State Of SubSonic, November 2007

I've been reading through the forums, getting up to speed on a lot of issues and what's plainly evident is that I've been busy for far too long. The good news is that I'm getting "in the swing" here and have begun my work on SubSonic in earnest, once again. So, to make this very plain:

SubSonic is NOT dead, not mired in anything, not even stalled. We've been sidetracked by flippin Real Life (way overrated). That's over.

To that end, I've expanded a bit on my previous post and want to share with you what's afoot.

Forum Issues: Toss our forums and move them to a more usable system. I blew it with this one - I thought it would come out differently but I learned something here: never fight a land war in Asia, and never use your own forum system until it's ready. I've talked with the current commiters and they are all over getting the SubSonic forums up to snuff, and there's a great vision on where they should go (lightweight "BlogEngine.NET"-style) and so off they go - we may be back.

I've been freakishly evaluating forum systems and the winner, easily, was phpBB. But it's almost impossible to get data from another forum into it so I tossed it and went with the Runner-up, YetAnotherForum. The only reason these guys were runner up is the UI is really, really "forum-y" and I will need to do some design work. Either way - this is top of the list (and the guy is from Hawaii!) and the import is happening today/tomorrow with the rollover coming, hopefully, in the next week or so.

Bug Fixes and Patches: Concurrently, Eric is attacking the work items/patches on CodePlex. He's back, he's married, and he's mad as hell. Ok he's not mad - he's much too nice to ever get mad (unless you're a raving conservative).

New Project Site: I need to revamp our site with much more complete docs. I have Sandcastle sitting here in front of me, as well as a secret little documenter tool I've been working on :). Between the two we're going to get this API doc'd as it should be.

In addition, we'll re-org a bit and make the site much easier to navigate. This won't take too much time - but it needs to happen. We need much better support.

Clamping Down: There's a lot of "unfinished" work, namely in our providers and our REST/JSON bits. I'm going to actively look for help with regards to getting all of our providers up to snuff so we can release this with a smile on our faces.

Alternate Templates: I created a set of "MVC" templates previously that are being used pretty extensively. I'll tidy these up and make them work nicely.

Moving Forward with .NET 3.5
We're shelving the query tool update that we've been planning. In fact we're shelving any further feature change/innovation in favor of moving forward with .NET 3.5.

There are soooo many language enhancements to .NET 3.5 that we have a chance to refactor and trim our feature set really nicely. For instance, our entire Sugar library can be redone as extension methods - which is what they should be.

In addition, as many know, we have a lot of love coming for the new MVC framework.

It doesn't make sense to rev two branched versions of SubSonic that run on a different platform, so the next major version will be a version rev to 3.0, and will work on .NET 3.5 only.

This doesn't mean we won't support/fix/tweak/patch 2.0 - we'll always try to make it better. But in terms of features, it's pretty much set.

New Features for 3.0
Query Tool Upgrade: Eric and I have been talking a lot about the query tool and how to make it work with LINQ. I think we have a nice scheme planned, so expect to see a new query tool as we've discussed in the past.

Migrations: Finishing this up. Finally.

MVC Support: We're going to throw all kinds of love at the new MVC toolset. All Kinds. It'll be magic. And we'll cook up some nice reference apps for you to play with. More on that later (when I figure out just what features I'll be working on in the MVC toolset. Damn it's nice being on the inside :).

Writing a Book
I've been contacted by 3 different publishers - major ones - on writing a book about SubSonic and MVC (myself and the team). I'm still working on the details (like finding time to call them back) but I'm very, VERY excited to do this, and to finally write a book that's not only informative but FUN to read.

Begging For Help
This is ongoing. Forum help, docs, forum moderators... really just about anything. I'm extremely picky about our commit list (I have to be) but would love to talk to you if you're interested in ... well anything. My email is my full name at gmail. Do let me know.