While I decided awhile ago to make my forum app open source, I'm reaching a point now, closer to its finish, that I have to pay more attention to what that means. The biggest issue is that I have to find ways to truly decouple it from any other stuff living in the same Web site, and that has been trickier than I expected.
I spent some time on figuring that out tonight. My motivation is actually two-fold: I'm going to show it at the Open Source Fest at Mix next month, and I need to make it less brittle and prone to breaking other stuff in MouseZoom when I make changes. In a perfect world, you could just drop it in a Web site and would magically work, but I don't think I can quite get it to that point. The next best thing is to reduce friction enough that there aren't config sections and initialization code all over the place. The biggest problem I have right now is that I'm stuck forcing the same dependency injection container on the whole site, which doesn't bother me, but it might be problematic for use in someone else's. That might end up being a future enhancement.
I'm almost at feature parity with the old Webforms version, and that's a good feeling. The amount of code is probably half what I had in the old, if you don't count tests. With tests, it's way up in the five figure range, so there's an awful lot of time invested over the last year and a half. It's sometimes frustrating that most people will never know or understand how much work goes into something like that.
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