Scott Hanselman

Changes in the Microsoft MVP Program - MVPs for Open Source Contributions

March 20, 2014 Comment on this post [48] Posted in Open Source

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Image by "tetue" and used under Creative Commons http://flic.kr/p/eYrTT4 Before I went to work for Microsoft a few years back, I was given the "MVP" award for ASP.NET. I didn't go out and seek this award, it just happened. The MVP awards are backward-looking in that they look at the work that you've done in the previous year, not what you're going to do.

The idea behind these awards has been to give some recognition to folks that have volunteered their time to write books, create documentation, run user groups, and generally spread the word as advocates for the development platform.

However, it's long been my opinion that these awards are too narrow in scope. It's great that you're blogging or speaking on a developer topic, but what if you don't speak at all and instead put that energy into a great .NET open source framework? Fortunately others within the big house share my thinking and we're changing the MVP program to actively recognize open source.

Here's a quote directly from an internal email/memo. It's got a little corporate-speak, but it's rather frank and to the point. What you need to know is that this email was sent to all of the Microsoft subsidiaries (the "field") to make sure they are on track and get what we're trying to do here. I've bolded and trimmed it a little but you get the idea:

Currently there is a class of developer influencers whose contributions are not yet fully recognized by the Microsoft MVP Program. These influencers run, manage, or commit to large and highly influential open source projects. However since they do not participate in what is considered as more traditional ways such as speech engagement, books, online forums or user groups, they are not usually considered as potential MVPs. Often these developers have technical community followings but may not necessarily be "on message.". As a result, there is a belief amongst some influencers that Microsoft does not support Open Source software.

As we move forward, we will change the MVP guidelines to recognize open source activities with the same weight as other community activities. We need to send a clear message that a healthy .NET ecosystem, including open source impact, is good for all stakeholders. It is time for the MVP Award to recognize open source activities to promote further growth and support of the technical communities.

When I started pushing this idea, I thought we'd make a new "Open Source MVP." I pushed that for a while but realized quickly that it would create an island of OSS MVPs, and no one group would claim them. Better to push OSS throughout the whole program so everyone shares a home. Instead, we changed the idea and designed that Open Source contributions should be as valuable (or more so) as any other contribution, and you could become an MVP solely based on open source and nothing else.

If you make the next great "Foo Framework for ASP.NET" then you'd be an ASP.NET MVP and get the benefits of any other MVP, including an MSDN subscription that you could use to support your project. There's no expectation to speak or blog or do anything other than be awesome and keep working on your project.

Here it is in corporate speak (from that memo):

Today we already include open source activities in our review process as part of a MVP’s contributions. The shift now is that a candidate can be reviewed and awarded solely on contributions in open source projects, if the contributions are significant, without having other activities such as speeches, online forum supports, books, blogs, etc.

We'll be looking at open source for the next MVP "cycle." We can't bring in every little project, as much as I'd like to, but if you've got a successful and growing project, or if you know someone who is doing amazing stuff in open source, make sure that your local Microsoft community person nominates them!

* Image by "tetue" and used under Creative Commons

How to automatically notify the user that it's time to upgrade a Windows App

March 19, 2014 Comment on this post [51] Posted in Musings

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Back in 2007 I did a post called Making your Application Automatically Update Itself. Yesterday I was pairing on a little startup I'm doing on the side with Greg Shackles and it was time do the setup application. I thought about WiX, I thought about InstallShield, but then discovered a wonderful little gem of a setup application called Inno Setup by Jordan Russell. It's free, but it's a joy and you should donate if you use it.

It took me just 15 minutes to make a simple installer, and it's clear that this tool is deep and broad in its support. However, there's no free lunch when it comes to auto-updating. Inno Setup will upgrade my app from build to build when I run a new setup over the top of an old one. I still need my app to notify the user that it's time to upgrade.

