.NET

I'm working on a Sharepoint project which has some interesting points: 

• We're constrained to use Visual Studio .NET 2003 by the client (so none of your Team System stuff)
• We have 3 developers, on three sites, plus a client developer on a fourth and fifth site

 It's a biggish project, and the thought of trying to run Visual SourceSafe under these circumstances frightened me. I've seen that thing "working" over a VPN, and it ain't pretty.  What to do?

Well, if you subscribe to Eric Raymond's taxonomy, we're a "cathedral" sort of company. Microsoft gold partner, well-defined methodology, coding standards and all that. But clearly the working environment smacks somewhat of the "bazaar" (please: no jokes about it being "bizarre" - they are far too close to the bone), and I figured at the outset that it was time to take a serious look at incorporating at least some "bazaar" techniques into our "cathedral" framework. Open-source projects successfully manage hundreds of developers, on hundreds of sites: how do they do it? By subversion (well, perhaps also by CVS and others, but this article is about subversion). I don't mean that they sneakily and deviously implement their software, I mean that they use subversion as a source code/version control system.

This weekend I started working on FICSiface, a sort of toolkit to getting software hooked up to the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS). My initial plan was to have a class that could connect to FICS, send data, and raise events when FICS sends data to it. This came together quite quickly (remind me to talk about asynchronous IO soon), and of course I got carried away. I decided it would be nice to use it to hook up Blikskottel , my chess engine, which would run as a Windows service. All of this glue stuff is being written in C#, because one day it would be nice to run it on Mono. Then I got carried away some more. While I was testing on FICS (my computer account, Skottel, having been reactivated by an extremely helpful and industrious FICS admin - thanks!), Blik (another computer, Rookie by Marcel Kervinck) came on and made some random joke. So I thought, in light of the fact that Blikskottel is now based in Scotland, it would be cool if Skottel could make self-deprecating jokes about Scotsmen from time to time. In order not to be boring, it would need a biggish database of jokes - and Google came through handsomely.