Fredrik Normén

During the last twelve months I have spent a lot of time on Continuous Delivery and a deep dive into Team Foundation Server 2012. A commit stage is set, we use TFS build to build, and NuGet as an Artifact Repository. Now my goal is to bring the deployment to the team, let them also be part of the deployment process, maintain and create deployment scripts etc. I have looked around among some deployment tools like Octopus and InRelease. InRelease looks promising. Instead of using one of the great tools, I decided to create my own. Why you may ask? The reason is that I want to be able to do any modifications and bring the code to the team, and to be honest, I needed something to do on my spare time ;)

Just for fun added a simple support for using Razor together with OWIN. You can read a little bit about OWIN on my previous blog post.

Something that I haven't liked for a long time is the use of branches in a projects. I don't like the waste when it comes to merge between branches, "Merge hell". In the beginning of the project I'm in now, it took hours to do merges before a release, both handling conflicts, but also selects different changeset that should include and not include in the merge before a release. The hard part was when a branch per feature was present. Later on this was changed into one single dev branch, but still sometimes two branches may exists. The team was used to work like this from previous projects. To handle this merge hell one dedicated person handle all the merge so the team can work undisturbed (not true, they were involved when conflicts occurs). Even with a dedicated person, the problem still exists, it was just moved. The time it takes to do the merge, was there, the problem with non-disciplines people that did not following the guidelines when it comes to fixing bugs in different branches, or forgot to merge into the main branch, created problems. Wouldn't it be nice to get rid of all the merge problems, let everyone just work in the same branch? There is a way, it may not work for every projects though (sometimes a bigger change may be useful to have in a single branch, but I think it should first be avoided). The solution to the problem is what Paul Hammant calls "Branch by Abstraction".

"OWIN, a standard interface between .NET web servers and web applications. The goal of OWIN is to decouple server and application and, by being an open standard, stimulate the open source ecosystem of .NET web development tools." – owin.org

In my previous blog post I wrote about how to get information about a build, the problem with that code was that the code only returned the user who requested the build, not the user who had checked-in a changeset that failed the build. So this blog post will cover that part.

For the last three years I have helped a financial company with a business critical financial system. I have the role as an architect and coach when it comes to system design. I also spend times to make the team work more efficiently, to release new features with high quality, and maintainable code faster. So the last months I have spent a lot of time with a Deployment Process, to see how we can use Continuous Delivery. We use Visual Studio 2012 and Team Foundation Server 2012 (TFS) as our configuration system. We use gated check-ins (The goal is to use branch by abstractions, so the team work against one mainline only, to remove the "merge hell"). Even if we use gated check-ins we had to disable some acceptance tests because the time it takes for them to run. Instead we use a build that runs at lunch time and one at the night to include the acceptance tests (Those needs to be observed by the team). So far TFS have worked perfect, both for Gated check-in and Continuous Integration for the mainline. We also use TFS for a "push deployment" to our internal test and UAT environment. Everything is automated. We haven't yet "enable" the "push-deploy" against our production environment yet.

This blog post is created just for fun, and it's will be about how we can use Razor to create a Hypermedia API using XML as a hypermedia for a "Maze game" inspired from the book "Building Hypermedia APIs with HTML5 and Node", Mike Amundsen. Only the server-side API is covered in this blog post, so no Client.

In my previous blog post “Using Razor together with ASP.NET Web API” I wrote about a solution to use a MediaTypeFormatter to render HTML by using Razor when the API is accessed from a browser. I’m now sort of done with the basics and will share the current solution in this blog post. The source code will later be available.

I decided to make the solution more extendable so I created a HtmlMediaTypeViewFormatter that inherits from the MediaTypeFormatter: