The Breakneck Speed of Open Source in .NET

I wanted to share my first real experience with a large open source project in .NET.

I recently wrote an article about moving from CSS to LESS with Visual Studio Web Essentials. While writing the post, I noticed that the Extract to File feature could be improved. Web Essentials did extract the selected text to a new file, but it did not automatically import the new file into the current file.

Since Web Essentials is an open source project (you can find it on GitHub), I decided this would be a good opportunity for me to try contribute to the project. I started by logging an issue describing the behavior I had expected.

Now, this is where I was surprised. My intention had been to submit a pull request resolving the issue myself. I never had a chance because the issue was resolved within an hour!

Immediately after I submitted the issue, 3 people started to discuss it: Adeel Mujahid, Peter Spada and Mads Kristensen. Shortly after than, the code was merged in to the master branch.

The speed of all this shocked me and I think this shows the benefits of open source for Microsoft. I am certain that I would not have received this kind of quick response if the project was a closed-source Microsoft project.
Thank you Adeel, Peter and Mads for your contributions.