• Codecamp recap and feedback.
  
• Teched thoughts & feedback.
• The OpenXML debate.
• Repository Factory from P&P
• Workflow foundation (anyone using it?)
  

The Sylvia Park Architecture chat was today, bit slow to start with, but not a bad turn out with 9 of us in the end.

First some stats:

First off I asked the question, should you open source software that is key to your business, sparked by a recent conversation with and old business partner who's been considering open sourcing the product I helped develop for him - mostly because the business makes money for deploying/consulting/configuring the software more so then licensing it, and the remote chance of other people using/promoting etc. the product couldn't hurt the companies profile.

This sparked a bit of a debate, and certainly a few of the people developing products in the group had some opinions.

• It's not a matter of make the source available and they will come, you need to actively construct a community around your product.
• You need to make all the communications for the project visible.
• If you cannot communicate the vision for your product clearly, you'll never get traction with the community.
• By and large you’re better off focusing on making money, there's a long lead time before OSS projects gain traction.

We then moved onto something a little more hands-on, talking a bit about Rhino ETL - I ran through my experience so far (personally I'm liking it a lot) and the feedback from others was that SSIS does about 98% of what you need, with the customization work required for the other 2% taking as long as the rest of the project!  I could see RhinoETL being a great little swiss army knife for a lot of data-related projects in the future, especially with its target support.

Keith's question was asked, when is PeterB going to start blogging/bliki'ing... not any time soon I believe was the response, as he requires some kind of alter-ego... Along the same lines we also briefly talked about the decline in blogging, and what “good” blogs people read among all the noise that's out there today...  Technology-savy VC's came up in the conversation, such as Paul Graham (of "hackers and painters" fame).

Tagging & tagging file systems were next on the table (like Alex James's XTend which got a mention) and Peter noted that the upcoming service pack for Vista should make it a lot easier to organize data via "piles" i.e. dragging documents without an author over a pile of documents by a certain author will assign the author to the anonymous document. 

The key point/concern was that these kinds of tasks must not make search operations harder i.e. Categorization should never penalize search operations.

Talked a little about BDD or Behaviour Driven Development, this struck a chord with Peter who has been doing something very similar with existing clients, though I'm not sure I articulated the Analysis side of the BDD very well - there's a nice BDD introductory post on the DanoNorth.net blog.

In my mind at least BDD is all about ubiquitous language – I see it as the central tenant of BDD, where energy and thought is put into keeping the business level parts of corporation or company in-line with the development/software/solution parts - tying it all together with a common language/vocabulary.

Digging in deeper we have some software frameworks to help with BDD testing:

• rbehave for ruby
• rspec for ruby
• jbehave for java
• nbehave for .Net
• BehaveSharp for .Net
  

Roy Osherove recently posted a nice "look" into the use of BehaveSharp too, worth a look.

On a similar note Test Driven Development cropped up, with the interesting question of just how you could "force" or "lead" someone through the process of developing test first (without just having them watch a screen-cast) ... easier said then done I think was the consensus.

Also briefly covered was Lightspeed 1.0 and the announcement of the versions/pricing came up... Some of us were intrigued by the model-based pricing structure :)

Incidentally Like the container tutorials series I did, I also index these blog entries (and some general information about the Sylvia Park chats) on my wiki.

• Google joining the Open Invention Network.
• RhinoETL what / why?
  
• Behaviour Driven Development.
• What is it / anyone doing it?
  
• .Net Library for BDD - Behaviour #
• Open sourcing your own products?
• When, if etc.
• Convincing shareholders/stakeholders.
• Affects on publicity, marketing.
• What's happening at the day of code (dev code camp).
• Lightspeed goes to v1.0.
• Sql Server 2008 improvements

• Lots of stuff doesn't work just yet ;o)
• it will end up on Rubyforge, not Codeplex... and I think it's quite an appropriate decision considering the nature of the project... good to see common sense winning over marketing dogma - and it's going to be there by the end of August.
  
• The project will eventually be entirely open to community contributions (I don't think that includes the code making up the DLR itself, as a shared platform that's probably something that needs to be tightly controlled)
  

So I see both Andrew, Nick and Alex J have some thoughts on languages, and of course Rowans post sparked it off... and people talk about beautiful languages, mentioning expressiveness in the same breath. 

Personally I love how expressive Ruby is - I think potentially because I got my first exposure to ruby after reading Why's poignant guide a while back (I see there are new chapters ...oooh) which was quite surreal compared to how I say learnt C++ (from reading the Borland Turbo C++ manual when I was 11, also my first exposure to OOP)...

When I code in ruby I feel like I'm telling stories... I dig that :)

So Alex J mentioned that extension methods let us achieve much of the syntactic sugar that ruby provides (though obviously in ruby's case this isn't so much syntactic sugar as core mechanisms in the language itself) - and of course Lambda expressions are helping too, but does expressive == good 100% of the time?   I don't think I'm qualified to say, but I can't help but feel that a language which is very expressive, isn't necessarily the easiest to manipulate and refactor, so I may not be as productive and it may not feel as fluent to me... I quite liked this resharper horizons post which suggests that tooling support should probably influence future language design - could that requirement possibly fight against an increased level of expressiveness in a language, will compromises need to made, or is nirvana just around the corner?

OK, well I figured this post should at least have some code... I'd feel uneasy otherwise... so how about:

public static class CommonExtensions

{

    public static Action<Action<int>> LoopTo(this int start, int end)

    {

        return new Action<Action<int>>(action => To(start, end).ForEach(i => action(i)));

    }

    public static IEnumerable<int> To(this int start, int end)

    {

        if (end < start)

            for (int i = start; i > end - 1; i--)

                yield return i;

        else

            for (int i = start; i < end + 1; i++)

                yield return i;   

    }

    public static void ForEach<T>(this IEnumerable<T> sequence, Action<T> action)

    {

        foreach (T item in sequence) action(item);

    }

    public static void PrintLine(this object o)

    {

        Console.WriteLine(o);

    }

}

So now we could try and do this....

// ruby

(10..20).each { |i| puts i }

// C#

10.LoopTo(20) ( i => i.PrintLine() );