hdLee

Anti-Feature Requests - A different way to contribute to Open Source Projects

 A lot of contributions to OSS are either writing code to add new features, or users requesting new features.

Both of these roles are critical but I've noticed there are few OSS participants formally identified as part of a "triage" team, yet it's quite common in the commercial software world.

Triage is essentially helping to decide what work should not be done, so that precious resources get applied to the best possible features and fixes (or least what work should have lower priority).

The term comes from the medical emergency rooms where doctors triage the patients into groups of different priority.  If you've broken your arm, you'll being waiting behind the person who needs immediate surgery, even if you arrived an hour earlier.

Certainly triage happens in OSS, a lot of times by development leads.  Tough decisions happen all the time.  However scouring a huge bug list for items that should be shifted up or down in priority, or questioning obscure items that might really not be as important, doesn't seem to always happen as much as it could.  How could it with only extremely busy developers held responsible?

Once example of this not being emphasized in OSS is that many projects have an option to "Vote for this issue as important", while not having an option to "Vote for this issue as not important" (allowing votes to be cast as 0 to 5 stars would help this).

So for projects where I contribute or at least follow the progress, I'm trying to make sure I keep an eye out for helping with triage where it seems productive.

Some project leaders may not want anti-requests or triage help, and that's of course their choice.  However I just think we should remember that an anti-request could be the catalyst to get your actual feature request enough resources to be completed sooner.

Lee

Linq DataContext and Dispose

A question many developers have with Linq and databases is this:

How important is it to call Dispose on a DataContext object?

Normally a quick web search gives an easy answer to common questions like this.  But sometimes Google fails us.  It turns out so many people have attempted to write about this with wrong or incomplete information that a web search returns mostly junk.

Here is a definitive answer, which I have finally learned after reading down to comment one hundred and twenty seven :) on a blog post by ScottGu, who runs the ASP.NET team at Microsoft.

Short answer:  It is generally not critical to call Dispose on Datacontext.

Longer answer: 
All objects in .NET are eventually disposed automatically by the automatic garbage collector.  The reason developers are paranoid about calling it explicitly is that if an object contains an expensive resource like an open database connection, then we can't afford to wait around for garbage collection, it would have a big impact on scalability.

The good news is that DataContext objects do not keep open database connections like some ADO.Net objects do, so it doesn't really hurt to let the garbage collector do it for you.

There is one caveat here though:  The DataContext does track change states for the data, and by disposing it you would release this memory more quickly.  In almost all apps this difference wont be significant.  However if you have a web site that is using all memory available this is one of many optimizations you could make.

Btw, a gigabyte of expensive ECC server memory is going for as little as 30 bucks now, so if your server is strained you can help it out pretty cheaply.