I'm on vacation and am sitting in a coffee shop catching up on some blogs.  Sergio Pereira posted the other day his praises of the new crop of .NET screencasts.  His post explicitly calls out Steve Bohlen and his Summer of NHibernate series.  I wanted to echo Sergio's sentiments about the .NET screencasts and in particular Steve's new series.  I have used the quiet evening in the cabin to watch the excellent videos that Steve Bohlen has put out.  The quality of the videos both in production and content are unsurpassed.  I've used NHibernate before but this is a much better primer than reading a few blog posts/tutorials here and there when a roadblock is hit.

If you've not seen these videos yet and are looking for a good introduction to NHibernate, check out the Summer of NHibernate series.  When you do, make sure you donate (at least a dollar).

Last week I blogged a about Unappreciated Open Source projects.  In the post I made a commitment:

From here on I've resolved to donate a dollar any time I download a free library or webcast where a donate link is presented.  Why $1?  In all honesty it is something I can commit to.

I'm thoroughly looking forward to watching the Summer of NHibernate next week while on vacation.  As I was downloading the videos I came across the "donate" link so I whipped out my Paypal account and made good on my promise.

Many people use open source tools, whether its NUnit, Nant, Rhino, or log4net in their professional lives.  If you use any of these tools, when was the last time you donated time and/or money to any of the open source tools you use?  That's what I thought. 

I was recently watching the Hibernating Rhinos from Ayende Rahien and I wanted to thank Oren.  Right there on the Hibernating Rhinos page it reads:

I wanted to donate.  Perhaps because the videos provided so much guidance from one of our industries finest.  Perhaps because I've met Oren and generally think he's a good guy.  Regardless, I donated some money.  Not much, but some.  Something to say, "thank you, I appreciate this.

Curious if other donate, I emailed Ayende to see what revenue, if any, his video series has generated.  I wanted to know well the community was supporting a popular training tool.  Here's the stats, lifted a few moments ago.

So how much has Oren received from this video series?  Guess.  Seriously.  $125 since September 2007.  From the stats above there have been 242,610 downloads of the videos. That breaks down to .000515 per download!!!  As a community that's quite pathetic.

From here on I've resolved to donate a dollar any time I download a free library or webcast where a donate link is presented.  Why $1?  In all honesty it is something I can commit to.  I download and use a lot of tools, so I don't want ongoing cost to hinder me.  $1 is a token to say thanks, acknowledging the work that's been put into the product.  I would challenge you to make a similar commitment for the tools you use.  Let's show the author(s) of these tools/libraries that we do appreciate the work they do!

"But you have the source!"

I heard that statement a little over a month ago at the Alt.Net Open Spaces event in Seattle.  It's no secret to those who know the community, that open source technologies are at the very least promoted and in many cases you'll find many open source project committers within the Alt.Net community.  Heck, David Laribee, a founding member if there is such a thing, in a post defined Alt.Net as (emphasis mine):

1. You’re the type of developer who uses what works while keeping an eye out for a better way.
2. You reach outside the mainstream to adopt the best of any community: Open Source, Agile, Java, Ruby, etc.
3. You’re not content with the status quo. Things can always be better expressed, more elegant and simple, more mutable, higher quality, etc.
4. You know tools are great, but they only take you so far. It’s the principles and knowledge that really matter. The best tools are those that embed the knowledge and encourage the principles (e.g. Resharper.)

The quote, and many like it, came in a session titled "Mature Open Source projects versus first generation Microsoft projects".  The discussion centered around why some (many) developers, managers, and executives feel comfortable choosing a brand-new Microsoft product when a far more mature open source alternative exists.  One the fears surrounding the adoption of open source is the lack of surety that open source project will exist in perpetuity.  One needs to look no further than two projects, NVelocity and NDoc, to find historical evidence of an open source project vanishing.  The main counter-point to that argument, and many others, was the quote above, that with open source, you were never truly left high-and-dry, since you had the source.

It's a noble thought, but really, who wants to manage another codebase in addition to their own?  In fact I turn to open source project many times so I don't have to write my own code.  Why re-invent what someone else has already done and guided to maturity?  The idea that I can compile and manage another, possibly large, and probably complex codebase is hardly a comfort to me.  It wasn't until a few weeks ago that I realize that the open source pundits were correct.

I have been working on a project for the last year that has, as of two versions ago, started using Watin to automate the downloading of a file from the internet.  Watin is a testing framework but is used by many to automate business processes, which is what I use it for.  If you haven't checked it out yet, it's beautifully simple.

Watin provides handlers to download a file, however, the code was hanging at the point where it should've cleared the download.  I looked at every documentation page, blog post, and blog comment I could to see if I was missing something.  My usage was correct.  So I dug in a bit further using WinDowse to find the handle of the button that should be clicked.  As it turns out the handle of the Save button in a FileDownload Dialog changed from 4424 to 4427 in IE7, who would've guessed it right?  Well, since I had the source I went in and made the change, and voila, I'm back in business.

It gave me some confidence that if an open source project does cease, I can pick it up and patch it up.  I still don't want to manage multiple codebases from many different source, but in the end the pro open-source guys were right, "You have the source!"

I'm having a problem with my nant script which uses the Nant.Contrib library in order to build using a solution file.  The error currently reads, "MSBuild can only read solution files between versions 7.0 and 9.0 inclusive."

Unfortunately at this time I can't find much information anywhere about this.  Either people aren't using 2008 yet or aren't using Nant.

Any smart people out there that can comment on this?

Update:  I had to search a little bit harder, given that VS2008 only went RTM a bit ago.  I did find that Jeffrey Palermo posted a solution to this a few days ago (11/28).  His fix is to modify the nant.exe.config file so that it can recognize the new framework and thus point to a new version of the msbuild.exe.  Thank you Jeff!