Well, after 2 years of work and nearly 25,000 lines of (mostly) Silverlight code, I’ve come to several conclusions that lead me to put myOSity into open source mode very soon:

Too little time, too little time…

I just can’t spend enough solo hours coding this project to bring it to the place where I envisioned it to be.  I’m hoping that the Silverlight community will find at least some value in the effort.

Technology moving too fast for a single programmer to keep up…

As Google so plainly put it recently, the desktop computer will be a thing of the past in a few years, in terms of the average user’s primary access point to the magical Internet.  Though I did have some longer term plans for myOSity to bring it to smaller form factors (Smartphones), I realize that I will not be able to keep up with current trends.

When?

My plan is to release myOSity into open-source soon after .net 4 and Visual Studio 2010 are both released RTM.  The reason for this is rather technical.  Basically, myOSity is utilizing various “cutting edge” frameworks from Microsoft (Silverlight v4, RIA Services, Reactive Framework [Rx], just to name a few).  Rather than release the code into the wild with these platforms in their various “pre-VS2010” states, which is already very confusing and difficult to manage, I’ve decided to release it post-VS2010 with all the frameworks (hopefully) in their standardized form.  Doing so will require me to do a bit of recoding.  I also need to make some changes so that myOSity will compile locally against a local database instance (.mdf) for easier use by the open-source community.  This will also take some time.

I’ll post another entry when the actual release happens.  I’ll be publishing the project to Codeplex.

Xamla has recently been accepted into the silverlight.net Community Gallery.  You can check it out here: http://www.silverlight.net/community/samples/silverlight-samples/xamla/

I moved another application to open-source on Codeplex today:  Solitaire!

I previously wrote about Solitaire here, waaay back in January.  Oh how the time flies…

Last night I created an open source project on Codeplex (http://xamla.codeplex.com) for Xamla.  Xamla will be a lightweight artboard that will allow users to create their own visual designs.  Aside from being a standalone application in myOSity, Xamla will also become the engine for myOSity's profile page designer component (coming soon!).  For those who are interested in the more technical aspects of Xamla, or wish to participate as a contributing developer, Codeplex will will be the place to do it.

An VERY early version of Xamla is available on myOSity (http://www.myosity.com).  Or, for your convenience, below is a running version.  You're not going to get much screen real-estate with the one below, but at least you'll get a sense for what it's about.

(This is not a screenshot below, try it!)