Contributing to OSS projects made easy
I recently came across what I believe is a missing feature (bug?) in Json.NET most excellent library: when using custom constructor, default values are not populated for properties :(
Being open source, I just went to its GitHub project, created the mentioned Issue, and proceeded to fork the repo.
Immediately after getting the source and opening the VS solution, I noticed it used different settings than my default ones, i.e. it uses two whitespace “tabs”. That’s typically the first barrier to contributing: am I supposed to now go to the project website, read some coding standards page, change my VS settings to match, just to start coding?
Luckily, I also noticed alongside the solution, the Newtonsoft.Json.vssettings file. Now that’s useful! Not only that, but by being named the same as the solution file (just changing the file extension), it’s automatically picked up by the ...