Microsoft + OpenSource = The nOpenSource Project
A couple of developers at ConseQuent have spent the last eighteen months using a range on Open Source software in the .Net space. Yes, that's right: Microsoft and Open Source can play together nicely, and we thought we'd share a bit of our story here on my blog...
Our story started with SubVersion - the leading open-source source control system. We selected it mainly because, as an offshore development house, we needed a way to check out code via the internet, and Visual Source Safe was lousy at this! Since most of our projects talk to a database, we needed a good robust Object Relational Mapper, and we looked at nHibernate and OPF.NET, and settled on nHibernate for now (though this is an ongoing debate!).
Building an effective test strategy is at the heart of any good development effort, and we have used nUnit for unit testing, Fitnesse for building good acceptance tests, and we are currently exploring WatiN for automating front-end web testing.
While the company ethos tends to be against building projects using large code frameworks, we have explored both Spring.NET (the port of Spring to .Net) and Castle.NET (The port of Ruby on Rails to .Net). Two tools we have found useful are Log4Net for logging, and Sharp Zip for working with Zip files.
Given this history, we decided to coin a new term for .Net Open Source code: nOpenSource (in keeping with the name of a lot of the projects like nUnit and nHibernate). From reading the dotnet.org blog, it looks like there are a lot of nOpenSource developers out there. What we are planning is creating a community of people interested in nOpenSource technologies through a community website and community events. If you would like to be part of this project, drop me a mail and I'll include you in the nOpenSource mailing list letting you know when we plan to launch.
In the meantime, if you are interested in any of the technologies, and don't have the patience or bandwidth to download them, we've put together our first nOpenSource CD which has all the downloads for the technologies above plus some others I haven't mentioned. You can pick it up at our offices in the Cape Town CBD, or if you are going to DevDays Cape Town, drop me a mail and we'll try and hook up with you there.