Contents tagged with General Software Development
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Installing Win7 From a USB Drive
Friend and all around nice guy Steve Smith wrote this blog entry about how to install Windows 7 from a USB key. Quite a few steps, but I've done this before so I know it works. I began thinking what the Apple story would look like and smiled: 1. Download OS X and save it to your USB drive. 2. Reboot. :) Seriously, though, I had to track down lots of steps when I did it a few months ago so Steve's entry will be helpful to many.
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Hosting - There *Is* a Difference!
Several weeks ago I did a WordPress installation on a friend's server so they could update their site themselves. They use GoDaddy for hosting because it was cheap. You get what you pay for. I can't stress this lesson strongly enough. Ever since I completed the installation, I noticed dreadful performance on anything that needed a database call. I complained to GoDaddy on three occasions but nothing was really done except to say that in a shared hosting environment "sometimes" the performance slows down. I had hosted my blog www.russology.com on WordPress for a couple of years now but I just signed up for Crucial Web Host and moved my blog to my new shared hosting account last night. Lightning by comparison. The WordPress pages load so fast it's like static HTML, even the ones that hit the database (MySQL 5). Crucial Web Host is $25 per month. Some might balk at that number. After all, GoDaddy is something like $5 per month. But as I said earlier - you get what you pay for. Crucial uses cPanel, phpMyAdmin, and other very common tools. GoDaddy uses a bunch of different things that aren't really intuitive and sometimes give me problems. One thing is for sure - I certainly don't miss seeing GoDaddy's advertisements as I do what I need to do on my domains or hosting account.
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Thoughts on Mix, Ballmer, and the iPhone SDK
I am a software developer and architect (currently using Microsoft technologies) so of course I was interested to watch the sessions from the MIX conference that just happened last week in Las Vegas.
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Code Analysis or Check-In Policy for Warnings
I've been doing a bunch of Google searches today trying to figure out how I might be able to raise a violation if somebody tries to do a check-in when there are more than 100 warnings in the solution. Because (as far as I know, anyway) the only object available to you in a check-in policy is the PendingCheckin, I'm finding it difficult to implement this. Does anyone know how I can approach this? I'm aware that Visual Studio will raise a violation when the number of warnings reaches a certain number, but this number is way too high for us. I thought of doing it as a Code Analysis policy, but several questions came up with that approach as well. First, in order to write a custom code analysis policy, I have to use th FxCop SDK 1.35, don't I? There isn't a "CheckInPolicy" abstract base class that I can just subclass, is there?
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Multiple Sitemap Index Files in Robots.txt
I have been searching around using Google but I can't find an answer to this question.
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Internet Explorer's Reign of Mediocrity
I saw this on digg.com today and I have to admit that I am one of the (apparently THOUSANDS) of people who are tired of having to tweak their standards-based code just so that IE 6 and 7 (MIcrosoft's browsers which do NOT adhere to web standards) can display their web pages the way the developer or designer originally intended. With IE's reduced market share due to the success of Firefox, Safari, and Opera, combined with Microsoft's several-year development cycle to release IE 7 - a browser that doesn't even bring IE up to date with the competition - I think people are really just starting to say, "You know what? Screw you." What do YOU think? http://digg.com/programming/Digg_this_if_you_re_tired_of_IE_costing_you_money_no_ads_involved Please comment! Opinions are welcome.
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MySpace & Me
I'm very excited to announce that Monday I joined MySpace as a Software Architect. This is a site that has 200,000,000 members and something like four billion page views a week. I can't back this up with paperwork, but I'm fairly sure this is one of (if not THE) most visited site on the entire internet. They don't have hundreds of servers, they have thousands. I'm very much looking forward to learning a lot here and offering whatever I can to the team. MySpace uses ASP.NET and SQL Server - quite the interesting case study for these technologies. We use Team Foundation Server for source code control. Each contributor uses Visual Studio 2005, and many projects follow an agile methodology called Scrum. Anyone who is a member and has ideas for new features or functionality is welcome to email me at rnemhauser (myspace.com is the domain). PLEASE do not email me with errors or problems. Tom, the first friend any new member has, receives these messages and they ARE read. I'm interested in new, out-of-the-box ideas, no matter how crazy. Check out my MySpace profile at http://www.myspace.com/russnem
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Backups in Today's World
Like many people in today's world I have an absolutely enormous amount of data stored on my various hard drives. Aside from my 320 GB+ of iTunes music and video, there's a significant number of photographs and well over 150 gigs of captured and rendered video. There's also the code for almost every software development project I've ever worked on. The databases for my current projects will also exist and some are so large that a local backup would be far more beneficial that trying to FTP 5 gigs of data down. All this stuff needs to be backed up, but of course DVDs are out (even the dual layer ones) because they store less than 10 gigs each. Even with two dual layer DVD burners in my Mac Pro I'd have to sit here for who knows how long putting in almost 50 blank discs every month. I'm very curious. What are most people with hundreds of gigs of stuff using to back up their data? Is tape backup still around these days? Would a 750 GB or 1 TB drive in an external FireWire 800 enclosure be my best bet? Any advice would be appreciated.
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My New Blog
Over the past year or so my blog posts have spanned subjects much more diverse than just Microsoft technologies and developing in a Microsoft world. To that end, I have created a more general-purpose blog that I hope my current subscribers will check out.
http://www.russology.comThis is obviously still a great place for my posts about Microsoft technologies, so please be sure to keep this feed too! -
Shaking Things Up: Scrum, Agile, and TDD
In mid September I started working as a vendor for Microsoft. The majority of my time involves coding. Prior to September I had only a vague idea of what scrum and test-driven development were. Scrum aside, I just couldn't understand why anyone would want to spend time writing all these tests and THEN code their application. My philosophy was, "Let me get some code together that needs to be tested. THEN I'll write the tests." Of course, as you've probably already guessed, the tests were seldom written.