I've been busy coding

It has been 10 days since I last posted a new blog entry. I've been busy. I was not spending lots of time taking photowalking nor was I spending my time surfing on the internet, checking the latest photos in Flickr or Zooomr. I was spending my after hours doing development work for my Open Source project called Dotnet Commons 2.0.

I started the original Dotnet Commons project back in 2004 after seeing that there wasn't a similar Open Source project like the Jakarta Commons for the .Net framework. I've benefited from the Jakarta Commons projects as they really do help in speeding up software development. There are tons of literatures and articles about Jakarta Commons. A quick google search will land you many and I am not going to tell you how great Jakarta Commons is.

Initially there was some momentum in creating a similar Commons library for the .Net world called the .Net Commons, but the enthusiasm seemed to have died down pretty quick. Unlike Jakarta which has IBM's backing, the lack of a major sponsor seemed to have contributed to the lack of speed and enthusiasm in pushing the .Net Commons project much further than the initial project proposal stage. Perhaps Microsoft's constant push for the adoption of the Enterprise Library has something to do with it as well... Software developers working with the Microsoft products (.Net Framework) simply do not display the same enthusiasm for Open Source unlike the Java development community. The Java guys seem to adopt and even embrace Open Source naturally. As much as I have to admit that I have switch from being a Java developer to now a .Net/C# developer, I just think that the Microsoft development community are filled with mainly code monkeys who simply await Microsoft to tell them how to do things "correctly". Whatever Microsoft says or suggests becomes the "industry best practices". I see this at work place and I see this in newsgroups and forums. Most of the stuff in the Microsoft patterns & practices website are things that the Java community would have done yons ago. Yet, many of the Microsoft developers think that the "goodies" in the website are the best things since sliced bread.

Why am I doing this Open source project then? My motivation stems from 2 aspect. Firstly, I like to think that, no matter how small my contribution to the Open Source community, I would like to do promote the Open Source to the .Net world and to the .Net development community. I have benefitted much from the use of Open Source softwares and I will gladly "payback" by contributing some of my time to Open Source projects. Secondly, the functionalities in the Dotnet Commons project (and sub projects) are useful collection of utilities that most developers will be writing in every systems, applications or projects. Why re-invent the wheel all the time.

"The goal of Dotnet Commons 2.0 project is to become an extension of the .NET Framework 2.0 Base Class Library (BCL) that provides support for the generally useful low-level features that are missing from the BCL."

Well, I believe my time has been well spent. And I hope I will be able to convince more people to take up the challenge to help in Open Source projects. The tasks are not done yet. I will spend more time adding new things into the Dotnet Commons project. In the meantime, stay tune... and I should soon go back to do more photography and hopefully be able to post some more interesting photos.