I had the priviledge of performing the first commit of xRM Portals Community Edition to GitHub shortly after the one-time code drop by Microsoft, and within a few short days it’s exciting to see this project taking on a life of its own. The biggest surprise so far has been the small but notable number of people that have starred, watched, and forked the project, showing that there’s genuine interest in it.
The project launch didn’t go as I’d initially planned. I had seen an earlier version of the code prior to the official code drop, and had some code cleanup changes in mind that I thought would be good to include in the first commit. However, when the time came and the official code drop happened, I had a change of heart for what to do. I decided that for the sake of posterity, it would instead be better to commit the code as is, so that all the changes that would be made could be traced back to the original unmodified version for all to see.
The first few commits were geared towards changes that would prepare the project for future participants to contribute to it, and to make the repository Git and GitHub friendly. This included adding project contributors to the copyright of the license file, renaming the license file to instead be ‘LICENSE’ so that it would be recognized by GitHub, adding a README.md file with information about the project, and adding a .gitattributes and .gitignore file to facilitate how files are handled during commits.
With those changes complete the real work begins. Before getting too deep into the code and making any significant changes, it would be good to have a clean, solid base to work upon. One of the first things one does after cloning a project is to compile it, and although the projects do compile, there are a couple dozen compilation warnings that are an unnecessary distraction. I’ve started to create issues noting the compilation warnings, and the community has already responded and contributed to fixing the warnings.
I expect the compilation warning cleanup will continue for a few weeks, after which we’ll see what other adventures we can get ourselves into.