July 2003 - Posts
This past Saturday night, three of our team members (Greg,
Sam and I) got together for a social event at Sam's house. Of course, we talked about .Net topics like
Rotor code, the ASP.Net
Portal and
Community Starter Kits, and Enterprise Services. I brought my latest book purchase
.Net Enterprise Services by
Clemens Vasters. It's written in German -- its been over 10 years since I have read German (in college), but this will be fun to get some practice again.
By the end of the evening, we were all talking about how much we wanted to get new computers. Greg wanted a multimedia desktop, Sam wanted a Mac, and I wanted a new laptop. On a whim, we decided to head over to
CompUSA to see what trouble we could cause.
Geeks on the loose in the candy store
Greg bought a nice Sony desktop with a Pentium 4 3.0 GHz, 1.0 Gig RAM, and a 160 Gig hard drive. I got a Compaq laptop with a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz, 512 Meg RAM, 60 Meg Harddrive, 16" screen, and DVD/CD-RW combo. Sam didn't get his Mac that night, but went back on Sunday and picked up his new dream machine.
I spent most of Saturday night way into Sunday morning getting my laptop set up. I quickly kicked
Windows XP Home and installed
Windows 2000 Server and
Windows Server 2003 (compliments of my
MSDN Universal) on a couple of partitions. The rest of Sunday was spent installing other software and moving data from my old laptop.
Geeks or what?
Our project team was talking about setting up an internal blog or wiki a few days ago. Today, Sam noticed Harry Pierson's DevHawk Wiki -- a new Wiki application written in C# using some ideas from Don Box's delegates post from a few days back. I downloaded the sample and installed it internally for our team.
We have already started using it, and its working great. Thanks Harry!
This Wiki version is a v 0.1 release. He is looking for collaborators, if you are interested in helping with this project.
Ingo has a case (an
article and examples) for why Sealed is sometimes needed.
Get the latest .Net
Reflector version (3.3.0.0) that was released July 17.
Brad Adams is
asking for recommendations/suggestions for the
initial PDC sessions list. What will be important for you to learn at this conferance?
Jeff Reese talks about his own experiences with the Build Process. I am very interested in this area, especially as it applies to The Joel Test.
On my last project, we used Vault for source control (as I mentioned previously). For our continuous integration, we used a set of scripts I wrote to extract source code from Vault, build the assemblies with the command-line compiler, and move the assemblies to the correct locations for testing. The build was set on a schedule to run every few hours. We used Issue Manager for our bug tracking. After release, we were starting to look at NAnt and Draco.Net for building and countinuous integration.
On my new project, we have different scenarios and requirements than the previous project (of course), but the ideas of the build process are the same. I believe once you start using some of these methods of writing good software (unit testing, pair programming, continuous integration, bug tracking, etc.), you wonder "How you could I have written software any other way?".
John Lam talks about an NUnit 2.0 gotcha he found.
If you are using the 1.1 .Net Framework, you will need to add a setting to the nunit-console.exe.config and nunit-gui.exe.config files to use the correct CLR version (v1.1.4322 for 1.1). Add this to the above files:
<startup>
<supportedRuntime version="v1.1.4322" />
</startup>
Thanks John.
If you haven't seen it, check out SQL Blogs for lots of great SQL Server info.
I have been wanting to post some of my own information about my database work with both SQL Server and Oracle. I code SQL in my sleep it seems, and I am always thinking of ways to keep data secure, retrieval fast, and integrity maintained. Glad to see there are blogs specifically devoted to database topics!
Eric Sink (CEO of SourceGear that produces Vault) and Matthew Reynolds have both been talking about how great Vault is over SourceSafe.
I also would like to add my voice to how much better Vault is compared to SourceSafe. On my last project, with 5 developers spread across the country, we attempted for a few days to use SourceSafe over VPN. I was in charge of installing and setting up this scenario. In a word, it was horrible! Performance was terrible.
I quickly went to SourceGear because I had used SourceOffSite (also by SourceGear) a few years back on top of SourceSafe for a similar remote development environment. I was pleasantly surprised to see a complete replacement of SourceSafe written in C# and using SQL Server (you can also use MSDE). I quickly voice my concern to the team that we take a look at the product. It was purchased, and everyone was all the better for it! Even when we had to move from a VPN setup to a straight Internet-connected setup at another location, Vault worked flawlessly! We switched to SSL, and once again, everything worked flawlessly!
For my own personal development, based on this experience, I am looking at purchasing Vault and recommending this product to others as well. Sold to another satisfied customer!
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