This is our little 10 minute solution, but it's actually working very nicely. Inside the latest.txt files is a simple version string like 0.9.9.4.

var http = new HttpClient();
string versionString = await http.GetStringAsync(new Uri("http://www.hanselman.com/SecretStartup/latest.txt"));
Version latestVersion = new Version(versionString);

//get my own version to compare against latest.
Assembly assembly = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();
FileVersionInfo fvi = FileVersionInfo.GetVersionInfo(assembly.Location);
Version myVersion = new Version(fvi.ProductVersion);
           
if (latestVersion > myVersion)
{
    if (System.Windows.MessageBox.Show(String.Format("You've got version {0} of SecretStartup for Windows. Would you like to update to the latest version {1}?", myVersion, latestVersion), "Update SecretStartup?", MessageBoxButton.YesNo) == MessageBoxResult.Yes)
    {
        Process.Start("http://www.hanselman.com/blog");
    }
}

I'm thinking:

We'll add an SSL certificate and confirm its identity on the HTTP call as a little added security.
Error Handling, natch.
One could also download the setup app to %temp%, check it's SHA hash, launch it and close myself. Not sure I like it this automatic, though.
Maybe only check the version once a day or once every few days.

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AngleBrackets open web conference in Florida - April 2014

March 19, 2014 Comment on this post [7] Posted in Musings

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We had a blast last year at AngleBrackets in Vegas. Next month we're heading to family-friendly Orlando with our friends ScottGu, Denise Jacobs, Douglas Crockford, John Papa, Dan Wahlin, and lots more.

There's some great optional workshops/pre-cons and post-cons that are a fantastic opportunity to get some one-on-one training with experts in the field. It's deep web technologies with a focus on practicality, open source, and creative problem solving. Check this out, get your boss to sign off and bring your laptop!

PRECON12: AngularJS SPA Development - 0 to 60 (Sunday, April 13) Hands-on Bring your own Laptop - John Papa
PRECON08: Architecting Applications for Multiple UIs (Sunday, April 13) - Paul Sheriff
On the Metal: Essential HTML 5, CSS 3 and JavaScript for All Developers (Sunday, April 13) - Todd Anglin
Service Orientation Technologies Designing, Developing and Implementing WCF and the WEB API (Sunday, April 13) - Miguel Castro
PRECON07: The Architecture Clinic - (Sunday, April 13) - Juval Lowy
POSTCON08: Building Data-Centric Single Page Applications with Durandal, Knockout, Breeze and Web API (Thursday, April 17) - Brian Noyes
POSTCON03: Experimental Design for User Interfaces (Thursday, April 17) - Billy Hollis
POSTCON09: Hacking the Creative Brain (Thursday, April 17) - Denise R. Jacobs

AngleBrackets is a conference that's "co-located" with the DevIntersections conference. That means that you can move between the two conferences and attend the sessions you want. You can move between MongoDB, Ruby, and node.js sessions and even (gasp!) SharePoint sessions at the other conference. It's a great way to get your boss to send you to a conference while you learn all aspects of web development.

Here's a few cool session I'm tracking for myself, just to give you a taste of the diversity of topics.

Managing Asynchronicity with RQ - Douglas Crockford

Turn based servers are now joining turn based browsers in providing race-free and deadlock-free interactivity. The event-driven model has long been popular in UI systems, but the nature of work in servers presents some new challenges. Functional programming provides solutions, including monads, arrows, promises, and various flavors of FRP. This is another such solution, intended to enhance ease of use with constructs that support parallel and sequential operations.

The Art of Disciplined Creativity - Denise Jacobs
As tech industry professionals, we rarely experience a shortage of projects that necessitate our creative thinking. While everyone has moments of being on fire with creativity, all too often the time of being in the state of creative flow is too short. Additionally, sometimes we get stuck: we lack inspiration, our creative confidence wanes, and the generation of ideas comes to a standstill. Much like elite athletes, we need to exercise discipline to be able to get into the creative "zone" at at will and produce consistently great results. Let's explore ideas and practices for regularly gathering sources of inspiration, eliminating blocks to more easily access creative states, prolong them, and leverage their power to develop and execute great work.

Grunt-ify Your Front-End Web Development - Elijah Manor
There are a lot of manual processes that front-end developers tend to perform in order to get their job done. Wouldn't it be nice if there was some way to automate all the things? Well, thanks to Grunt you can :) In this session we will introduce Grunt and showcase some common workflows to automate building, live reloading, CSS processing, unit testing, deploying, as well as making your own custom plugins. Along the way, we will discuss some tips and tricks when using Grunt.

There's also other optional PreCons at DevIntersections on SQL, C, ALM, Disaster Recovery, Rosylin and CodeGen and more. Check out the great line-up we have this year at AngleBrackets and I'll see you there!

