Tales from the Evil Empire

What's interesting about debacles such as the recent left-padding madness is how it can get you to re-think seemingly obvious concepts, and challenge some basic assumptions. Here's in particular a little reflection that just occurred to me on the way between the bathroom and my office, and that may seem super-obvious to some of you. It wasn't to me, so here goes, I'm sharing…

Orchard adds RSS automatically to everything that looks like a list of content items: blog posts, of course, but also comments, projections, lists, search results, tags, etc. I’ve explained before how RSS works internally, but adding a new feed from code can look like a daunting task if you’re not an experienced Orchard developer. Fortunately, there is another feature related to RSS that makes it possible to create custom RSS without writing a line of code.

Coding convention discussions are always fun. I just had one of them on the weekly Orchard meeting, where I’ve joked that spaces are objectively superior to tabs, by which I meant that there are objective arguments in favor of spaces that I find subjectively compelling..

They hate joy.

They hate freedom.

They hate peace.

They hate life.

They hate what we are: joyful, free, peaceful, and alive.

So they scream, they enslave, they wage war, and they kill.

They can kill us, but they won’t kill joy, freedom, peace, or life.

We’re stronger.

We stand together.

We are the Human Family.

Tell the pointy-haired bosses around the world: putting a GPL sticker on your product is not going to magically make all those nerds in their parent’s basements build it for you, and for free. Nope. Not going to happen. And you know what? The code contributions are not the benefits you’re looking for…

I moved my FluentPath library’s source code from CodePlex to GitHub, and while I was at it, I vacuumed a bit, removed the cobwebs, and decided to see what applying some C#6 goodness would do to my code. Usually, I would not advise anyone to touch existing, working code that way just for the sake of using the new features: if it ain’t broke… But I wanted to kick the tires, you know? Just don’t start sending people pull request with that sort of crap, that would just be rude ;)

It is customary when returning from a conference that we write a trip report and send it to the team. In the spirit of openness that surrounds all things Orchard, I’ve decided that I’d write the trip report for this year’s Orchard Harvest as a public blog post… So here it is…

Taylor Mullen was here to introduce the tag helpers that are going to be added to ASP.NET MVC 6, basically to replace HTML helpers. Tag helpers are html tag-like bits of C# code. Because they are essentially C#, you can get all the benefits of the IDE, such as IntelliSense and refactoring.