Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day: OSS

Showing posts with label OSS. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

TouchDevelop [Browser Client] is now Open Source (MIT) and on GitHub

Canadian Developer Connection - Microsoft Research makes Touch Develop open source

Touch Develop is a tool developed by Microsoft Research that allows developers to build mobile apps, games and websites in a browser. As of this week it is now open source on Git!

The TouchDevelop project was inspired by the programmability of 8-bit computers of the 80s that introduced many of us to the power of programming. TouchDevelop brings that magic to modern touch-based devices. The result is a tool that you can use to write basic code using a browser and can play on websites or mobile devices

What is TouchDevelop? ...

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TouchDevelop has always been a very open tool, with developers having the ability to share their scripts with other Touch Develop users. But now they take the next step – they have released the TouchDevelop web app under the MIT license. The team at Microsoft Research remains dedicated to leading its further development, but you, our users, fellow researchers, and hackers of the world, are invited to contribute.

TouchDevelop sits in a GitHub repository. You can fork it there, submit pull requests with bug-fixes or new features, submit and comment on issues in the bug-tracker, and check on latest activity. TouchDevelop consists of about 160,000 lines of TypeScript plus some CSS and a tiny bit of HTML. ...

TouchDevelop - TouchDevelop goes open-source

The TouchDevelop project was inspired by the programmability of 8-bit computers of the 80s. This is how many in our team learned about programming and we wanted to bring that magic to modern touch-based devices. In very beginning, with our first Windows Phone 7 app, it was about programming your own device, 80s style.

Soon after, we have moved to the open web as the platform and added the capability to publish and share your programs (scripts) with other users in source form, so others can learn from and even improve upon them. We believe this openness has helped the platform quite a bit, with over 200,000 scripts published over the past 3 years.

Today, we’re taking another step on this path – we’re releasing the TouchDevelop web app under the MIT license. The team at Microsoft Research remains dedicated to leading its further development, but you, our users, fellow researchers, and hackers of the world, are invited to contribute.

Join the party!

TouchDevelop sits in a GitHub repository. ...

What’s not there

You’ll notice we’re not releasing the source of our Windows Phone and Android apps, as they will become obsolete very soon, when we switch to Apache Cordova. Also, running a cloud back-end for a major service like TouchDevelop is costly and complicated. We’re thus not expecting you to do that (and we’re not releasing the back-end). Instead, you can run your forked version of the TouchDevelop client web app against our cloud services. This will work as long as you’re running the client on localhost. If you want to run it from a different domain, drop us an email and we can talk about it.

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Microsoft/TouchDevelop

TouchDevelop is a touch-friendly app creation environment for iPad, iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux developed with <3 at Microsoft Research. Our mobile-friendly editor makes coding fun, even on your phone or tablet!

This repo contains the source code of the TouchDevelop editor. If you are intending to write TouchDevelop scripts, you probably want to go to touchdevelop.com:

stable: https://www.touchdevelop.com/app

beta: https://www.touchdevelop.com/app/beta

Other pages of interest:

landing page: https://www.touchdevelop.com

blog: https://www.touchdevelop.com/blog

Hour Of Code tutorials: https://www.touchdevelop.com/hoc

What's in this repo?

The repo is mostly written in Typescript with tiny pieces of HTML gluing.

This repo contains the source code for:

the browser client

the compiler

the editor

the runtime

the node.js client

However, you will not find the cloud backend code here. Indeed, https://www.touchdevelop.com takes care of storing and managing the scripts.

Contributing

There are many ways to contribute to TouchDevelop....

I tweeted this earlier, but wanted to follow-up with a normal blog post (and there's also going to be a Coding4Fun, http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/blog, post on it next Wednesday too ;)

Thursday, January 08, 2015

.NET Code Contracts are now OSS

CodeContractsDotNet/CodeContracts

Code Contracts provide a language-agnostic way to express coding assumptions in .NET programs.

