ARMED, where is the source?

For quite a few years I’ve been putting everything I wrote on github and made most of it open source with a permissive license like MIT or Apache2. If anyone asked then I would be happy to change any licenses, whatever they wanted but with this new extension I haven’t put it on github.

Basically it is freeware, I wrote it in TypeScript which compiles to JavaScript so if you want the JavaScript you can just read it, I prefer reading and debugging TypeScript but as it isn’t compiled to machine code the extension effectively ships with the source.

I’m not putting the repository on github for two reasons, the first is that it didn’t actually take very long to write. I took the json outliner sample and added to it by writing my own set of functions that arm template support like if, equals etc which are just wrappers around the normal if and ==‘s operators.

If anyone wants to write their own version it won’t take you long, I wrote the graphing stuff in about 3 hours one evening.

If you need to debug it, you have the JavaScript source and vscode lets you open the chrome debugger and debug like a boss.

The second reason is that I’ve had pr’s for projects before where I’ve been busy and not focusing on them at the time and ended up merging things I now wish I hadn’t.

The tools I wrote are because I want a tool to do something, if 1 person or 100 people use them then great. In fact, in many ways , I would prefer not many people to use them. My ssdt dev tools addin for visual studio/ssdt has over 10k downloads if even 10% of those are active then I could potentially break 1,000 visual studio instances with every release.

I don’t have the time or resources to test all the different possible combinations of visual studio and windows etc to be able to have a great deal of certainty about a release so releases slow down to only the necessary.

This isn’t about writing tests this is testing whether windows 7 sp 1 with multiple combinations of the c run times, .net framework and DacFx all work with the dll’s I write and it would take a lot of work to build and test this stuff.

So, use the tools or don’t. If you do and you get stuck reach out to me and ask for help. Sometimes I can but sometimes I’ll be busy and can’t.

I have created a github repo to let people raise issues and put some docs but there is no code there:

https://github.com/GoEddie/armed-docs

If you want the source just ask and I’ll send it to you, you can copy etc and create your own projects but I don’t think I’ll accept any changes, not right now anyway.

If you want better tooling, write it, share it 🙂