Hot off the presses is a brand new repository admin screen!

Welcome back to GitHub Rebase! It’s a .NET week here on the Rebase. If you’ve got a suggestion for themes or projects let me know!

Featured Project

masstransit is an open source Enterprise Service Bus written in C# that lives here on GitHub. You can think of it as high level library over MSMQ or ActiveMQ that allows you to implement everything from simple messaging to Publish/Subscribe. Not used to asynchronous messaging protocols? Check out this article about how Starbucks does not use two-phase commit and then a sample implementation of the ideas presented in it and more on the developer wiki. Dive in further with plenty of code examples on one of the author’s blogs or this ElegantCode podcast.

Notably (New) Projects

RestSharp is a HTTP client that doesn’t suck (so they claim!) It’s seriously packed with features: automatic XML/JSON serialization, multi-part form support, various authentication schemes, and that’s just half of it. There’s plenty of documentation on the project’s GitHub wiki and even more blog posts to get you started.

gitextensions is a Visual Studio plugin that helps you use Git in your IDE. This project has a ton of seriously useful graphical views of Git. View your commit log, format patches, pull changes, and integrate your favorite mergetool, and more. You could also bring these helpers up in Explorer or through a shell that doesn’t suck. Watch some screencasts if you’re not convinced yet.

fluentcassandra is a C# Cassandra client library that’s just getting underway. Haven’t started with Cassandra yet? You can get jump started here and of course there’s plenty of documentation on the project site. Not of lot of documentation (that I could find) yet, but the library seems to be well tested and is ready for you to try it out!

GitSharp is a native Windows and Mono-compatible implementation of Git. Much like grit or ruby-git this project allows you to interact with Git through code, by querying your status, making commits, cloning repos, and so on. Check out more examples and projects that integrate with GitSharp, like TicGit.net, on the project’s website.

fluentmigrator brings the power of ActiveRecord migrations to your .NET project. Hook it up with rake or NAnt (or just the built in console app), and stop tossing around SQL scripts to create your database. Added benefits: keep your database history in version control, seed your database with records, and make sure new developers on your project can get your project setup in no time. There’s a great tutorial here about setting this up with your solution and a template to help generate migrations.

Today, we're announcing write support for our previously released Subversion support

Developers and designers in your company can now use existing SVN tools like Versions or Tortoise SVN to collaborate on Git projects.

To try it out, just use your GitHub credentials on a Subversion URL: https://svn.github.com/[user]/[repository]

Some caveats

• Because of the way SVN expects on-server merges, you may see some strange looking merge history when working with someone using Subversion.

• Annotations and some types of diffs still won't work properly yet - we're working on it.

• You cannot checkout parts of a repo (such as subdirectories) or branches other than the default branch on GitHub (yet).

• You currently have to have a 'master' branch

Finally, this is currently considered beta functionality - you are taking a certain risk allowing Subversion to modify bits in your code. Test it out and see if it works for you.

This page lists all GitHub users who have contributed to a project, sorted by number of commits.

Other fun ones:

• jQuery
• node.js
• memcached
• Tornado
• Redis
• GitX

Clicking a contributor's name brings you to a list of their commits.

• rtomayko's Sinatra commits
• dhh's Rails commits
• jeresig's jQuery commits

Enjoy.

Edit: We just added an API call for contributors:

$ curl https://github.com/api/v2/json/repos/show/ry/node/contributors

Git's HTTP protocol just upped it a few notches on the ol' IQ test. As discussed in detail on the Pro Git blog, Git supports a new, much more efficient HTTP based transport as of version 1.6.6. Well, now GitHub supports that new protocol as well.

From now on, if you clone a repository over the https:// url and you are using a Git client version 1.6.6 or greater, Git will automatically use the newer, better transport mechanism. Even more amazing, however, is that you can now push over that protocol and clone private repositories as well. If you access a private repository, or you are a collaborator and want push access, you can put your username in the URL and Git will prompt you for the password when you try to access it.

Try it out on a public repository:

$ git clone https://github.com/schacon/grack.git

For private repos, or to have push access on your repository, you can clone this way:

$ git clone https://username@github.com/username/project.git

Don't forget the https part - Git will send your password hashed but unencrypted over the wire, so be sure to use SSL. In future versions of Git (assuming our patch gets integrated), Git will prompt you for your username if it's not provided and the client gets a 401, so you won't actually have to put your username in the URL - it will just ask you when Git needs it.

Older clients will also fall back to the older, less efficient way, so nothing should break - just newer clients should work better.

Let us know if you have any problems with it, and enjoy!

We just fixed an issue where some Scala projects were being misclassified as Java projects. Now, recent projects like Twitter's FlockDB and Gizzard show up in the Scala language dashboard as they should.

You can also use Scala syntax highlighting in Gist now. It's bonus.

UPDATE

This isn't an update I wanted to write, but Kyle and I won't be flying to Europe after all. There have been numerous reports that even though airports are opening back up, Eyjafjallajökull could get angry again or set off the even larger Katla which would all but guarantee us getting stranded over there. Normally, being stuck in the UK sounds like fun, but unbreakable commitments in the States have forced us to preemptively cancel this trip.

Pour one out for us.

