Zack Owens : ClubStarterKit

ClubStarterKit - where do we go?

zowens — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 01:40:28 GMT

Wow, what a year. Not exactly what I'd expected. Before I dive into where we are now, let me preface this post by saying I have NOT forgotten ClubStarterKit! Although I was not the original author, I feel like it's my baby. I can't just forget about it. Not going to happen.

You might be quick to point out that I have done virtually nothing since the v3 beta 1 release. This, my friends, was a big mistake. Not v3 beta 1, which I will discuss later in this post, but the fact that I was not clear in what I hope to get out of the project. I do take the blame on the lack of development. I'm not going to sit here and tell you I have neglected to look at the code in a while. This is partially due to my work life (I have to make some money.. know that I have 2 jobs) and my personal endeavors (as I am a high school student with more to do than dedicate all my time to ClubStarterKit). No one is perfect. But I do sincerely apologize to the ClubStarterKit community for my lack of communication.

My hopes from the project

When I started the project, I knew that there was a void. ClubStarterKit v1 was an obvious success because of the idea of sample-driven learning. It did a lot of things that people needed. Now, I really wanted to bring CSK to the level of open source. With this, I opened up the door for contributors. This is an area that I found fairly problematic. We did get some amazing contributions, such as the CMS and the RSVP system. Without these core contributions, I would have spent more time building the features rather than tracking down bugs or expanding other CSK features. Trust me, building out a feature for CSK is not easy.

Essentially I had hoped for the ClubStarterKit to be a community effort where there would be multiple core developers. In my idea of "core developer", I seem to be the only one. To me, CSK seems more like a sample that goes through active development.

It is my hope to not be a nag about this, but come on CSK community. You guys do some amazing stuff. Then you demand something out of CSK without contributing? I just don't see how this whole thing can work out like this. I'm not a free contractor. I don't even ask for donations!

I have been asked by one member of the community to forget my role in CSK and pass it along to another developer. Guess what, no one stepped up. Interesting. Guess it looks like I'm still in, win or lose.

What's the deal with the inactivity?

Like I said, there are many factors to this. Mostly, I am starting to regret hard-coding SubSonic into CSK. I now know, after completely hard-coding this stuff in, that I should have allowed external DALs that people wanted. Not everybody like SubSonic and it's query tool. Some people like NHibernate, LINQtoSQL, XML, whatever. I seriously screwed up. My fault, guys. I've learned, let's move on.

A big reason for inactivity was time. I just couldn't devote a lot of time on CSK like I used to. Luckily, this is about to change for me. Just know that I'm going to have more time to work on CSK. Period.

What's next?

I hate to say it, but v3 beta 1 was kind of bad. I really wanted something fresh. That just wasn't what we got with v3 beta 1. The ideas were there, just the delivery was poor. So this is what I plan on doing. What I want to do, and I would LOVE to hear feedback from you on this, is to completely scrap the current codebase and move over to the ASP.NET MVC framework. I am seriously in love with ASP.NET MVC. Honestly, it will move development, deployment, and testability along. I am in the preliminary planning stages. Also, for development, I would like to use C# and convert the C# code over to VB. The fact that the original kit was released in both languages made it all the more appealing. With a refreshed codebase, we can make this process much easier on the person converting (probably me :) ).

Also, we will have an extensive service layer that can be extended to use a custom DAL or any form of data storage.

Lastly, the features listed in my last post will go in.

So, what do you think? I would LOVE to hear your feedback AS LONG AS IT IS PRODUCTIVE AND WILL BENEFIT THE PROJECT.

THANKS FOR YOUR CONTINUED UNDERSTADING CLUBSTARTERKIT COMMUNITY!

Source Code conversion as part of a Build Process

zowens — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 04:10:20 GMT

If you're like me, you want a particular piece of code in your particular language. For example, a lot of people want the Club Starter Kit 2.0, 3.0 in C# since it has been written in VB. Me being the lazy open source developer that doesn't get paid :), I keep delaying the CSK conversion to C# because of my personal stuff. Then I was thinking, what if it were a part of the build process? Then I wouldn't have to go through the arbitrary process of converting a whole application to another language for a release that I will most likely be changing.

