Welcome to the Stormwind Community Portal!

Stormwind Project is an Open Source Community aimed at the .Net platform. Stormwind committers are very active and devote a significant time into development of the Stormwind Projects. The Community's fundamental rules are being agile and responding to community feedback in a timely fashion (given the committers' time constraints, of course).

What can I get from this portal?

There are several pieces of fundamental information gathered at this portal.

• A list of our sponsors and stories on how each of them is helping us. If you'd like to have your product featured in our community and believe it can help us, please let us know. If you can provide infrastructure resources such as WebHost, Virtual Private Servers, Mirrors for Downloads and such, please let us know and you can become a Stormwind Sponsor as well.
• A list of the current active projects and links for everything related to each project. Usually each project page will feature a succint description on the project and a link to where to get more information about the specifics (builds, releases, usage, repository analysis, etc).
• Stormwind Projects licensing information. All Stormwind projects are licensed under a single license called Open Software License ("OSL") v. 3.0. That is a very permissive license, and noone should have problems using it.
  
• Some coding guidelines that we expect you to follow when submitting code to Stormwind through patches. This is not a must-have though. The main thing is to submit a patch. The committers will then check if the patch applies and if it does, commit it.
• Stormwind policies on Source Control Management. Here you can check how we do our source control management and learn how to explore the repository.
• Information about the community such as PMC (Project Management Comittee) members, ways to contact us, blog roll for the committers. You will also find information on how you can contribute to Stormwind.

Using Stormwind Project

Using.Stormwind.Project (http://using.stormwindproject.org) is the wiki that contains all documentation on Stormwind.Project.

Each project feature a space with documentation about it being added as releases go by. All of them also feature release notes for all releases. So if you need information on how to use a certain feature, or just would like to know what has changed since the last release, using.stormwindproject.org is the place for you to check.

As usual with all Stormwind resources, we welcome contributions on the wiki as documentation only grows richer with user feedback. So if you feel that something is missing, something is wrong, or just would like to share some example with the community, you can click "Page Operations" in the menu on the left, and then click Review. This will give the community the oportunity to help shape the content of Stormwind documentation.

If you'd like more access to the wiki to contribute with some documentation, just let us know in our mailing list, and we can talk about giving you committer status in the wiki area.

Fisheye for Stormwind Project

Fisheye is an amazing tool to give insight into Source Control Repositories. We at the Stormwind Project are always keen on trying new tools that help us get more information on our own projects.

So, each project that is under active development features a repository in http://fisheye.stormwindproject.org. Ok, but what can I get out of this information.

Well, I'm sure that one of the things you ask yourself when choosing an open source project to use in your company is: How active this project is?

Since we, at Stormwind Project, believe in maximum transparency, we enable anonymous access to all our tools. That means you can check on whatever we are doing at all times, without ever as much as mentioning to us. Fisheye is one of those tools. It will give you detailed reports on the activity in each of our projects, thus enabling you to make a better decision on whether you want to commit your company's resources to one of our projects.

Project Management

Confirming our affirmative above on maximum transparency, our tool of choice for project management (ThoughtWorks Mingle) will also allow users to check on what stories we'll be playing in each iteration, what's next and what we've already achieved in each project.

We are in the process of setting this infrastructure up, so you'll get more and more information about how our projects are managed.

Bug Tracking

So, after using one of our projects, you found a bug. That's ok, we acknowledge that there's no such thing as perfect software. We can have perfect relationship with our community, though. If you find a bug, there are two courses of action that you can choose.

The first one is to raise the bug and wait for prioritising by the Committers, and subsequent fix.

The second one, which is faster, is to fix the bug yourself and commit a patch to the project.

We'd like to make a point here that we're not saying that you MUST choose either way, as we're committed to fix any bugs that our users find in one of our projects. We're just trying to get some help, and the best way to helps us help you is to contribute.

Now, to raise a new bug, all you have to do is find in the project page here in the portal, the link for the JIRA page responsible for tracking issues with that project. After raising the issue, if you want to contribute a patch to it, just attach the patch to the issue and our committers will look into it asap. You can find the main JIRA application at http://jira.stormwindproject.org .

Build Server for Continuous Integration

A build server is an integral part of open source projects, since we must have an efficient versioning system, and a way for our users to know whether the software they are getting is being developer under maximum caution. Right now, we are short of a build server that satisfies all our needs, but we are working to change that.

You can expect news soon.

Forum

If you have any doubts about a given project and feel like asking them in a forum, just head to our forum at http://forum.stormwindproject.org , and ask the question. We have a commitment to answer as fast as possible.

You can always search to see if someone asked the same question, though. We encourage users to answer questions of other users, thus maximizing the interaction between the community.

Questions? 

If you have any more questions to ask and can't find it in any of the pages here, or in any of the tools above, please feel free to contact us directly in our mailing lists, and we'll reply as soon as possible. Any question is worth asking. Just try to be nice, since being kind can go a long way into getting someone to help you.

Bernardo Heynemann
Stormwind Project Chairman