The contracts take the form of pre-conditions, post-conditions, and object invariants. Contracts act as checked documentation of your external and internal APIs. The contracts are used to improve testing via runtime checking, enable static contract verification, and documentation generation. Code Contracts bring the advantages of design-by-contract programming to all .NET programming languages. We currently provide three tools: Runtime Checking. Our binary rewriter modifies a program by injecting the contracts, which are checked as part of program execution. Rewritten programs improve testability: each contract acts as an oracle, giving a test run a pass/fail indication.

Automatic testing tools, such as Pex, take advantage of contracts to generate more meaningful unit tests by filtering out meaningless test arguments that don't satisfy the pre-conditions.

Static Checking. Our static checker can decide if there are any contract violations without even running the program! It checks for implicit contracts, such as null dereferences and array bounds, as well as the explicit contracts.

Documentation Generation. Our documentation generator augments existing XML doc files with contract information. There are also new style sheets that can be used with Sandcastle so that the generated documentation pages have contract sections.

Quick Links

Download: https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/1ec7db13-3363-46c9-851f-1ce455f66970

FAQ: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/contracts/faq.aspx

Forum: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/codecontracts/threads

JabbR chat room: https://jabbr.net/#/rooms/CodeContracts

Nice to see this open sourced, given the recent silence about it...

Wednesday, December 03, 2014

XML Notepad (fka XML Notepad 2007) gets some rev love, now v2.6 (& .NET 4.0 and bug squashing)

Software Complexity - Update to XML Notepad

As XML has exploded across the planet I continue to get many requests for improvements to my XML Notepad of 2007. The tool has been downloaded over a million times, so I figured it's time to show it some love and fix some bugs. In the process I updated it to NET 4.0 using VS 2013. I was amazed how everything from back then still works, including the Unit Tests. That is pretty amazing platform compatibility. Windows is a great platform and Visual Studio is still best of breed for software development, and I still love C#.

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You can download it from here; Welcome to Microsoft XML Notepad

Microsoft XML Notepad is a lightweight and fast tool for editing XML documents. XML has proliferated the planet and XML Notepad has been downloaded over a million times!

Or you can head over to the Project's CodePlex repo;

XML Notepad

XML Notepad provides a simple intuitive User Interface for browsing and editing XML documents.

This application is built using .NET Framework 4.0 in C#.

See XML Notepad Design for information about how this application is built.

The downloadable installer for the latest version is available.

When I find an interesting project I'll usually try to grab an Feed for it, so I can track updates, releases, etc. I was pleasantly surprised when the CodePlex feed for this project suddenly became active with check-ins, and then this official release.

TFS Word Add-In is now an OSS "Sample"

Willy's Reflections - Visual Studio ALM Rangers - Team Foundation Server Word Add-in goes OSS as a “sample”

We are pleased to announce that the release of Team Foundation Server Word Add-in as a sample solution, based on a prototype, not a production solution. Moving to OSS will allow the community to use it in their own ways

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Team Foundation Server Word Add-in - Version 1.2 OSS Word 2013 TFS 2013

Release Notes

Welcome to the Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Word Add-in
The Team Foundation Server Word Add-In is a sample solution, based on a prototype, not a production solution. Moving to OSS will allow the community to use it in their own ways.
Review these and other solutions, if you need a production Team Foundation Server and Microsoft Word integration:

AIT WordToTFS

Office4TFS

TeamSolutions

Also bookmark Visual Studio ALM Community Widgets for community widgets and tools.

Source Code
This package contains the same code which was checked in to version control when we released the source code. This is the only and last download package for this project.

Supported Environments

Microsoft Office Word 2013 (32-bit, 64-bit)

Team Foundation Server 2013 Object Model

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Given the commercial products that do what this Add-in does and more, and that it had kind of been languishing for a bit, I think it's pretty cool that the ALM Ranger Team bit the bullet and instead of just killing it, released it as OSS/Prototype/Sample/Example-ware. I did have to laugh at the emphasis on "as a sample solution, based on a prototype, not a production solution." That so sounds like some of the utilities/apps/etc I've released. :)

Look, if you don't want to pay for a solution (we'll leave it aside as to why is there a supported/free Excel Add-in for TFS and not one for Word... grumble... grumble) you now have this, with the source, so run with it...