All of us would dearly love to run on perfect software that is completely bug free. However, as in any software project, you have to make compromises. The fact is that if all software was released as “bug free” there simply would be no software and we would be having a fantastic bug free time without very much innovation at all other than a pencil. This might be news to you but did you hear? Yes, even Microsoft has to release products that are judged to have an acceptable amount of bugs. So what's new?
Well the situation is no different on the dotnetnuke platform. We have a reasonably stable platform, but we also realise that we have to tailor our resources effectively in order for us to keep up with the times, otherwise we fall behind. The new Cambrian initiative recently announced in Vegas by Shaun Walker demonstrates very well to the community that that the dotnetnuke platform will not be kept napping, and that we need to be at the forefront of the social networking buzz (some may even argue we already have a foot in it :).
The question is, just what is just an acceptable amount of bugs? Well from my view NO bug is actually acceptable and it simply needs to be squashed, end of story.
So what can be done about it? Well as I have previously explained… there is a limitation on what we can and cannot do. This is an opensource project, consequently we need the community to help us improve the dotnetnuke framework and get involved more.
So how can the community help us? Well I’m particularly targeting you quality developers with copies of visual studio that are armed and ready. Please visit my previous blog (click here) and locate any outstanding bugs that we might not have dealt with (maybe you’ve experienced some a bugs yourself and have developed a fix for it, if so did you keep the fixes to yourself?). Anyway you can comment on each of the outstanding issues in gemini, which means you should be able to paste in the code of your fix. You might even want to analyse existing proposed fixes and suggest code improvements. You never know... it might be fun :).
Once you have put a fix in place, your issue will be marked accordingly and be reviewed by our core team with a view to putting it into a future dotnetnuke release.
Surely there must be thousands of developers using the dotnetnuke platform? Just imagine if every single one of you posted one or two fixes what a dramatic improvement this could make. Surely this is more productive than buying the world a coke? So please help us!