A question of usage
I have a problem as an OSS developer. If I am doing my "job" right, producing easy to use, functional and useful, I am never going to hear from the users.
In ALT.Net Israel and in several other engagement lately, it has come to my attention that a lot more people using some of my projects than I ever assumed. I know that a lot of people are using Rhino Mocks, and this week I found a lot more big users of NHibernate than I knew off, but I wasn't really surprised. I know that Rhino Commons and Rhino Security are used in the wild, because I get questions about them often (Rhino Security much less than Rhino Commons, but it is there).
What surprised me was learning that there are people out there using Rhino ETL, Rhino Igloo (and presumably, in time, Rhino Queues). I don't think that I have ever seen a single question about them, but in the last two weeks, I had heard (in passing!) a few people mentioning that they are using that.
I was very surprised.
Comments
Well, you should've been prepared to be surprised.
Ha, good one Avish. :)
Speaking of NHibernate: Ayende, what do you think about this?
http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller/archive/2008/08/08/introducing-fluent-nhibernate.aspx
You have started a cult here. You know those types who enchant "It comes from Microsoft therefor it must be good". Prepare yourself for "It comes from Oren, it must be better than Microsoft". Start making your plans for world domination :)
After you posted the url to the Igloo source, I downloaded the source and reviewed it. In my opinion, this is WebForms done right. I got a few good ideas from your code, as well as a few things I'd do differently. I am doing WinForms for the time being, but Rhino Igloo will be a serious guideline when I am back to WebForms.
Hey Oren, that's great.
I've been evangelizing Rhino ETL a bit recently. It's really a great tool.
I have heard Rhino ETL mentioned on this blog before, but haven't looked at it - is that a production ready product? Can it be used as a replacement for SSIS? We use SSIS pretty heavily for populating our data warehouses and, probably like most people, utterly despise the designer / debugging experience. I can't immediately picture a DSL based replacement, but if people are using it and it works maybe it is time to take a look.
Funny. What percent of the OSS user community is dark matter? Who can say.
We've had people using RhinoETL down here in New Zealand, though some people were a little concerned about how much love it was getting lately, so I think people are still learning to trust it :)
The current commercial project I'm working on is using Monorail, Windsor, NHibernate, ActiveRecord, Rhino Mocks, Rhino Security (which just slotted in perfectly - saved me a lot of effort that one!) Rhino Commons and NHibernate Search... it's a very handy set of libraries you've built up over the last couple of years for us ALT.Net types!
Great to hear others are finding your projects as useful as I do.
We use Rhino.Commons and Rhino.Security, and loving it...
Nathan,
I have used it in production in several cases.
The experience of using Rhino ETL vs. SSIS is dramatically different.
SSIS is much easier to use if you do alot of branching because of the visual designer, the equivalent C# code in Rhino isn't terribly readable if your joins have joins, etc.
SSIS is pretty difficult to unit test though so I tend to do our jobs here with Rhino and come up with ways to not need joining for multiple processes too much. It's pretty easy to figure out how Rhino works by going through the unit tests.