Recently we had a meeting that was made up of Me, Steven and most of the Most Valued Minions. On the agenda was everything from discussing the governance of the project, to making plans for a v1, looking over the state of our GitHub repository and much more.

A lot of ground was covered and the intention of this blog series is to try and get down as much as possible of what we said and decided. We believe in developing in the open, so it is important that we get the information out to our community.

Please do not hesitate to reach out to us if you have any questions, suggestions and just want to share your thoughts on the subjects!

Here is a tl;dr of the posts

• Most Valued Minions can now commit code
• Cleaned up our labels on GitHub
• Cleaning up all the open issues and pull-requests
• Aiming for to put out a new release every 8-weekish
• Pushing towards a v1 release
• v1 will be a dual-target release, targeting both .net 4.0 and .net 4.5
• Post-v1 we will support .net 4.0 for about 6 months
• We are going to close down our Google group in about 1 month
• We are going all-in on OWIN, bringing it into our core
• We are fully committed to supporting ASP.NET vNext
• We released blog.nancyfx.org

Happy reading!

I have been wanting to create a Nancy blog for a very long time. My initial idea was to create a blog that used static files and posts in markdown format (like Sandra.Snow, which is built using Nancy, or Jekyll) and have people submit pull-requests if they wanted to share content.

A lack of time got the better of me and I never got any further than creating an empty repository. The idea never vanished and it has been something that we (the core contributors of Nancy) recently started talking about again.

During our meeting it was brought up again and we thought it was a great idea and that we should act on it. The next day Jonathan Channon shared his first spike of the blog that, behind the scenes, was powered by a Nancy based RSS aggregator. Awesome work!

I am very pleased to announce the beta of the blog.nancyfx.org website. It is still at a very early stage and we are not done with the design of the site yet (help is always welcome!). The source code for the blog can be found at the Nancy.Blog repository.

If you blog about Nancy then you can submit a pull-request to have your blog added to the feeddata.json. The aggregator will scan your RSS feed for any posts that are in a nancy or nancyfx category.

I won't to point out that we do not make any claims on your content. Our disclaimer clearly states that we do not take any responsibility or copyright of the content. We provide several links back to the original post and we inform the readers that all comments should be posted on the original blog (again, we provide a link)-

Don't forget to add our rss-feed to your reader to get all the aggregated Nancy content from a single source!

Over the years, we have often gotten the question on when we will be releasing v1 of Nancy. While it has never been important to us, many have been claiming that this is something that is important for enterprise adoption.

I still remember when we went from 0.9.0 to 0.10.0 and many thought we were crazy. Apparently 1.0.0 is the obvious next version after 0.9.0, right? With the current release being 0.23.0, you can perhaps tell that we did not agree.

Of course, it is my personal belief, that changing the version number to v1, is just an artificial sense of security. Nothing else is going to change in terms of support or promises (well almost, more about versioning further below).

There as several ways that our community are able to communicate with us and each other

• #nancyfx Jabbr channel
• #nancyfx hashtag and @nancyfx account on Twitter
• Nancy tag on StackOverflow
• GitHub issues
• Google groups

However, we want to make a small adjustment to that. If you are using our Google group, then you should definitly keep on reading.

On the Nov 20, Nancy will be celebrating her 4th birthday. That is quite an achivement for any open-source project, even more so for a project in the .NET ecosystem.

During these four years a lot has happened, but apart from when Steven was added as a core contributor back on Mar 31, 2011, no one else has been granted permission to commit code to the main repository.

That is, until now.

A while ago Scott Hanselman blogged about Changes in the Microsoft MVP Program - MVPs for Open Source Contributions, which detailed changed to the Microsoft MVP program that would enable Microsoft to award people an MVP solely based on open-source contributions.

Today I am very proud to share with you that I have been awarded the very first open-source based MVP! I have been awarded an MVP in the ASP.NET category, as it is the most appropriate given most of my open-source work has been in web-related technologies.

Just to be clear: there is no pure "open-source MVP" category, instead Microsoft will award MVPs in one of the existing categories, but based on different criteria. However, I feel it is only appropriate to include the OSS moniker in my MVP title, hence I will use ASP.NET OSS MVP to describe my MVP.

In my last blog I wrote about an upcoming Knowabunga day at the tretton37 offices. The concept of the day was to give people the opportunity to pitch something they would like to spend the day learning more about and have others form up behind their topic.

The rules were simple, you get a couple of minutes to pitch your idea and in order for it to move beyond a pitch, at least one other person had to be willing to spend their day learning with you. If your pitch did not generate any interest you had to join one of the other teams.

We were all given the opportunity to post our pitches up front. A lot of interesting topics were brought up such as learning Clojure, using the Web Speech API, Web Components, exploring Roslyn and many many more.

However, the moment I saw it, I knew I wanted to form up behind a pitch that suggested we spend the day with Unity3D and build games! Turns out, so did others and we found ourselves in a group of 8 developers, all eager to get started hacking.

The above screenshot is from the game that I managed to write, from scratch in less than 6 hours without any real prior experience with Unity3D.

But let us rewind the tape and see what we did during the day.

I recently blogged about the Knowabunga day concept that we use at tretton37 as a platform to creating learning oppertunities. Last time we devoted all of our time to contribute to a bunch of awesome open-source projects and it was a great success for everybody that participated. Tomorrow we're meeting up again, but this time we will use a different format.

The challenge we face is; How do you create a learning oppertunity for nearly 80 people, that all have different passions and paths they would like to explore? The concept we came up with this time was to allow everyone pitch an idea for something they would like to spend the day learning. You then join on of the idea that was pitched and go on a learning frenzy throughout the day!

I was playing around a bit with the Visual Studio 2013 scroll bar options, when I noticed a (too me) new section at the bottom of the options.

The thing that was new to me was the Behavior section at the bottom. More specifically what Microsoft calls map mode. Enabling map mode will turn the vertical scrollbar into a source map, i.e. it will give you an overview of your code, to help you navigate it. This is kind of like the minimap option you find in Sublime Text.

When we announced our full day of open-source at tretton37, we immediately got a lot of questions from people asking us all sorts of questions. A lot of the questions were about what projects we would be working on and how many people would be involved. However, even more questions were related to how we convinced the company to let us spend a full day doing free work, instead of billing clients.

The short version is that we did not have to convince the company at all. We already had the corporate structure in place to enable us to do something like this. The more interesting question really is; why are we able do things like this?