ClubStartKit is Reborn… With a new release

The title says it all. That’s right, I’m back on ClubStarterKit. I’ve tried to assure the CSK community in past blog posts that it isn’t dead. In the last year, I’ve done a lot of thinking and outside programming. I’m FINALLY in a position where I have really progressed in terms of project management skill and web design. Many of the opinions I held when I started the project have simply changed. I’ll detail some of those in a minute.

Here’s a link to the new release.

Open source software is really tricky, especially for someone who has to go to school and keep up with the day job. It’s simply TOO MUCH for someone else to demand so much on a person. However, demanding open source work onto yourself is highly rewarding. That’s why I’m back.

Why the time off?

Well, I simply had to build my business. Ultimately, that takes a lot more priority over any other open source work. As harsh as that is, I simply had too much going on. Also, I was in a bit of a rut with CSK.

The project started from a need by the community to extend the club starter kit originally started by Microsoft that shipped in the box as a starter kit with Visual Studio 2005. I found plenty of ways to extend the kit for myself and decided to share my extended version. It was a tool for beginners. My role was to share my knowledge of ASP.NET with everyone else.

But there was a point where I was just copy and pasting and hacking the crap out of something that wasn’t mine and was written by a bunch of other people. I ripped a lot of things out, especially the data access. What I put in it’s place was a disaster as well, though. I simply didn’t have the forethought to imagine a site that was fully extensible. I simply put out something that was hacked and hacked and hacked. I didn’t put something out that EVERYONE could use, I put something out that EVERYONE had to figure out every little piece and extend. That’s simply irresponsible on my part.

So I decided I needed to completely rewrite the thing. There was a point were I was sick and tired of writing VB. To me, it looks WAY too verbose. I couldn’t stand looking at it… and C# was my primary language at a point anyways, and still is.

The big news

Now I’m ready to come back. I finally have something that I put my stamp on. It’s MINE. I wrote it. There’s not a feeling in this world more satisfying for me than to say a piece of code is completely my creation. No hacks, no copy paste (ok, there’s a little… but at least I know what it does!) and certainly something I think everyone can use, whether it’s bits and pieces or the whole thing.

What’s new!

Well… for starters, it’s written entirely in C#! While I know some VB people are shivering in their boots, I plan on upgrading the web project to VB if there is an apparent need from the community. I’m not here to waste my time converting something to VB if there’s not a need. C# is such an expressive language and it’s something every VB dev should at least TRY to look at. More on that down the line.

Another big new thing is that it runs ASP.NET MVC, not classic web forms. I know that there is some serious turmoil out there over this subject, but it really is a much better way to create web applications in ASP.NET in my opinion. There’s not very much of a difference, as it turns out. It’s a very comfortable shift… more than I thought it would be. It makes applications much easier to understand, write, and test.  I can entertain comments, questions, and concerns by email over this. I’m willing to fight for this :) But really, MVC rocks. It’s simply amazing.

I know it hasn’t been released yet, but this release will be targeting Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0. There’s a lot of really cool new ASP.NET features that I think CSK would really benefit from.

Now to the big thing that might just turn some people off… we’re primarily going to use NHibernate for data access. I plan on adding a few more providers (Subsonic would be the first to the list). I really started off with NHibernate as a learning experience. It’s a very complex, but WELL written data access solution. I’ve VERY pleased with the results. There’s a learning curve with NHibernate, to an extent. But NHibernate isn’t as hard for simple operations, like what CSK provides. I think I can go back to the fundamental part of CSK and provide some really good samples for people to learn from. NHibernate isn’t really all that hard as long as you have something to look at. Trust me, reading the documentation isn’t as glamorous as it sounds :). Hopefully I can abstract that away from the average CSK user.

A huge reason for adding NHibernate as the primary data access point is because we can use it to generate our DB for us, often called “Domain Driven Design” (although we aren’t completely “DDD”). I can’t tell you how much trouble I’ve had with the SQL stuff in the past. If you start with your data model first, a tool like NHibernate or Subsonic will just generate all the DB code for you! For me, that’s HUGE! I hate having people say the new version broke their DB. That' hurts. Now we can just have the damn thing upgraded!

Speaking of the DB… we will be starting from scratch on that too… sorry to say. I know plenty of people will be really disappointed by this. Just how it is. Hopefully from now on, we will have a better upgrade path. I hate breaking people’s compatibility simply because we release a new version. I’ll be assessing a possible upgrade path for those running v3 beta 1 and v2. But we shall see. This would be a GREAT contribution if someone in the community could code this out.

The fact that we didn’t have a lot of tests in the last few versions proved we really didn’t have a great product. We just didn’t. That simple. I knew that this time, I needed to test EVERYTHING. While I don’t claim to be a TDD expert, I really tried to test first. I’ll detail contributions in a bit, but I can tell you, everything needs to have tests. While we’re a little light on tests right now, hopefully that will change as we get closer to v3.

What’s taken out

There was a serious outcry after v2 for a league management component. What happened in v3 Beta 1 was… interesting. I haven’t really seen anyone use it, and the feedback was mixed. So for this iteration, it’s not going to be a core part of the product. If there is a serious need, I think we (as in the community) should plan and implement an extension to CSK for league management stuff.

League management was a really good idea, but I think the ideas some people had were just out of my scope. It’s something someone needs to write a spec for. I can’t just create what I think will fly. Just not something I’m willing to waste more of my time on.

Also on my list of things taken out, I’ve finally decided to separate the logic of the application into separate projects. While the Visual Studio Express people might be upset, it really comes down to manageability of the project. If you create a large web application, it really defeats the purpose of expansibility. There are 6 main projects: Core, Infrastructure, Web, Data.NHibernate, Domain, and Tests. The core and infrastructure projects are meant to be distributed with ANY web project. It’s not CSK specific. So you can really use those as toolkits. It has some really good logic in it. I’d love to provide something that isn’t just for our little open source project. I will, however, be shipping a template with compiled versions of Domain, infrastructure, core, and Data.NHibernate. Hopefully that will help those who use express. We’ll see. I’d love to hear your feedback on this.

Contributions

In the past, I’ve said everyone can just contribute. That’s going to change. We’re starting with a whole new codebase that I wrote. Because of this, I think it’s time we started accepting patches rather than add contributors. We’ve had only a tiny bit of contribution in the past anyways. So here’s my decision.

I’m going to take every contributor off the list. It’s a tough choice, but it has to be done. I will start to accept patches. These patches HAVE to contain tests. Once you’ve contributed in that way, I will then consider making you a contributor to the source repository.

The release

So I’ve told you wants new, and what not, but I didn’t say anything about a release. Today I am releasing the new codebase. I’m going to name this ClubStarterKit v3 preview. While I would love to call this v4, I think that not having a final v3 would be kind of strange. So this codebase will eventually become version 3. My plans from this point is to get feedback on what I have an release Version 3 when it’s ready. No promises, no false hopes. It’ll be done when I say it’s done. In the mean time, you can download the preview here.

A call to action

I’ve done my thing. I’ve built what I thought you’d want. Now it’s YOUR turn to help me out. Tell me what you like, tell me what you don’t like, tell me what should be in there, tell me what the future of CSK looks like. I need your feedback. It’s the essential ingredient in any open source project. We need to pick up anew and make this a sustainable and polished project that we can call a community-driven project!

As always, thank you for your support and contribution. We all can give each other a helping hand in learning to develop software.