Something really cool is happening at Mix this year. They are putting together a little party for open source projects called Open Source Fest. There will be food, recognition and prizes (hopefully ipads). Sorta like a science fair for OSS projects. Its a cool idea and its obviously being done to help stimulate the .NET Open Source ecosystem.

This reminded me of an idea I recently had to stimulate the .NET OSS ecosystem: Unleash Microsoft’s secret army of documenters on some open source projects.

Anyone that has ever used .NET has to agree that it has some of the best documentation of any software platform in the world. My understanding is that a lot of this documentation is written by a secret army of documenters that storm through the class libraries annotating every thing in site. I think unleashing this army on some popular .NET libraries would really stimulate those projects. It would make using the projects much easier, it would probably unearth some ugly APIs and would likely make contributing to those projects easier.

TODO: Insert well written paragraph about all the many benefits of excellent documentation.

Look at how awesome these docs are.

And look how bad these docs suck.

A lot of methods have been tried to stimulate open source projects. Giving away money usually doesn’t seem to help much. The Google Summer Of Code project has had some successes but there is no point in competing with that model. Obviously Microsoft doesn’t want to unleash their army of engineers on OSS projects as they do need to be careful about what code they are looking at. The cool thing about contributing documentation hours is you don’t have to worry about any issues of developers seeing code they shouldn’t be seeing.

It would be even cooler if MSDN offered documentation hosting. Imagine how cool it would be if while you were looking up the idiotic syntax for String::Substring you could swing by the Rhino.Mocks namespace and figure out how to properly inject your dependencies?

So thats my idea. There are no free jalepeno poppers and definitely aren’t any iPad giveaways but I think it really would improve the .NET Open Source ecosystem.