Where are these open source projects?

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Where are these open source projects?

As we were evaluating the open-source projects to use within NTeam, we noticed that several projects that would provide much need functionality were not in existence. Mainly .NET Refactoring and Code Analysis (such as FxCop). I can't believe no one has taken these on yet. What gives? Are they too difficult to take on or are we overlooking them?

There is an active open source project for the Java community called JRefactory but I can't find anything for either tool group in .NET. Anyone willing?

Print posted @ Friday, April 08, 2005 9:19 AM

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# re: Where are these open source projects?

Dunno about .NET Refactoring, but why duplicate FxCop? Just use it as people have already written custom FxCop rules. Or are you thinking more of a lint-type checker? 4/8/2005 12:15 PM | Darrell

# re: Where are these open source projects?

Well, I don't think that we will be duplicating FxCop. I was just suprised that no open source projects were around with the same functionality. And, we are trying to offer more than one option for nearly everything. 4/8/2005 12:19 PM | Jason Bentley

# re: Where are these open source projects?

Not surprised by the lack of oss refactoring for .net
Most of refactoring idedas originating with smalltalkers and a good bunch of them moved then to python, java, and ruby.

But then what about taking Eclipse's excellent java development tool, and porting it to C#, as Nunit and Nant started from their Java cousins?
The overall language model of Java and C# are quite similar, and Eclipse has great refactoring support. Hacking the Java tool implementation could theorically be a somewhat easy route.
Now there are two alternatives there:
- translate Eclipse from Java to C#,
- keep Java as the dev language (a tad weird for a .net tool) and translate from bytecode to msil or use alternative to run Java on .net (ie folks are already Eclipse either native of on top of mono and ikvm)
A big hurdle: at the core of Eclipse great java integration lays an incremental java compiler written in java..
Probably a big undertaking but may be worth the investment...
4/9/2005 9:18 PM | Philippe

# re: Where are these open source projects?

This actually doesn't surprise me at all. I've been following Open Source development in the .NET community basically from the get-go and it took a while for OS to catch on. We're now at a stage where many successful JAVA projects are being ported to .NET while innovation has been limited to smaller projects. But your NTeam projects and others are really the first indicators of growing enthusiasm, bigger and bolder ideas - more innovative.

I haven't seen an OS refactoring tool for .NET as of yet (at least nothing that I'd reccomend). As for code analysis... well... as I see it the .NET community, or a major part of it, has just recently matured enough to deal with FxCop and the idea that it might be wise to use a tool for code analysis at all. So the hope for a good OS code analysis tool is hanging on a really narrow thread, in my oppinion.

Actually I feel that a large part of the .NET community is just recently iscovering the advantages of using O/R mapping tools, Unit testing tools, documentation tools and 3rd party frameworks for special purposes (such as Spring for IoC).

I'm bycultural since I've spent time with both Java and .NET - Both cultures have pros and cons but I'm really impressed how the .NET culture seems to be willing to employ and implement the beneficial sides of the JAVA culture. In the long run that's only gonna do us all a lot of good.

Sorry for the rant - I'll probably move some of this to my own blog - sooner rather than later ;) 4/9/2005 9:47 PM | Jónas Antonsson

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