Kyle and I will be hosting a GitHub meetup at the Prince of Wales in Aberdeen, Scotland this Thursday starting somewhere in the vicinity of 8pm.

I'll also be speaking about GitHub at the TechMeetup in Aberdeen on Wednesday the 21st. I'd recommend going to both for the full GitHub experience.

Unfortunately, there is one giant caveat: if the angry volcano in Iceland doesn't let us to fly to the UK tomorrow, we may potentially not make either of these events. Unless I update this post that tragedy has stuck, assume we'll be there.

git rebase --interactive --onto edition-41

Lots of projects this week folks, keep them coming! Like always I'm more than welcome to consider user submissions to Rebase. Let me know about your projects!

Featured Project

jquery-ui is the offical jQuery UI component library, which has finally moved over to GitHub! jQuery UI includes helpful interactions and widgets that you can build into your web application on top of jQuery, including draggable and sortable components, and UI controls like the everpopular accordion to the always useful datepicker. Each control is accessibility friendly by downgrading to normal HTML and comes baked in with theme support via the ThemeRoller. The latest release, 1.8, brings plenty of cool features such as an autocomplete widget, easier custom widget creation, and a stunning reduction of 71% file size on the main JS file. Get started today with jQuery UI here.

Notably New Projects

gizzard is a Scala based framework that has been getting a lot of attention this week. Gizzard looks at the problem of sharding massive amounts of data in a new way, by providing a framework for custom data stores (like a relational db, Redis, you name it) to hook in instead of writing everything from the ground up. The gist is: you bring the data storage, Gizzard brings all of the partitioning, sharding, replicating, and fault tolerance you need so you don't have to worry about it. For more information take a look at a sample application, Rowz or the project's extensive README.

awesome-buttons truly live up to their name by providing the buttons above using only CSS3 and RGBA. This is all done with some magic from border-radius, box-shadow, text-shadow, and even an overlay PNG for browsers that suck. By defining colors for shadows and borders in RGBA, browsers can then overlay the background-color and it looks great on any background. This is definitely a useful technique for designers and developers on GitHub!

storevil is natural language testing framework for C#/.NET which is inspired heavily by Cucumber. Instead of taking the cuke4nuke or SpecFlow approach, storevil uses reflection as a means to associate steps in your feature files to code. It does support regular expression matching as well if you need it, a nice way to define extension methods for common helpers, and reducing duplication of multiple steps with content chaining. The project's GitHub wiki is packed with examples and information on how to use it with your project. This blog post from the author also serves as a great introduction.

lightning is a helper for command line/terminal junkies to cut down on excessive amounts of typing when typing out paths in bash or zsh by helping autocomplete files and folders across hundreds of directories. Lightning works by defining 'bolts' that contain globs of files and then combining those into functions that are sourced as first class members of your shell. Lightning comes packed with filesystem specific generators that help you set up your own bolts, and you can bake your own in for your specific needs. Definitely read up on the basics and how to speed up your command line experience even further with it.

Reggie is a level editor for Super Mario Bros. Wii. Wait, what? I've heard of this with the older Mario titles but not with the latest. Pretty much all you need to run your own custom levels is an SD card and the original game disc. The level editor itself is cross platform thanks to PyQT and contains every sprite, monster, and platform you'll need to wipe out your mustached heroes. Check out this video of Level 1-1 or a tutorial on how to use Reggie.

GitHub is officially two years old today, and we're just getting warmed up.

Happy birthday GitHub!

hongrich's iPad app, Dashboard, was rejected by Apple so he open sourced it: https://github.com/hongrich/Dashboard

Check the demo:

Looks cool, a shame it's not in the App Store.

I'll be speaking at Frozen Rails in May along with some great speakers.

Tickets are still available - use the "GitHub" code and get a 10% discount!

We'll be holding a drinkup at Bruuveri so be sure to swing by and say hello. More details will be posted soon.

See you there!

LAST MINUTE DRINKUP NOTICE

We can't let the SF crew have all the fun! Join me (Tom Preston-Werner) in Boulder for a few drinks at the Southern Sun Pub & Brewery! I'm in town for a few days and I keep hearing about all these Boulder coders I need to meet. So don't leave me hangin'; stop by and I'll buy you a cold one! I'll be the one in the "fork you" t-shirt.

Southern Sun is at 627 South Broadway, Boulder, CO 80305, on the south end of town. Thursday, April 8th at 9:00pm.

You know you love it. Now that cURL is 12 years old (happy birthday!), it's moved to git and GitHub.

Follow along: https://github.com/bagder/curl

This week celebrates the 17th or 18th drinkup, depending on whether you count the last Bay Area drinkup in Redwood city as part of the San Francisco series. Going forward, drinkups will now take place once a month instead of every two weeks at the company physician's recommendation backed by our CPA. Turns out liver dialysis is expensive.

The facts: Laszlo, 2526 Mission St 8:30pm Thursday April 8th, 2010

Repopular is a new way to find popular code. Built by chad and marchdoe, the site uses Twitter to surface repos people are talking about right now.

Even better - the GitHub Explore page now uses Repopular data in the "Trending" section.

Chad and Doug plan to continue improving Repopular, and we plan to do the same with the Explore page. Keep an eye out for more ways to see what's going on!