There is a decent thread on [altdotnet] about project management software ("[altnetconf] Feature/bug tracker software?"). Here are a few of the choices listed:

Trac: I have been wanting to try this. I know someone personally that gave it a good review, but it looks like it got mixed reviews in this thread. It sounds like the chief gripe was having to use python to extend it. There is also a site for mods to trac: http://trac-hacks.org/

Mingle: We tried this at work. Liked it. For some reason never got any feedback from management (kind of typical where I work)

...oh...wait...open source...Mingle's not open source.

One tool I want to look at when I have time is Storyverse (code.google.com/.../storyverse).

Hi Rod,

This is really more of a letter to the editor than a comment on your blog entry.  I picked up a copy of the Jan/Feb. issue of CoDe magazine at a conference I'm attending. This is the first time I've really read a magazine on coding in quite a while, but I can't say I was overly impressed.

First of all, on your editorial page, you have a typo, citing this site as "blogs.dashpoint.com" instead of "blog.dashpoint.com". Normally a single typo would hardly merit mention, but in this case it affects what appears to be the only way to write a letter to the editor of the magazine.

Anyway, getting to my original reason for writing: the article by Ken Getz titled: "Visual Basic and Respect." The theme of the article is that Ken believes Visual Basic and/or people who use it should be given more respect.

At one point he mentions his claim that: "One gets the respect one demands." This could hardly be more wrong.

Respect must be earned, not demanded. When it is earned, it will be received without demand. When it is not earned, it cannot be received regardless of demand.

From the remainder of the article, I'd guess that Ken already gets more respect than he's earned anyway. His examples are, frankly, execrable. He's taken two (or perhaps three, depending on your viewpoint) separate actions, and conflated them into single wad of spaghetti. His examples deal with:

1) querying a database,

2) filtering the result of that query

3) formatting the results into a particular format

You can argue that querying the database and filtering the results are really a single action -- and I won't argue much -- I'd say they're theoretically separate, but queries include filters so often there's little practical reason to separate the two. There's no room for question, however, that querying the database and formatting the output are two entirely separate actions.

This conflation leads to code that's difficult to read and more difficult to maintain. Obvious problems abound. Consider localizing the code so the tags are in Spanish or French instead of English. You need to be able to read a strange mix of VB, XML and English along with LINQ to XML's own bit of SQL-like querying to be able to get started. Likewise, you need to learn this entire mish-mash to do something simple like adding another field to the output (e.g. email address).

I could go on at much greater length, but the bottom line is as simple as it is obvious: like many other VB users, if Ken wants more respect, he needs to earn it by writing better code.