I want to deliver Windows Forms source code to you. I've wanted to do it for years and I'm putting together a plan to make it happen. There are a set of issues here, and let me tell you that not everyone here is a big fan of it. But I think I can do it (other teams are trying as well).
Now, this is not the MFC model where you'll be able to build it, etc. We're talking about just source and PDBs for debugging. There are two major issues. One is IP (Intellectual Property) but I'm comfortable with what's in Windows Forms. And let's be honest here, there have been tools around for a few years (yes, Lutz) that basically are exposing this anyway. But most of Windows Forms is a big chunk of Win32 wrapper code. The second issue boils down to cost.
My team (not to mention the rest of the Division) is absolutely pegged right now working on delivering VS 2005/FX 2.0), and they will be for some time to come. So I have to make this happen on the cheap. And I'd like your feedback. The issue is around comments. See, in order for us to ship the code we need to "scrub" the comments and make sure there is nothing bad in there. No swear words, no bad jokes on the part of developers, no references to specfiic customers, no geo-political faux pas. And with well over half a million lines of code, there is just no way we'll be able to get this done. Plus you'll need to do it with each new release, etc. It's a ton of work (and don't bother debating the necessity of all of this, trust me, it is what it is).
The cheapest option would be to write a simple tool to strip all of the comments out of the source and replace them with whitespace. I'm pretty sure I can make that happen, allowing delivery of a ZIP or something with the source tree plus the matching PDBs, and instructions for getting them set up. Is this good enough?
The next option would be some intermediate steps where we leave comments in some choice files (e.g. Control) and strip them elsewhere.
And finally would be some sort of a review of the comments in a broader set of the files. This gets big fast and there's no way we have the resources in the forseeable future. One idea here is to get key folks from the community to help us with this. MVPs, are you listening?
That's the general idea. Thoughts? Is just-code good enough for now? Hopefully after we take that step we can start to improve it over time.
posted @ Thursday, February 03, 2005 8:24 PM