Scott Gives Open Source, Step by Step

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I've been wanting over the last few days to post Scott Hanselman's step by step tutorial on how to contribute to the DasBlog open source project. This weekend I had a chance to go over it, albeit without duplicating the steps - I'll do that soon enough.

It's always seemed a little sad to me that those of us working primarily with Microsoft development tools aren't as given to collaborating on anything that is either outside the scope of normal work or commercial effort. It's been a goal of mine to contribute to an open source project for a while and it's nice to get this little push in getting that done.

I did download DasBlog around TechEd time to study the structure of the application. It didn't quite install as easily as the *.vbs the readme file discusses but it was a simple permissions issue that I resolved by resetting server extensions on the virtual directory. At the time the NUnit 1.x binary was also unavailable so I had to remove the test projects in order to get it to compile.

Before I start writing patches, however, it will be important for me to have a proper understanding of the application's purpose, design, and implementation. I'm hopeful that my contributions while "dogfooding" will be more meaningful.

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