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OneNote and Microsoft's quiet API revolution

March 17, 2014 Comment on this post [20] Posted in Musings

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Microsoft just released OneNote for Mac today. They also made OneNote for PC free, which means there's a free OneNote app on Windows, Windows Phone, iOS, Mac, Android and a really full featured HTML5 web version at http://www.office.com. This is all very cool of course, but I'm interested in the APIs.

Now, to be clear, I have worked for Microsoft for the last few years on ASP.NET and Azure, but I don't know anyone in the Office team. I am not privy to any secret info and I get most of my news from The Verge, just like you.

But from my perspective, the real story here is that Microsoft has woken up to the power of the API. Some may argue that they've always had powerful web APIs, which is true, however the breadth and scope of these APIs and their ubiquity seems to have accelerated in recent years. They are clearer, more open, simpler, and more cross-platform than ever before.

The Azure cloud and the Azure HTML5 Portal where folks manage their apps uses a REST API, and the SDKs to use them - as well as a cross platform nodejs command line application - are on GitHub. If you use the main portal, write your own, or use Visual Studio, it all calls the same open API. Duh.

Exchange has APIs, Microsoft IDs use OAuth, Azure's Portal has an API and uses it themselves, SharePoint is one giant REST/OData API, Office 365 has been quietly releasing APIs for Mail, Calendar, and Contacts, and even now Lync has a REST Web API now.

Today when the Office team launched OneNote for Mac, they also launched http://dev.onenote.com along with integration partners like Feedly, JotNot, IFTTT, Weave News Reader and more all integrating with their REST API.

The moral of the story here is - if you have no API then you have no story.

Using the OneNote API

There's even more evidence of a change in thinking inside the big house. It's clearly of note that the API example in the OneNote API documentation on MSDN used Objective-C. They also link to a OneNote interactive Console at Apigee.

The API appears to be basically RESTful, with a POST of HTML to https://www.onenote.com/api/v1.0/pages creating a new OneNote page in your authenticated notebook.

You authenticate with your Microsoft ID using the SDK, get the token from the SDK object to be used in the authentication header then POST.

What has surprised me is that they have tutorials and samples across all platforms:

Android - Create an Android capture app - OneNoteServiceSamplesAndroid
iOS - … an iOS capture app - OneNoteServiceSamplesiOS
Windows Phone - …a Windows Phone capture app - OneNoteServiceSamplesWinPhone
Windows Store - …a Windows Modern UI capture app - OneNoteServiceSamplesWinStore
REST - Use the apigee.com API console - Open the interactive console

And, heck, the samples are all on GitHub too: https://github.com/OneNoteDev.

It looks like the focus for this initial launch is POST/Create for capture apps, photos, text, clippers, etc, but all the verbs are coming, clearly at the top of their backlog.

I like this direction, and to me, it's representative of a larger shift to recognize that the world doesn't always run Windows. I've said it before, and I'll said it again - The Web will always win.

Exploring FAKE, an F# Build System for all of .NET

March 15, 2014 Comment on this post [24] Posted in Open Source

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I've been orbiting around F# - but not really jumping in - for a while now. In fact, I looked at F# in 2008 almost 6 years ago and more recently talked to Richard Minerich and Phillip Trelford on Hanselminutes Podcast #311 "Why F#?"

Last week I looked at using ScriptCS, literally C# as a Scripting language, to drive browser automation. Today I'm exploring a make system called FAKE. It's F# Make, a build automation system similar to Make (which is 38 years old next month!) or Rake (which uses Ruby).

Fake is a Domain Specific Language that you can use without knowing F#, but if and when you outgrow it you can keep heading down the F# road. In all cases you've got all of .NET at your command.

Here's their Hello World example, a basic deploy script:

#r "tools/FAKE/tools/FakeLib.dll" // include Fake lib
open Fake 


Target "Test" (fun _ ->
    trace "Testing stuff..."
)

Target "Deploy" (fun _ ->
    trace "Deploy stuff..."
)

"Test"            // define the dependencies
   ==> "Deploy"

Run "Deploy"

Note that Deploy depends on Test.

FAKE uses F# but you can use it go build whatever. These are some C# OSS projects that use FAKE to build themselves:

Octokit.NET by GitHub
Portable.Licensing
Machine.Fakes
NSubstitute (https://github.com/nsubstitute/NSubstitute/pull/138 WIP)

FAKE isn't new, it's actually been around for 4 years with 55 contributors so far! It works not only on .NET but also on Linux and Mac under Mono - it works everywhere. Because it's all .NET you can use it on your Continuous Integration Servers like TeamCity or Travis CI.

