Herding Code 142 - Scott Guthrie on the ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Razor Open Source Announcement

Episode 142

The gang talks to Scott Guthrie about the recent announcement that ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Razor are being developed in public, open source repositories using git and will accept external code contributions. It's an action packed show, jam packed with information and guys named Scott.

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Show Notes:

• K Scott asks Scott Guthrie about the recent open source announcements about ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Razor. Scott G. details what's changed, highlighting both the new transparency due to working in public repositories and the changes to accept external code submissions.
• Scott G. explains that these are still supported products with dedicated Microsoft engineering investment.
• K Scott mentions a question from twitter - How far will this go? Will we see other products and projects following a similar model?
• Some more questions from twitter - What kind of feedback is Scott G. hoping to see? How will feedback be handled?
• Scott G. talks about how pull requests will be implemented. Developers will have to fill out a form and after they're on record pulls will reviewed for various factors and then be integrated.
• Scott K. asks a about ownership of the code contributed to the project. Is OuterCurve involved?
• Jon asks a question from twitter: Was this the goal from the beginning? What was the biggest hurdle - legal or logistics. Scott G. mentions the community response to including jQuery in the ASP.NET MVC Project Template.
• Kevin asks Scott about patch contributing that has some performance issues and is the patch rejected or are the issues fixed. Scott G. thinks that minor issues in code might still be accepted or just asked to be fixed. A patch that does noting but "Format C Drive" will be rejected outright, other than that the process is pretty flexible.
• ASP.NET MVC 4 is not taking new features on as it's currently in a Release Candidate mode.
• K Scott asks how Microsoft chose git as it's source control. Microsoft sure has made a lot of OSS developers happy using git.
• Kevin points out that the Windows Azure SDK's are on GitHub and asks why the ASP.NET components weren't put there as well. Are there plans to move those projects from GitHub to CodePlex now? Scott G. says that CodePlex didn't support git when the Azure SDK's were released. With the announcement of git on CodePlex they've made decisions based on where they fit best, and ASP.NET content had historically been on CodePlex. There aren't any plans to move from one to the other, and the beauty of DVCS is that they can be worked on in either place..
• Scott K. talks about how the team received feedback from blogs and mailing lists and now CodePlex discussions and asks about whether feature/roadmap discussions will be public or not.
• Jon asks about how release versions vs. nightly code builds will be supported from Microsoft. Scott G. explains that support will still attempt to help, but of course a released version is recommended for production scenarios.  He also reminds that product support will help with any .NET support scenario, including ASP.NET open source code.
• Jon asked a about how this will affect the Mono project, and Scott G. hopes that it does.
• Scott K. asks about how the release schedule might change now that the projects are open source.
• Scott G. talks about how, by going open source, customer feedback can be potentially received in real time which hopefully increases product quality.
• Kevin asks about community contributions of major new features. Scott G. says it'll be a learning process, but they're hoping to see some great ideas from the community. He discusses how Microsoft's been incorporating open source libraries for a while, including JSON.NET, jQuery, Modernizr, etc., so now there's flexibility to incorporate features both as core code and as external libraries.
• K Scott says Microsoft has been doing a great job incorporating community projects into their products rather than reinventing the wheel each time.
• Scott K. asks how Microsoft decides to create new projects or use existing solutions from the OSS community. Scott G. says it's important to keep the MVC core concepts simple while allowing for advanced scenarios, and he and Scott K. discuss the balance between keeping concept count and clutter low while including support for popular scenarios.
• Scott G. mentions that he hopes the new open source view gets Microsoft feedback sooner so that changes can be made faster to final releases which will translate to better products.
• K Scott asks about what's new in the world of Windows Azure. Scott G. clarifies that his new role includes ASP.NET and the web stack as well, and says there's a lot of exciting stuff in the works for Azure. Scott G. says he'd like to come back on Herding Code to talk about it when it's released.

Show Links:

• Scott Guthrie - @scottgu
• Scott's blog post: ASP.NET MVC, Web API, Razor and Open Source

Show notes by @buildstarted - thanks!