James Newkirk's Blog : CodePlex

xUnit.net v1.0 Released

jamesnewkirk — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 04:14:00 GMT

We released xUnit.net 1.0 today! Download, blog post.

xUnit.net v1.0(RC2) Released

jamesnewkirk — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 02:27:00 GMT

Brad Wilson and I released xUnit.net v1.0(RC2) today. Brad has the details on his blog.

You can download the release on CodePlex here.

The CodePlex Team and the patterns & practices Summit

jamesnewkirk — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 02:56:00 GMT

The CodePlex team will be well represented again at the patterns & practices Summit in Redmond, WA - November 5-9, 2007 . We will be presenting or co-presenting the following sessions:

"Yet Another Talk on Agility" - Brad Wilson and Peter Provost
Dependency Injection Frameworks - Brad Wilson and Scott Densmore
EntLib Devolved - Scott Densmore
Make It Your Own - Scott Densmore
Lessons Learned in Programmer Testing - Jim Newkirk
CodePlex is sponsoring an evening event on Tuesday titled "Open Source in the Enterprise".

Peter's not on the CodePlex team but we like him just the same. For additonal information on the summit and all of the sessions please click here.

Announcing xUnit.net

jamesnewkirk — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 01:10:00 GMT

I have just blogged about a new testing framework that Brad Wilson and I have developed. Click here for details.

Moving Day

jamesnewkirk — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 18:44:00 GMT

I have decided for a number of reasons to move my blog to a new address. The new address is http://jamesnewkirk.typepad.com. For a few posts I will be cross-posting but about a month from now I will be at the new address exclusively. Please join me at my new blog home.

TechEd 2007

jamesnewkirk — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 03:04:42 GMT

I will be at TechEd next week. I am helping out my co-author Will Stott at a Chalk-Talk Session on Monday, June 4 at 4:45p. The session is titled, "Microsoft Visual Studio Team System for Agile Teams".

In addition to this I will be at the "Open Source Software in Enterprise Development" panel discussion at lunch time on Thursday.

I will also be at one of the Microsoft booths at various times (I'll post more details on Sunday). If you questions/comments/complaints about CodePlex please drop by and let me know.

Teamprise and CodePlex

jamesnewkirk — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 06:09:00 GMT

When we launched CodePlex last June we thought there might be an issue with some projects that had contributors who did not work on Windows. This was confirmed when we heard feedback loud and clear saying I cannot put my project on CodePlex because the only client that you have for Source Control is Team Explorer.

Well that was certainly true until today... Earlier today Teamprise announced a complimentary license of the Teamprise client suite for anyone wanting to connect to an open source project on CodePlex. I can't thank Martin Woodward enough and the rest of the team at Teamprise for offering their great tool to our customers. This opens up CodePlex to a larger number of potential projects who in the past may have considered other open source hosting solutions.

If you are CodePlex contributor click here to sign up to receive the complimentary license.

CodePlex Deployment - February 20, 2007

jamesnewkirk — Sun, 25 Feb 2007 04:33:00 GMT

We deployed a new version of the CodePlex software this past Tuesday. I wanted to give you a break down of the features and issues that we deployed, as well as give you a preview of some changes to the upcoming release pages that we are currently working on for the deployment on March 13th. As I mentioned in my previous blog post voting has had a huge impact on the priority of the items that we work on. For example, the feature "Ability to add a Soapbox video to home page" was created on January 8, 2007. It received a large amount of votes, 45 in fact, and we implemented and deployed it within 5 weeks. We can't promise to turn all of the work items around as quickly but the more you vote the higher the priority. In our next deployment we are working on the release pages. To give you an approximate view of the changes here is the February 20, 2007 CodePlex deployment. Note: The Comments column is something that will not be part of the deployment.

Mock-Up Of New CodePlex Release Pages (to be deployed March 13, 2007)

Total Votes: 220

Work Items

Issues (11 Votes)

Votes	*Name (links to work item on CodePlex)*	Comments
5	Add a More link on quick markup guide
2	spelling error in People tab: "Coodinators"	:) Any more spelling errors and I will be purchasing a dictionary for all team members
1	Unable to show more than 10 items per page
1	Can't delete posts	This was an oversight. I suppose all bugs are but this was truly something we intended to do but somehow did not get put into the previous release.
1	Links to anchors within in a web page don't work (used to work)
0	Special national characters not working in CodePlex	All issues prior to the implementation of voting have a vote count as zero.
0	Export To Excel Maintain Sort Order
1	the forum of CodePlex can not display chinese character

Features (209 Votes)

Votes	*Name (links to work item on CodePlex)*	Comments
48	No way to contact user	We have been wanting to do this for awhile. I hope this helps facilitate more 1 to 1 communication. We did implement it with appropriate safeguards. If you do not want to be contacted you do not have to provide your email.
45	Feature request: Ability to add a Soapbox vid to home page
40	Project Logo	Many people have been asking for customizations of the project home page. This feature allows you to change the graphic and replace the title with your own custom logo.
33	Create profile page for users	This is the beginning of work that we will be doing for individual profiles, keep your suggestions coming.
22	Go to Work Item	Believe it or not we used to have this feature. You might ask why it was removed. I removed it as a requirement when we built the new Advanced View. Its back and I probably won't take it out again.
12	The issues I have submited
6	Need to be able to bulk edit work items on codeplex	We did this explicitly on the page and it also works with right-click behavior.
3	I should be able to search for the bug reported by me	This is a duplicate of work item #3096
0	I want to multi language support on Wiki...

