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.

The lectures are anywhere between 30 to 60 minutes each and are based on the Haskell language–for which Meijer has special feelings. He even goes as far as leaving one or two homework assignments at the end of each session, which often involve comparing C# to Haskell and fiddling around with the latter.

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13

This is truly a “Can’t Miss” and I recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more about the origins of functional programming and how it works. As a bonus, you even end-up learning Haskell… “YOU KNOW!” lol

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This is the first installment of a series of micro-posts about things I happen to stumble upon on the Internet and which should be of interest to people. If you like it, follow the “Can’t Miss” category to get updates.