This weekend was quite busy. First, I’m excited to announce that I’ve been added as an official NUnit developer. I’ll continue working on making sure NUnit builds and tests cleanly in Mono, especially on Linux.
In addition, the NUnit team has announced two new-ish projects. The first is a VSUnit Visual Studio plugin that Charlie Poole has been working on. The second is NUnitLite which will basically be a tiny version of NUnit that can be embedded in your app.
You’ll notice that last link isn’t to SourceForge. That’s because we’ve been invited to be part of a new Microsoft Open Source community called CodePlex. What is CodePlex?
CodePlex.com is a simple but highly functional online venue for distributed, community-collaborative software development. All projects are 100% public, transparent, and open source. CodePlex’s promise is to enable Windows and .NET developers like you to write, share, and consume source code and built binaries with each other and with the rest of the world as fluidly as you can on an intranet or VPN: openly, securely, and freely.
Initially, we envisaged CodePlex as a replacement for gotdotnet Workspaces. During its development, it quickly evolved into something much, much more. CodePlex leapfrogs sites like Workspaces in ways that I think you will find both promising and exciting, in terms of features, client affordances, licensing, and project management. It is not 100% done but I’m sure that you’ll discover that its quality, performance, and the direction in which it’s headed are clear. Written from the ground up in C# utilizing .NET 2.0 technologies and built on top of Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (VSTFS), CodePlex enables geographically-distributed teams to enjoy the benefits of VSTFS over the Internet: a one-of-a-kind resource.
We’re not actually sure how this is all going to work out, but we as the NUnit team decided that if Microsoft wants to try to open up to the Open Source community, we’d at least give it a try. If it doesn’t work out, we’ll just pull the projects and move them back over to SourceForge. (Charlie does a better job of explaining NUnit’s involvement on his blog).
So all in all an exciting weekend, and some projects and sites that it will be interesting to watch.