The hits keep on coming, Dear Reader. Just as we announced a few months back, .NET Core is open source. We said it would run on Windows, Mac, and Linux, but then the work of doing it has to actually happen. ;)
Go check out the .NET Framework Blog. Today the .NET team put the Core CLR up on GitHub. It's open source and it's under the MIT License. This includes the Core CLR source, the new RyuJIT, the .NET GC, native interop and everything you need to fork, clone, and build your own personal copy of the .NET Core CLR. What a cool day, and what an immense amount of work (both technical and legal) to make it happen. Years in the making, but still lots of work to do.
The GitHub repo has 2.6ish MILLION lines of code. They say when it's all said and done.NET Core will be about 5 MILLION lines of open source code.
The .NET Blog did a nice pie chart, but honestly, I found it to be not enough. It basically was a big grey circle that said "other 2.2M." ;)
I'd like a little more insight, but I don't know if I have the compute power, or the patience, frankly, to analyze this code repository. Or do I?
I decided to import the repository into Microsoft Azure's Power BI preview. Power BI (BI means "Business Intelligence") is an amazing service that you can use (usually for FREE, depending on your data source) to pull in huge amounts of data and ask questions of that data. Watch for a great video on this at http://friday.azure.com this week or next.
I logged into http://powerbi.com (It's US only for the preview, sorry) and clicked Get Data. I then selected GitHub as the source of my data and authorized Power BI to talk to GitHub on my behalf. Crazy, AMIRITE?
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What does Power BI tell me about the .NET Team's "CoreCLR" GitHub repository?
Here's what Power BI told me.
Let's dig in. Looks like Stephen Toub has worked on a LOT of this code. He's super brilliant and very nice, BTW.
Editing the query and looking at Dates and Times, it seems the .NET Team commits code at ALL hours. They are really feeling "committable" around 3 to 4 pm, but they'll even put code in at 4 in the morning!
Here's a more intense way to look at it.
One of the insanely cool things about Power BI is the ability to ask your data questions in plain English. Given that my SQL abilities have atrophied to "Select * from LittleBobbyTables" this is particularly useful to me.
I asked it "issues that are open sorted by date" and you'll notice that not only did it work, but it showed me what I meant underneath my query.
What about issues closed by a certain person?
I'm running around in this tool just building charts and asking questions of the repo. It's all in HTML5 but it's just like Excel. It's amazing.
Open issues from last year?
Average time to close an issue in hours?
It's amazing to be running queries like this on something as significant as the now open-sourced .NET Core CLR. I didn't need to be an employee to do it. I didn't need special access, I just did it. I'm enjoying this new Microsoft, and very much digging Power BI. Next I'm going to put my Blood Sugar and Diabetes Data in Power PI and encourage others to do the same.
P.S. Check out the code for the Core CLR Hello World app. When was the last time you saw an ASCII Art Linux Penguin in Microsoft Source code? ;)
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