In a follow up to this post I made yesterday, it seems some people are annoyed that a Codeplex command line client exists at all...

• Microsoft re-inventing the wheel
• Codeplex wastes six months reinventing wheels
  

I still can not help but feel some people are missing the point of Codeplex all together... as I see it (and these are only my opinions on the matter) - Codeplex:

• Supersedes the aging gotdotnet.
• Demonstrates TFS features
  
• Scalability for high volumes of users (not necessarily usability, but they're working on that)
• Case study for any large organizations considering deploying it across their organization.
  
• Provides a place Microsoft can.
• Host open-source projects for life.
• Control and support the environment.
• Keep a single message across their organization - we use TFS for source control from now on.
  

(At this point it's worth noting I'm a SVN/Trac/CC.Net guy myself... I can't actually justify the expenses of TFS at the moment)

For me the reasons to use codeplex over another open source provider are simply:

• It's different / new.
• It has a strong Microsoft / .Net focus.
  
• It's easier to get going for a newbie .Net developer (integrated source control in VS.Net, simple wiki pages baked-in)
  
• You can play with TFS.

They are reasons, but hardly "compelling" ones ;o)

The beta command line client is a good thing, but to counter that "6 months wasted effort" with a call to replace TFS with subversion in Codeplex ... that just seems counter-intuitive to me... suddenly you have a roll-on effect of zero integration between source control and the in-built issue tracking mechanisms... so what, lets replace that with Trac??... and now that comes with it's own wiki... so ditch the existing one... and suddenly Codeplex is nothing more then a shell for managing file releases with some forums.

What kind of message would it send to microsoft customers who have invested time and effort into team system... let's be reasonable, it's just not going to happen, so whats the next logical step... improve the tooling to work with the existing source control solution... first step to achieving that... build a decent command line client!

So... if you are looking for subversion based hosting why not use well established players who have been supporting open source from the beginning like SourceForge or tigris... don't they still deserve your love now more then ever since Codeplex is on the scene... what better way to vote than with your choice of OSS project hosting?

Codeplex is an alternative, not a replacement, for the likes of Sourceforge... perhaps what we need is a OssHostMatrix, much like WikiMatrix that compares feature for feature so you can pick the host that's appropriate to your project on features alone, rather then bitching about what's missing in Codeplex, when it's freely available elsewhere...

I'm starting to feel sorry for some of the codeplex guys (like Jonathan Wanagel, who I commend for being vocal about what's going on at codeplex... he seems to pop up on a lot of blogs I read) ... they certainly do seem a little damned if you, damned if you don't at the moment - especially when progress is slowly being made and demonstrated.

Cast your mind back...

If you recall (maybe you don't) there was some discussion a while back about Codplex, TFS and the fact that it's a bit of a wash for creating an collaborative environment for an open source project... why?  Well because of the chasm between developers for the project and those users who wish to collaborate by providing small patches, or working on the bleeding edge (i.e. checking out changes since the last time they build your project from source)

Just to recap the big problems were:

• No support for patches
• No anonymous check-outs
• No easy way to diff/merge between your version and the latest version on source control (because you could only get the source as a tarball).
  

In particular I remember Ayendes posts on the subject, which sparked a bit of debate on the whole issue (and even got some feedback from the codeplex developers themselves...)

• Codeplex WTF
• Team Foundation Scalability ??? And why CodePlex exists?
• Adding SVN functionality to CodePlex

Codeplex's new command line client

Well it looks like one small step has been taken this week, check out this entry on the codeplex blog ... There is now a .Net 2.0 command-line client being developed, which will include support for:

• Anonymous checkouts (hurray! dragging down a tar ball every time there were changes... what an arse that is/was)
• Merging
• Patching

I got all excited (well as excited as you can be about a command line client for TFS) and grabbed the beta... really all I cared about was anonymous checkouts... I like my open source medium rare (mmm... nothing like a fresh check-out of castle... release candidates never have any of the fun stuff!)

But my hopes were dashed - it appears there's no way to skip the authorisation check as far as I can see, and when supplying my own credentials I didn't have access:

c:\dev\tools\codeplex_client>
cpc co reflectoraddins:/ c:\dev\resources\reflector
_addins\

Username [snd\anonymous_cp]: bittercoder
Password for bittercoder: ********
error: TF50309: You do not have sufficient permissions to perform this operation
. ---> Attempted to perform an unauthorized operation.

I guess there's a little more waiting to go yet...

Still, not to get too disheartended I decided to try it on a project I coordinate for (ye olde Splicer...) and I can certainly confirm it works... considering that the command line tools are less than 200K, this is already a great improvement over the current situtation... (about 250mb to download Team Explorer's iso).

c:\dev\tools\codeplex_client>
cpc co splicer:/ c:\dev\home\splicer_copy\

A    c:\dev\home\splicer_copy
A    c:\dev\home\splicer_copy\src
A    c:\dev\home\splicer_copy\src\ASL - Apache Software Foundation License.txt
.... and so on ;o)

So as you can see ... it does work... but I have to say it's pretty damn slow (could just be because I'm in New Zealand of course).

At any rate... I'll be keeping my eye on it... there may be hope for codeplex yet ;o)

... and on one last note... the gui check-in looks a little like TortoiseSVN don't you think... hopefully the work towards some feature parity there.

Over the past couple of days I've been working on using DirectShow and DES (DirectShow Editing Services) for re-encoding mobile video content suitable for posting on the web... With the goal of including video editing into our unified "media engine" which the Syzmk line of products makes use of... as an off-shoot of that work I decided to refactor the rather ugly code we had for working with DES over the weekend into something a little less ugly, that hid most of the details away, say hello to:



(sorry, couldn't resist the lame web 2.0 logo ;o)

A simple little library for doing most of the useful things in DES, the project is hosted here up on Codeplex.  It's currently in an alpha state, at version 0.9.0.0 - and should get feature drops every week or so until I think it can go into beta.

To give an idea of what I'm up to, it's basically just wrapping up the various DES components and removing alot of the unpleasantness (ie. you get to deal with human-friendly units of time like seconds) .. and seperating the concerns of the timeline, and rendering that timeline into something useful like audio or video container (currently that's just WAV, AVI & Windows Media formats).  It's fully functional, but the interfaces at this point it isn't very stable as I'm likely to refactor the various interfaces mercilessly till I get it working how I want, so if you build something with the library now, it's likely to break in the future (but probably not in major way, it is after all mirroring the functionality available in DES).   The added bonus of developing a set of rich wrappers for a lot of this stuff is that I can mock away the requirement on DES altogether, which is always a bonus considering how long the units tests currently take to run for the Syzmk RMP product.

When I get a chance, I'll put up some code examples to demonstrate how you might use it... At any rate it'll be going through some dog fooding in the next month or so while I integrate it with the Syzmk product, so you'll probably here a little more about in the future.