.NET Summer Hackfest Update: Session 1 Progress, Session 2 Announcements

.NET Summer Hackfest is a .NET Foundation sponsored, community run open source hacking party. We're almost done with Session 1 and ramping up for Session 2, so here's some info on what we've been up to and how you can get involved.

Here's the most important part: Session 2 runs from August 7 – August 18 and includes two exciting projects: Brighter and DotVVM. It's open to everyone, from absolute beginners to experienced .NET open source developers. Here's a great time to get involved with your .NET open source community!

Session 1 Progress: Keen IO SDK port to .NET Standard

We started with one project for the first session: porting the Keen IO SDK to .NET Standard. Keen IO is a really cool event data platform that's really developer friendly. At the free level, they give you $20 credit per month, which works out to 2 million streamed events. They also give discounts to OSS projects, and they've got open source API libraries for a lot of frameworks.

The team started with a straightforward porting goal, but I pushed them to include some stretch goals to keep them busy. They've made great progress, as you can see from the Kanban board below.

Some highlights for this project:

• The core SDK, tests, and build have been ported to .NET Standard
• The code is all running on Windows, Ubuntu and MacOS under .NET Core (hooray)
• Cross-platform Continuous Integration is set up on AppVeyor (for Windows) Travis CI (for Ubuntu and macOS)
• We learned a lot for the projects we'll be doing in Sessions 2 and 3 (my selfish goal for this project)
• We had a one on one call with Immo Landwerth to get some advice on some interesting .NET Standard issues
• The Keen IO dev team have been phenomenal hosts!
• Most important for me: we had some great commits from the community around the world, including several pull requests from Tarun and Don

Session 2 Projects Kicking off Monday, August 7: Brighter and DotVVM

If you've been keeping an eye on .NET Summer Hackfest but haven't got involved yet, now is the time! We've got two established .NET open source projects run by some well known .NET community leaders. Both are planning some local in-person community events as well.

DotVVM: An Open Source MVVM framework for Web Apps

DotVVM is an innovative MVVM (model-view-viewmodel) front-end web framework that offers a clean programming model, over 25 built-in controls, and support for both "classic" ASP.NET (OWIN) and ASP.NET Core.

Here's what they'll be working on and how you can get involved.

Also, if you're in or near Prague, they'll be running a full day Hackfest event at the Microsoft office in Prague on Friday, August 11.

Brighter: A Lightweight Command Processor and Dispatcher

Brighter is a Command Processor & Dispatcher implementation that can be used as a lightweight library in other projects. It can be used for implementing Ports and Adapters and CQRS (PDF) architectural styles in .NET. They'll have some smaller up-for-grabs issues for folks who are getting up to speed as well as some more ambitious work to implement abstractions to facilitate additional middleware such as Redis, Kafka, and Event Store.

We'll have some more information on how you can get involved in the Brighter hackfest within the next day.

Let's Do This!

This is your open source .NET Community! Now's a great time to show up and make an impact!

Beginners, here's a great chance to get involved and level up your open source .NET skills.

Community leaders, let's take this chance to build the development community you want to see.