Personally I sent 29 (mostly small) pull requests to the Visual F# project. 5 pull requests\u00a0already got accepted\u00a0and 15 are still under evaluation. \u00a0In principle the\u00a0development process seems to be working very well. Especially in the Visual F# project Don Syme and the Visual F# team are doing an excellent job to encourage the community. They are marking user voice issues<\/a> as “approved in principle”\u00a0and even provide detailed documents for implementation tasks (See CoreLibraryFunctions<\/a>). This makes it very easy to get started and to hack a bit on the F# compiler. A big thanks to you guys.<\/p>\n A very important part of the open source is the review process. The F# community is awesome in this regards. On issues like a new “compareWith” function<\/a> I got comments with remarks about coding style, test cases, documentation and lots of new ideas about possible performance improvements. It’s really exciting to be part of such an active and welcoming community. There is only one “but” and this “but” is the choice of the development platform. I really think CodePlex<\/a>\u00a0is hindering these projects to become even more successful. In this post I want to show some of my experiences with Codeplex. Remember I already sent 29 pull requests so I think it’s fair to say I tried!<\/p>\n The first impression on the Codeplex site is that every click feels so frustrating slow. Waiting 4s and more for a site to load doesn’t exactly feel like 2014.<\/p>\n If you want to comment on something then there is an “interesting” distinction between issues and pull requests. On issues\u00a0you get a preview box and some buttons to make formatting easier, but you can’t edit your comments later:<\/p>\n On pull request you can edit your comments later but your don’t have the formatting buttons:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Like most online portals you can enable E-Mail notifications on Codeplex. Unfortunately it doesn’t really work. I tried to set all notification sliders I found to the max. and still don’t get notifcations if someone sends a new pull request to the Visual F# projects. Instead I’m getting annoying E-Mail notifications on my own activities:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Things like this make you wonder if they actually dogfood their own stuff.<\/p>\n As described above good code reviews are a very important part of any software development project, for open source programming language projects even more so. Unfortunately Codeplex has a really bad code review tool. I mean it is possible to comment on diffs:<\/p>\n But if you update the pull request with a fix then the comment is displayed on the new fixed code and makes no sense any more:<\/p>\n The whole code review is broken when you add commits to a pull request and it get’s even messier when you rebase your pull request on the current master. Rebasing pull requests is a very common operation in open source projects since it allows to move the merge effort from the project maintainer to the contributor. But unfortunately\u00a0Codeplex gets confused by the rebase and now shows a wrong diff:<\/p>\n A code platform shows a wrong diff – yep I couldn’t believe it myself so I tried again. #7040<\/a>, #7045<\/a>,\u00a0#7060<\/a>, always the same.<\/p>\n A couple of days ago I wanted to tweet a link to a cool performance trick and knew it was the last commit on a pull request. Now try to find the url:<\/p>\n Yes that’s right – the commits are ordered in alphabetical order BY HASH\u00a0or as I call it in “least useful order”.<\/p>\n Of course you may ask: “Steffen why didn’t you report these issues to the Codeplex team?” and that’s a valid question.\u00a0Actually I went to codeplex.codeplex.com<\/a>,\u00a0which I believe is the home of the Codeplex project, and looked at their\u00a0issue list<\/a>. This is what I got:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Not a single issue on the first page is related to Codeplex and it seems they don’t even care to close this spam. So why should I care to log issues there?<\/p>\n It’s more than\u00a0obvious – use the “move source code to github” strategy and people already created an issue on the TypeScript project<\/a>. Unfortunately it got closed:<\/p>\n After reading this\u00a0I really doubt it was the decision of the teams to use Codeplex. Fortunately the ASP.NET team seems to be an exception to this. Somehow they managed to move to github.com\/aspnet<\/a>.<\/p>\n There are also other ways. Microsoft could really invest in Codeplex and make it a usable platform. But I don’t see this happing, because it will cost A LOT of money. Even if they would open source Codeplex I don’t see a community which is willing to improve this site.<\/p>\n So I appeal to the people in charge at Microsoft please answer the following questions:<\/p>\nOverall usability<\/h5>\n
![\"Issue](\"http:\/\/www.navision-blog.de\/images\/comment_editor.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Pull](\"http:\/\/www.navision-blog.de\/images\/comment_editor2.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nE-Mail notifications<\/h5>\n
![\"E-Mail](\"http:\/\/www.navision-blog.de\/images\/mailnotifi.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nCode reviews on pull requests<\/h5>\n
![\"Comments](\"http:\/\/www.navision-blog.de\/images\/codecomments.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Wrong](\"http:\/\/www.navision-blog.de\/images\/applied.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"Wrong](\"http:\/\/www.navision-blog.de\/images\/wrong_diff.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nFinding the needle in the hashstack<\/h5>\n
![\"Alphabetical](\"http:\/\/www.navision-blog.de\/images\/alpha.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nReporting Codeplex issues<\/h5>\n
![\"Codeplex](\"http:\/\/www.navision-blog.de\/images\/codeplexissues.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nWhat now?<\/h5>\n
![\"Business](\"http:\/\/www.navision-blog.de\/images\/businessneeds.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n