State of the Project

Hey everybody. Ricky here. Just wanted to take a few minutes to give all of you an update of things and address an issue that appears to have become more prevalent in the last few days weeks, along with a potential fix.

For a while, reports of an issue have started to come in on the forums dealing with the search API, namely with deserializing results. The sad part is, this issue was fixed long ago (on 6/13/2011) by @GoldenTao. The real problem is that no release has been made in a very long time that includes this fix.

If you need this fix, I suggest you download the source of the last release, and apply this change.

You may ask, “So, Ricky … why has it been so long since there has been a release? Does this mean that Twitterizer is dead?” Twitterizer is not dead. In fact, a LOT of changes have been made. @GoldenTao has put a lot of time working on the library. He’s added User Streaming support, fixed a lot of bugs, and made the entire library Silverlight compatible.

As to why there is no release, that’s mostly my fault. I can give reasons (I have a few legitimate ones) and excuses (I have many more of these), but it comes down to the fact that I have not been around. @GoldenTao has done great work, but I feel like there is a good deal of cleanup and restructuring that is needed before a release is put out. Needless to say, the next release will be a big one and I would like to make sure it is decent. I just need to find the time/mental capacity/motivation to do it.

Currently, this is what I feel the need to do:

1. Restructure the project into multiple solutions. Make the base a SL build, with other solutions for .NET and .NET client profile that link in the base code files.
2. Ensure that Streaming support is complete. I know User streaming functions (I’ve been using it via Metrotwit beta for months), but I’m not sure about Site streaming.
3. Revisit the outstanding tasks/bugs.

The last note I’d like to drop is about our Github repository. A while back I created a bash script (heresy, I know) to grab changes in our SVN repo and mirror them on Github. It’s broken. It’s been broken for a long time. I didn’t find out until recently (I don’t use Github personally). I spent a couple of hours trying to get the mirror script working again. It seems to tell me everything is OK, but it’s a damn liar and I hate it. I’m going to pull the link to it for the time being. If one of you would like to chip in and try to figure it out, I’d love it.

As always, feedback is welcome and appreciated.

Update: I was curious, so I did a little checking. It’s been 9 months since the last release. Since then, there have been 46 revisions. 367 changes by 4 developers (2 of them made a single change each). I’d say the project is still alive, wouldn’t you?