Or how Google made its very own SourceForge.
Google has made avaliable for all of us with a GMail account, Google Code Hosting, a repository for Open Source projects hosted by Google. It uses Subversion, and allows the project administrators to manage a bug tracker, the project collaborators, add links to external webpages about the project, and so on.
I’ll keep telling you things as I keep trying it.
Two very good news for this post. First of all is the recent update of our favorite Open Source IDE for C#, SharpDevelop, to Framework 2.0. Yeah I know, this isn’t strictly new, because it’s not recent (and how difficult is being in this day and age!): it was the last July the 17th when it made its official appereance the definitive version of SharpDevelop 2 2.0.
But now let’s talk about the second piece of news. After downloading it ( 4.2 Mbs) and install it (less than five minutes) I begin to try it. When creating a new try it out solution (another Hello, world!) I began to tremble: compatibility troubles on sight.
SharpDevelop 1 used combines, file swith a .cmbx extension, as its central type file: SharpDevelop combines were the equivalent to VS .NET solutions. So when you spotted on your hard drive a .cmbx file you knew it was SharpDevelop’s, and it was by default associated on Windows Explorer to that application. Files such as .cs or .resx you could decide wich IDE you want them associated to.
But now the combines are lost, being replaced with solutions, just as in Visual Studio. And their file extension is the same: .sln.
The pain. I was already picturing myself creating separate root folders for Vs and SharpDevelop projects, I was already picturing both IDEs fighting for the .sln association like two furious web browsers, I was already picturing myself corrupting forever a solution after opening it with the wrong IDE, and so on.
Hold your horses: after creating a nice, little and silly solution in VS .NET 2005, I’ve been able to open, modify and compile it without fuss in SharpDevelop 2. And viceversa, the same solution can be opened, modified and compiled by both IDEs with no troubles that I detected.
I wish I could do a much more serious testing, for example an ASP .NET application, but for now I can declare both IDEs totally compatible. And this is a very good news.
While some of us, myself included, are sometimes tempted by the siren songs of Web 2.0 and announce the desktop as a dead and buried paradigm, others persist in telling us that it’s far from defunct.
What you can see in above’s video is a demo of a 3D desktop prototype, using real physical data to emulate a real life desktop. With it we will be able to order the icons in piles, drop them, wrap them, make them bigger or smaller, classify them, put them on bookshelves, and so on… Taking into account the enthusiast reception to the idea, they’re thinking in making the step from prototype to product and they’re searching for expert C++ and OpenGL developers. More info, on their site, where you can also download a better quality version of this same video.
I have my reservations about the real usefulness of this new desktop system, mainly because of my particular way of using the desktop. While other people have their desktops completely crowded with dozens of icons and documents, I keep it as clean as I can: normally only My PC and the Recycling Bin icons. In my case, the desktop is not a workplace: I only see it just as I’ve started, right before I start opening windows. Curiously, that spartan discipline I impose on my computer desktop has absolutely nothing to do with the very real mess my real desktops are, at home and at work. First BumpTop’s disadvantage would be, then, how easily you could emulate real life mess in your virtual desktop. I can only imagine then that the time I spend re-organising my real-life desktops, and the nanoseconds it takes the mess to reign supreme again, would have their loyal virtual counterpart with BumpTop.
The second disadvantage, for me, is that with something so very beautiful we won’t need the web anymore to procastrinate: we could do it directly on the desktop. 