CodePlex Deployment - January 30, 2007

jamesnewkirk — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 05:04:00 GMT

We deployed a new version of CodePlex last week on Tuesday, January 30th. Some of the features/issues that we deployed include the following:

Forums/Discussions (56 votes) - The theme (more on this in a separate blog post) for this release was to provide an update to the forums, which have been renamed discussions. This included the ability to edit a post, and to use email as a means to notify you of follow-up replies, and a mechanism to have a discussion thread be only visible to the developers and coordinators.
Source Code Browsing (55 votes) - The source code tab has been augmented to allow anybody to view the source code directly. This was the single feature that received the largest number of votes on the CodePlex Issue Tracker.
Sponsored Ads - We now offer project owners the choice of placing sponsored ads on their project pages. Project advertising is provided through Kanoodle BrightAds, and all the proceeds from Kanoodle go entirely to the project owner. Many open source developers work long and hard on their projects and use donations or sponsorships as a way of helping to support their efforts. We wanted to give project owners the ability of having sponsored ads for their project if they choose.
New Project Creation - Prior to this release the new project creation process required the user to fill out a form and we would create the project. In this release that step is now fully automated. Any registered user can now create a project on CodePlex. All projects are created with a 30 day grace period where the person who created the project can update the wiki, upload the source code, create a release etc. If you have been waiting to create a project I encourage you to click here and get the process started.
Granular RSS Feeds (21 votes) - In addition to the overall project feed you can now subscribe to an RSS feed for just the wiki, releases, issue tracker, discussions, or source code.

Overall we deployed features and issues that had received 143 votes. I can't tell you how helpful the voting has been in helping us prioritize the work that we do. As I look forward to the next deployment on February 20th we are looking at the highest voted issues as candidates. Click here to see the latest issues.

CodePlex is Hiring

jamesnewkirk — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 22:36:00 GMT

Would you like to work on the CodePlex project? Now is your chance to participate in the further development of the website. The CodePlex team has an open web developer position. For details click here.

Scott Densmore joins the CodePlex team

jamesnewkirk — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 19:17:11 GMT

I am very happy to announce (although Brad and Scott blogged about it last week - what can I say I am slow) that Scott has joined the CodePlex team. I had the pleasure of working with Scott when both of us worked in the patterns & practices team. He has already hit the ground running.

Welcome Scott.

CodePlex Deployment

jamesnewkirk — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 03:18:00 GMT

I have been remiss in my posting with regard to the last CodePlex deployment.

We deployed a new version of CodePlex on September 26th. Click here to see the details. There are a few things which I would like to highlight about the deployment.

Wiki Changes - We revamped the Wiki rendering engine. This has corrected a number of bugs associated with the Wiki. In additon we also made the "Preview" page work better. Lastly with regard to the Wiki we changed the way that the Wiki styled the code markup. For an example, click here.
Editing a license - We have had a number of people ask for the ability to alter a license for a project. In this deployment we added this as a feature. Most of the time an open source project does not change its license. However, there are details that need to be updated and now project coordinators can do this for their projects. We do keep a history of the license changes as well.
File Download Counts - In the previous versions of CodePlex we posted the number of file downloads in the recent activity section on the project home page. Many of you have asked for download counts to be totals as opposed to the last 7 days. In this deployment we have moved the download count from recent activity section to the releases tab. In addition we now list the total downloads on a per file basis. Thanks for the suggestion. Note: We have discovered an issue with the download counts and how they manifest themselves in the Popularity ranking on the Project Directory page. It seems that if you have an image in your wiki pages this is counted as a download as well. This is the cause of some projects having a small number of page views and very large download counts. This will be corrected in the November 7th deployment.

Please keep you comments and suggestions coming. Your feedback to date has been invaluable.

The CodePlex Team and the patterns & practices Summit

jamesnewkirk — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 07:25:00 GMT

The CodePlex team will be well represented (in fact you might get sick of us) at the patterns & practices Summit in Redmond, WA - October 9-12, 2006 . We will be presenting or co-presenting the following sessions:

Application Frameworks in IT - Jonathan Wanagel
Dependency Injection Architecture - Brad Wilson
Evolving to Patterns - Jim Newkirk
"The Agile Talk on Agility" - Brad Wilson and Peter Provost
TDD for GUIs - Brad Wilson
Micro-Pairing - Brad Wilson and Peter Provost

Peter's not on the CodePlex team but we like him just the same. For additonal information on the summit and all of the sessions please click here.

CodePlex Team Interview is now live on Channel 9

jamesnewkirk — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 04:19:00 GMT

The team interview went live today. You can find it at

http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=226791

Let me know your thoughts.

CodePlex Deployment

jamesnewkirk — Tue, 27 Jun 2006 10:01:00 GMT

Last week on Wednesday we deployed Version 06.06.09.1588 of the CodePlex software. The version number as you could probably figure out represents the day of the week that we produced the build, in this case 9 June, 2006. After that date we did a full regression test, deployed the software to a staging environment which closely matches the production environment, verified it again and then deployed it to the production servers.

There is still much work going on the project. We are prepping for a mid-July deployment which will include improvements in the RSS Feeds as well as a reasonably large number of bugs. Stay tuned to the CodePlex Information and Discussion page for details on the specific content of the next deployment.

Feedback is critical for us to make proper prioritizations with regard to the issues. I appreciate that it is early and not many of you have been able to create projects like you have wished. We are working on getting the site opened up for all projects who wish to participate on the site.

Lastly, I would also like to introduce the CodePlex Team Blog. I will be doing most of my posting with regard to CodePlex on the new blog along with the rest of the team.