Can’t Miss! Part II: OpenWrap, a promising .NET package (export) management system

I’ve recently stumbled upon a very interesting package management system for .NET: OpenWrap. It’s no surprise that it’s been idealized and is being developed by the talented @serialseb (blog) (github), the same guy who developed the OpenRasta web framework.

I haven’t really found the time to test OpenWrap thoroughly, but knowing the thrills and pangs one get on setting up a package management system for .NET, I immediately acknowledged the importance of this project. Sure, there are other cool alternatives being developed right now such as Bricks and WebGAC; you can even set up Ivy to play nice with .NET, as we’ve successfully done at Locaweb. But regarding the emergence of competitive solutions for package management in the .NET ecosystem, Sebastien couldn’t put it a better way:

(…) Package management is going to be the next Vietnam war on .net, and many people will come up with different solutions. It’s all for the best, and most projects, as they have done many times before, will die off on their own. This is to be expected. As such, I implore the .net world to let enough time for each of those projects to compete purely on the quality and functionality they provide, and let the best one eliminate naturally the other ones. Don’t succumb to the belief that standardizing early will help, or that popularity would be a distinctive factor. If we fuck-up the package management story on .net, we may never recover, so give it a bit of time and be circumspect in your analysis.

That being said, this post aims only at showing what’s out there regarding package management, with a special emphasis on OpenWrap. Sebastien has been posting several articles on his blog about how the project is developing, so it should be interesting to watch his progress. Last but not least, it is an open-source project, so feedback/contribution from the community should be more than welcome.

Can’t Miss! Part I: Learn the fundamentals of functional programming with Microsoft

Erik Meijer, IMO one of Microsoft’s most brilliant employees, has put together a series of 13 lectures teaching the fundamentals of functional programming. As I mentioned in my last post about Microsoft, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Microsoft is producing and distributing freely this kind of high-level content, given the fact that guys like Meijer are behind the project.

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Rails Summit Latin America 2009

Dias 13 e 14 de outubro rolou em São Paulo o Rails Summit Latin America 2009, evento organizado pelo Fabio Akita e pela Locaweb. É seguramente o maior evento da comunidade RoR na América do Sul. Esta é a segunda edição e, em relação ao ano passado, temos mais palestrantes e, no geral, o evento está bem mais interessante. Fiz uma cobertura do evento ao vivo, mas depois fiz um resumo das palestras que assisti. [...]

My take on the .NET ecosystem

(A tradução deste artigo para o português estará disponível em breve.)

I’ve been working – both academically and professionally – with the .NET stack since 2003 and although I didn’t meet the rough edges of .NET 1.0 and Visual Studio 2002, I did saw the steep transition from Framework 1.1 to 2.0 and the smoother 3.0 and 3.5 steps. Right now we’re once again in a period of transition which seems to stale the .NET world for a couple of months at every release cycle. It seems the world is waiting for .NET 4.0 and whatever wasn’t good enough on the previous version–such as the Entity Framework–is not going to be further developed by the community. While in theory this represents a golden opportunity for alternative libraries to gain some momentum, in practice corporate developers do realize that the cost of changing legacy applications they simply don’t want to touch outweighs the cost of sitting still while Microsoft puts the latest bells and whistles to the “branded” library and the mainstream community starts blogging with some useful prototypes people can reproduce.

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