sfeldman.NET

Uncle Bob did it again. Another book that is full of experience and wisdom. This time it’s not about code, it’s about being a professional developer and what it means. I really loved the book. There were so many examples that I couldn’t not to smile recalling instances from my own experience having parallels with what is described in the book. One particular sentence I really loved was about TDD:

“I know this sounds strident and unilateral, but given the record I don’t think surgeons should have to defend hand-washing, and I don’t think programmers should have to defend TDD.”

So true. This is exactly what I felt like every single time a discussion around “justification for doing TDD/BDD” came up. If I’d decide on CS students reading materials, this one would make it on the list.

Mercurial is a very appealing distributed source code versioning system. I used it with Google code and also for some local work when no server repository was available. Worked great. This time I wanted to go through the scenario of setting up Mercurial as a team repository with a centralized server. This would be still useful for an individual developer to have local commits (better than committing every single change just to ensure it’s captured) and would allow to push an entire change set to be versioned on the server and allow others to retrieve that change set with all the “intermediate bookmarks”.

Setting up Mercurial on a server through IIS was not painful, but tedious and too manual (yes, I prefer simplicity over unnecessary complexity – hint: VisualSVN server). I was a bit turned down by the fact that Active Directory authentication is not working with IIS for Mercurial. You can get it going with LDAP support build into Apache web server.

For me – for now I am going with Subversion. When something like VisualSVN Server for Mercurial shows up, I’m switching.  Unless I need the local (disconnected) mode