Microsoft fixes blog comments, speeds up blogs with open source

There are plenty of Microsoft employees on Twitter answering questions and sharing links, including senior figures like Brad Smith and Frank Shaw responding directly, for example to Google's arguments about the Novell patent purchases.

But the Microsoft blogs are the 'official' place to get detailed information; sometimes prepared and checked by the lawyers, more often posted directly by the developers working on the technology. You can ask questions and get direct answers. Along with Channel 9, it's a hugely important way for Microsoft to communicate because you're talking to real Microsoft employees who care about technology and want to explain it, not faceless marketers. The blogs have changed the perception of Microsoft in the technology industry by letting ordinary users and developers get to know the people who work there.

They're not the ideal place to debate; comments aren't threaded and the popularity of the Building Windows blog has strained the backend, with many readers finding their comment either doesn't appear or shows up three times. Microsoft suggests using the Microsoft Answers forum site for technical questions (and the Developer Center forums for discussing Windows 8), but the blog team has been working on improving the comment system.

At the end of November, Sean Jenkins - the product manager for the Microsoft blog platform - told commenters on the IE blog that more fixes were going live. "We have been listening and I realize it's taken a very long time, but today we've rolled out another set of fixes around the comments issues you have been reporting. Hopefully you've seen a lack of duplicate comments the past few weeks. Today we've pushed out bits to fix the submission of the comments along with the time comments can take to load. If you still see issues, please use the comment form here and report them to me."

In our tests, we've found that posting comments to high-traffic Microsoft blogs is much more reliable now, in both IE and Chrome; the page tells you your comments is being published so fewer people will hit refresh and double post, and comments actually appear. If you were frustrated with the process of posting comments, it's certainly improved. (Your mileage will obviously vary on how you feel Microsoft is responding to your comment.)

Fixing the comments isn't the only improvement happening on the MSDN and Technet blogging system; over the last month Microsoft has been adding the open source RequestReduce optimiser to the platform, especially for forums and searches. RequestReduce implements lots of current best practice for improving Web site performance (especially on ASP.NET sites) by merging and compressing CSS and JavaScript, and converting background images to sprites that load faster - and it does it all automatically, even if not all the script is on your server. According to RequestReduce developer Matt Wrock, that's a 25-30% reduction in the number of HTTP requests made and a 33% improvement in performance of the sites as a result. Here's how that looks in the hours before and after rolling out RequestReduce:

Wrock isn't just the open source developer behind RequestReduce; he's also a software engineer for Microsoft working on the MSDN and Technet systems. He builds RequestReduce on his own time, and other open source developers who don't work for Microsoft contribute to it. And along with the other teams working on the MSDN and Technet sites, Wrock uses open source technologies at work; he namechecks nHibernate, StructureMap, Moq, XUnit, Caste Windsor, Service Stack, Json.Net and Psake.

There's always a lot of suspicion when Microsoft is involved with open source, but this is a classic example of what open source is really good for; a developer building technology that makes their day job better, sharing it and the community improving it and getting the benefit. It doesn't mean Microsoft is going to open source the commercial code it makes its money from, but it illustrates a far healthier relationship with the open source community than some people expect.

Mary Branscombe

Talkback

I am always skeptical when it comes to Microsoft using open source, because I see a lot of taking by Microsoft but hardly any giving. Not that it's a requirement unless they improve an existing open source product, but a large company like Microsoft easily has the resources to use an open source project and greatly make improvements, and release them back to the public. Similar to how Sun took some of the popular open source projects and improved them years ago. What has Microsoft taken, improved upon, and given back to the open source community? And why can't Microsoft adhere to the GPL, rather than making up its own license?

apexwm 16 December, 2011 14:33

In recent months, Microsoft has actually been one of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel, adding much of its paravirtualisation support. So yes, it does give, and it does use the GPL.

You'd be surprised by how much open source work MS does, and how much it encourages contribution among its developers. Just take a look at the Codeplex site for a lot of Windows open source, much of it from inside teams at Redmond.

Simon Bisson via Facebook 16 December, 2011 15:05

GPL usage is dropping like the proverbial lead balloon at the moment and a variety of BSD/Apache-style licences are becoming more popular (stats at http://blogs.the451group.com/opensource/2011/12/15/on-the-continuing-decline-of-the-gpl/). There's a reason why there are far more licences than GPL; they have different purposes and different philosophies.It's certainly better not to multiply entities unnecessarily - and RequestReduce is under an Apache 2.0 licence - but better to have open source released under a permissive licence than not all.

Non-commercial software isn't an obvious proposition for a business per se, although it has lots of advantages both for employees and for the benefit the company can get from engaged and productive employees, but those tend to result in different levels of engagement. Microsoft officially tends to release code rather than adopt existing projects; Microsoft *contributors* are found improving code on a wide variety of open source projects. Given how business worked out for Sun, adopting and contributing to existing open source projects isn't necessarily a successful path for a commercial company ;-)

MB

Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe 16 December, 2011 16:23

SB & MB:

"Just take a look at the Codeplex site for a lot of Windows open source, much of it from inside teams at Redmond."

I do think that Codeplex is a good thing in general, as it promotes collaboration among developers which a common characteristic of open source. And it's generous of Microsoft to host the site. But which projects are contributed by Microsoft itself? To be honest, Codeplex looks like a duplication of Sourceforge.net (which has been active for many years prior to the launch of Codeplex), where the projects on the site are contributed by the general public.

"In recent months, Microsoft has actually been one of the biggest contributors to the Linux kernel, adding much of its paravirtualisation support. So yes, it does give, and it does use the GPL."

Yes that is true, but what many do not know, is that Microsoft had used a Hyper-V network driver under the radar with some GPL-licensed components which were linked to closed source binaries. This was discovered and Microsoft was then forced to submit its source code to comply with the GPL. So I don't necessarily think it was Microsoft's good intentions that initiated this contribution.

"Given how business worked out for Sun, adopting and contributing to existing open source projects isn't necessarily a successful path for a commercial company ;-)"

Sun did make a huge effort and contribution to the open source community as a whole. But, I think that the extra bloat of the Solaris OS and proprietary hardware division, ended up doing more harm than good in the long run. I don't think the projects such as MySQL, OpenOffice and others, had much to do with the demise of Sun. Companies like Red Hat have the right formula, and as such have proven that open source software can be profitable due their high success over the years. But, they are strictly a software company without the bloat of a hardware division.

apexwm 16 December, 2011 19:03

This post has been removed by a moderator.

Red Hat is a support company that drives the customer cycle by investing in open source rather than a software company per se. That model wouldn't work for Microsoft as a platform company with a massive number of support partners.

Most Microsoft transgressions against GPL turn out to be third-party contractors whose submitted code has not be sufficiently checked for OS origins rather than actual malice; I expect that to be the case in the incident you mention as well. Flying chairs aside, malice is rare at Microsoft - unless it's directed at other divisions ;-)
M

Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe 20 December, 2011 15:38

I would like to subscribe this blog feed to my mail Otterbox

Seo Analyst via Facebook 26 December, 2011 20:18

Duplicate comments are not made intentionally. Its very good to know that now you are keeping check on this problem because sometimes a commenter do not have choice to undo his comments. Thanks for the post.
Freebies

Freebies202 12 February, 2012 02:14