Brian Ritchie's Blog

If you're like me, you like to keep an eye on what is being committed to your subversion repository.  A while back, I posted how to create an RSS feed from your SVN commits.  RSS feeds are cool, but CommitMonitor is cooler.  This little tool sits in your system tray and notifies you when users commit changes.  It also gives you a historical view and lets you performs diffs.  Give it a try...I think you'll like it.   

My shop has been using Subversion for a number of years.  It is a reliable tool and works well for our team.  One area that Subversion could handle better is tracking merge information.  Our team is always working on multiple feature branches and merging those changes back into the main line of development.  The current merge support works fine (most of the time), but doesn't handle complex situations well. 

Subversion 1.5 begins to improve this with "Merge tracking" support.  From the Release Notes: Merge tracking means Subversion keeps track of what changes have been merged where. This reduces the overhead involved in maintaining branches, and gives users a way to inquire what changes are merged — or are available to be merged — on different lines of development.  Subversion 1.5 adds "foundational" support for merge tracking with more improvements coming in v1.5.1 and beyond.

Besides merge tracking, they've made a number of other changes.  Here's the full list:

TortoiseSVN (our favorite SVN client) has also released version 1.5. We're setting up a VM to test our code base on 1.5.  Once I've given it a good test drive, I'll post more.

Debugger Visualizers are one of the best productivity additions to the Visual Studio debugging experience. After reading Vardi's post showing the wide variety of custom visualizers, I decided to start maintaining a list of visualizers at dotnetpowered.com.  After some internet research, I've documented 32 visualizers for everything from Regular Expressions to Linq Queries.  Check out the list and rev up your development environment today!  If you know of any other custom visualizers, please send them my way.

I've updated my Dilbert Image Service to handle the redesign of the Dilbert.com site that broke it today.  It's nice to have a portal with good content, but it's better to have a portal with a today's Dilbert comic!  Nothing brings users to your portal like Dilbert.  I hope you enjoy the updated service.

Tuning SQL Server has always been a black art.  Luckily, SQL Server 2005 added a number of tools to give us a glimpse into its inner workings through Dynamic Management Views (DMV). In the MSDN article, SQL Server: Uncover Hidden Data to Optimize Application Performance, Ian Stirk provides an excellent overview of the various DMVs.  "SQL Server 2005 collects data relating to running queries. This data, which is held in memory and starts accumulating after a server restart, can be used to identify numerous issues and metrics, including those surrounding table indexes, query performance, and server I/O. You can query this data via the SQL Server Dynamic Management Views (DMVs) and related Dynamic Management Functions (DMFs)."  More...

Using DMVs directly is great, but various tools have been built on top of them to take your tuning experience to the next level.  Microsoft SQL Server Customer Advisory Best Practices Team has published DMVStats: A SQL Server 2005 Dynamic Management View Performance Data Warehouse on CodePlex.  We're taking a look at this tool over the next couple of weeks.  If anyone else has used it, I'd love to hear your results.

Is cubicle life making you too happy?  Are you starting to feel motivated?  Have no fear, the folks at Despair.com are here to help.  They are fighting the war against motivation!

"For over two decades, the multi-billion dollar motivation industry has unleashed untold suffering upon the workplaces, schools and civil institutions of the world- in the insidious form of the motivational poster.  In 1998, one company dared to fight back, as Despair, Inc. introduced Demotivators®, satirical products reverse-engineered from the most powerful motivational posters ever inflicted upon mankind."

They have lots of good stuff on their site, but if you can't find something you like then generate your own!  They now let you generate and print your own posters.

Here is my addition to the fight against Motivation...

The .NET Language List at dotnetpowered.com has become one of the most comprehensive lists of .NET-targeted languages available on the net.  This is thanks in large part to community involvement.  I've wanted to do some upgrades on the page for some time, and the first of them are finally online.  Click on the Enhanced View link to see the new functionality.  You can vote for your favorite language & sort the list different ways.  I'll also be adding the ability to add comment support so you can discuss your the aspects of your favorite language with the community.  Please let me know what you think and how I can make it better.  Also, if you know of a new language, please send it my way.

This a major release for the Mono project and includes many improvements:

• Windows.Forms is implemented!  This allows WinForms GUI applications to run on both Windows and Linux.
• Extensive platform support.  You can run Mono almost anywhere! 

     32 bit systems: x86, PowerPC, ARM, s390, SPARC.
     64 bit systems: x86-64, s390x, Itanium (IA64).

     Operating system support Linux, OSX, Windows and BSD.  

• Performance Improvements.  Lots of compiler optimizations, I/O layer rewrite, and ASP.NET rewrite
• More ways to run ASP.NET applications.  You can run them under mod_mono on Apache, XSP (a standalone web server in c#), or embed a web server in your application with Mono.WebServer.dll 
• Tons of unit tests!  The Mono team is very big on unit testing and has over 121,600 lines of new NUnit tests for ASP.NET alone!

Congrats to everyone on the Mono team for reaching this milestone.

MS Research has been working on a ".NET-based" operating system for some time.  Its a pretty exiting idea that could open up all kinds of new possiblities.  Now, it looks like the open source community may be getting in on the act.  The mono-develop mailing list has been buzzing with discussions of a CIL-based OS.  William Lahti has already start something he calls Jeto.  Jeto is an open source managed OS based on GNU/Linux. If you want to stay up on the discussion or contribute...look at the SharpOS web site.

For the past few years, I've been using Sharepoint for my development portal.  However, it doesn't seem to be the best tool for building out documentation on our development projects.  A Wiki seems like a much better choice.  I've started using ScrewTurn Wiki.  It is written in .NET 2.0 and is very nice.  ScrewTurn is very lightweight, easy to use, looks great, and has no need for a database.  The next major release will add plug-in support and a number of other features. Give it a try...I think you'll be impressed.

It looks like Microsoft seems the benefits of the Wiki approach too and is adding Blog and Wiki support to Sharepoint Services Beta 2 Refresh.  That should keep things interesting.