Before I go ahead and implement this myself, I was wondering if anyone out in the community has done this sort of thing before? I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard, what with the CruiseControl.NET API being what it is. I have already scoped out some ideas of how to implement. But I was wondering if anyone has ever built this plugin.

PLEASE leave a comment on the blog or email me (zowens2009 at gmail dot com)

THANKS COMMUNITY! I will make you proud if this isn't out there ;)

Future of ClubStarterKit project

zowens — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:20:00 GMT

It's been almost a year since I started the ClubStarterKit project as an open source project up on Codeplex. Since then, we've released Version 2, which added functionality to the original starter kit, and the first Beta of Version 3, which tried to change the data architecture with SubSonic.

The problem is that I've sort of abandoned the project for a while to work on my personal projects. But in that time, I've been really looking at better ways to put together the ClubStarterKit. This post is sort of a Version 3 feature list/roadmap that hopefully we can stick with!

The Data Layer

We tried to do something cool by redoing the data by using SubSonic. In my eyes, this was only a partial success. The reason I chose SubSonic in the first-place was because the original app really was just a presentation of data, there wasn't really much that went on and from a programmer's perspective, there was a lot of logic just encapsulated in the SqlDataControl. Having inline SQL in a SQLDataControl is really unmanageable and can be a pain to update. With SubSonic, it's easy to update a data sequence to contain an additional field.

What I want to do next is have a Data Provider. I realized that not everyone wants to use SubSonic. Some people want to use ADO.NET and I'm sure that some people want to use LINQ now that it is available. What I want to do is give people the option in the provider. The default will still be SubSonic, since I strongly reccomend it, but we will also natively support ADO.NET and LINQ and possibly anything else you guys might want us to support :)

Wiki

I've wanted to build a wiki for quite some time. Our CMS does do some pretty cool stuff, which we will be building upon with the final release, but I also want to build a wiki for those clubs that need such functionality. I'll be evaluating some of the wiki stuff I want to put into the ClubStarterKit's wiki engine, but I definitely want it's functionality.

Photo Album

I really want to revamp the Photo Album functionality. I really want to make it almost Flickr-like with commenting, tagging, etc. But I also want to add the functionality of a sweet photo-album with effects. I would love to add something like the Lightview since it's really amazing to look at :)

What about all the questions I have in the forums?!

I know that I have fallen behind on my forum answering. For that, I TRUELY apologize. I do have a life, you know :) But there really isn't any excuse for not answering people's questions. In the next couple of weeks, I will be cleaning out the issue tracker, taking care of some things, and get those forum questions answered! There are WAY too important for me to just blow them off.

New Website?

I am considering building a website for the project. Codeplex is GREAT, but there are some things I would really love to just make myself into a website. It would most-likely run off a modified version of the ClubStarterKit (which I WILL post for you guys to download) and will show off what a modified version could look like. More on that later.

If there are any question about the roadmap, the project, or feature requests, PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT! If you have an urgent issue or you just want to talk with me one-on-one, email me (zowens@eagleenvision.net). I really want to start getting this rolling again as this starter kit should be on the cutting edge of ASP.NET design!

Thanks to the community and the contributors of the project on your feedback and we hope to start getting your ideas and suggestions into the product!

Quite The Surprise for ClubStarterKit!

zowens — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 19:05:00 GMT

I was just catching up on some RSS feeds and I saw something really cool... the ClubStarterKit open source project was put up on the main ASP.NET site! (http://www.asp.net/downloads/starter-kits/codeplex-club/)

Although I didn't really ask for this to go on there, I think it is appropriate. THANK YOU SO MUCH WHOEVER PUT IT UP! Hopefully we can continue to provide a great community for the ClubStarterKit... and this should help :)