Getting Started with FAKE

Check out their Calculator sample, a .NET project you'll extend to build itself with FAKE. Just download the zip, unblock it, and unzip. Then run build.bat from a developer command prompt.

The build.net is a bootstrapper. It could be powershell or a shell script if you like, of course.

@echo off
cls
"tools\nuget\nuget.exe" "install" "FAKE" "-OutputDirectory" "tools" "-ExcludeVersion"
"tools\FAKE\tools\Fake.exe" build.fsx
pause

This batch file uses NuGet to get FAKE, just as npm install restores node_modules, or gem gets ruby libraries. Then it calls Fake on the build.fsx file. Follow their Getting Started instructions to slowly expand the responsibilities of the build.fsx file.

FAKE has a lot of Helpers in their API documentation. Hundreds, and there's a whole community making others that you can call upon. For example, the built in FileHelper has things like CleanDir to remove files and subdirs.

Here we Clean before we build by making Clean a dependency of Default. BuildDir here is a property that's shared.

// include Fake lib
#r "tools/FAKE/tools/FakeLib.dll"
open Fake

// Properties
let buildDir = "./build/"

// Targets
Target "Clean" (fun _ ->
    CleanDir buildDir
)

Target "Default" (fun _ ->
    trace "Hello World from FAKE"
)

// Dependencies
"Clean" 
  ==> "Default"

// start build
RunTargetOrDefault "Default"

Jumping to the end of the tutorial, the syntax gets a little more tricky, butu once you get the |> format, it makes sense.

Some cool things to note and file away as interesting at in the script below.

the use of !! to include files
the use of -- to exclude a file spec after a !! operator
Zip is built-in as a helper and zips up the results of the build.
the options passed into NUnit
The dependency chain
#r for referencing .NET DLLs

// include Fake lib
#r "tools/FAKE/tools/FakeLib.dll"
open Fake

RestorePackages()

// Properties
let buildDir = "./build/"
let testDir  = "./test/"
let deployDir = "./deploy/"

// version info
let version = "0.2"  // or retrieve from CI server

// Targets
Target "Clean" (fun _ ->
    CleanDirs [buildDir; testDir; deployDir]
)

Target "BuildApp" (fun _ ->
   !! "src/app/**/*.csproj"
     |> MSBuildRelease buildDir "Build"
     |> Log "AppBuild-Output: "
)

Target "BuildTest" (fun _ ->
    !! "src/test/**/*.csproj"
      |> MSBuildDebug testDir "Build"
      |> Log "TestBuild-Output: "
)

Target "Test" (fun _ ->
    !! (testDir + "/NUnit.Test.*.dll") 
      |> NUnit (fun p ->
          {p with
             DisableShadowCopy = true;
             OutputFile = testDir + "TestResults.xml" })
)

Target "Zip" (fun _ ->
    !! (buildDir + "/**/*.*") 
        -- "*.zip"
        |> Zip buildDir (deployDir + "Calculator." + version + ".zip")
)

Target "Default" (fun _ ->
    trace "Hello World from FAKE"
)

// Dependencies
"Clean"
  ==> "BuildApp"
  ==> "BuildTest"
  ==> "Test"
  ==> "Zip"
  ==> "Default"

// start build
RunTargetOrDefault "Default"

You can do virtually anything and there's a great community out there to help.

Here's a more complex dependency chain with an optional parameter:

// Build order
"Clean"
  ==> "BuildApp"
  ==> "BuildTest"
  ==> "FxCop"
  ==> "NUnitTest"
  =?> ("xUnitTest",hasBuildParam "xUnitTest")  // runs the target only if FAKE was called with parameter xUnitTest
  ==> "Deploy"

There's a rich FAKE world out there with support for Octopus Deploy, all Unit Test systems, Xamarin's xpkg format and much more. Thanks to Steffan Forkmann for helping me explore this. ;)

Scott Hanselman

Changes in the Microsoft MVP Program - MVPs for Open Source Contributions

Related Links

About Scott

How to automatically notify the user that it's time to upgrade a Windows App

About Scott

AngleBrackets open web conference in Florida - April 2014

About Scott

OneNote and Microsoft's quiet API revolution

Using the OneNote API

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About Scott

Exploring FAKE, an F# Build System for all of .NET

Getting Started with FAKE

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About Scott