperation.        This can be applied to any type of collaborative organization where individuals [...]

(cross-posted from the mailing list ) It has been nearly three months since launching the CoApp project, and in that time I’ve been absolutely amazed at the response that we’ve gotten, and the community folks that have jumped on board. As a matter of...

Hi, my name is Garrett, and I have a problem. I love scripting stuff. And, I by stuff, I mean everything. Really, I often use it as an exercise to understanding whatever it is that I’m trying to learn—if I can automate it, I’ve got a strong feeling that...

Hi, my name is Garrett, and I have a problem. I love scripting stuff. And, I by stuff, I mean everything. Really, I often use it as an exercise to understanding whatever it is that I’m trying to learn—if I can automate it, I’ve got a strong feeling that I understand it. As you may [...]

(cross-posted from the mailing list ) I’m doing some initial work for long term planning today—really this will help drive my focus over the next year or two. Assuming that CoApp produces a beautifully functioning package manager and ecosystem, what open...

In a couple of weeks the CoApp Design & Development Summit that will take place here at Microsoft, I’ll have 15 or so people from around the world to thrash thru my some of my crazy ideas regarding package management on Windows. Scheduling this even...

I figured I’d take a quick break, and review the fine wisdom my old pappy has imparted to my blog:   Like my pappy always used to tell me “ It may not be the easy way, but it’s the cowboy way. ” … Well, WinSxS may not be the easy way (yet!), but...

(cross-posted from the mailing list ) Windows Side-by-side (WinSxS) technology is a really shiny piece of technology that is not well enough understood, and often misused. This comes from a variety of reasons, one of which is the documentation—while quite...