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# Friday, 22 June 2007

Scott Hanselman hit the nail on the head with his recent post.  It gave me quite the laugh, but unfortunately it is so true (Just like when I watch Office Space).  I was told the other day by a coworker that I over engineered a solution because I used an httphandler instead of just making a page.  Anyone with a small understanding of ASP.NET should realize that using an httphandler when no content needs to be display is going to be more efficient.  This “page” was going to be hit about every time someone accessed the portal and from what I have come across using an httphandler will increase performance by 5%-10%.  Considering the development time was only increased by the one minute or so that it took to add the proper section to the web.config I would have to say that in this scenario the httphandler was the best way to go and I think that the solution could only be considered “over engineered” if you don’t understand it.  Anyways, I’m beginning to think there is a case of ADD going on in my new environment.

Friday, 22 June 2007 06:00:00 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [1] - Trackback - Save to del.icio.us - Digg This! - Follow me on Twitter
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# Sunday, 17 June 2007

Like I said in an earlier post I’m currently working on a side project with a couple former coworkers that I hope with become a success.  This project has turned my dining room table into an ad hoc office several evening each week and caused the need to setup a development infrastructure to support the project with the backbone of that being the source control repository.  I decided to use Subversion for the source control repository for the initial reason that it was free, but also because it seems to be fairly highly regarded in the community.  I’ve used both Visual SourceSafe 6.0 and 2005 in the past and whereas I’ve never had any direct complaints with VSS it did always seem to be a bit of a task getting things setup initially when starting a project.

Subversion is working fairly well for us.   Because we cannot always get together to work on the project I have http access setup and my partners can very easily sync their source code over the Internet.  Subversion integrates nicely with Apache web server to do this.  Let me point out though that I have all this running on Windows, not Linux.  There are Windows versions of both Subversion and Apache.  For the client side of things we are using both TortoiseSVN and AnkhSvn.  TortoiseSVN integrates directly into Explorer and is handy for setting up new projects and handling the tasks at the file system level.  AnkhSvn is an add-on to Visual Studio that integrates Subversion tasks into the right-click menu of Solution Explorer.

Anyways my goal in this post is to help direct anyone who is Googling trying to setup Subversion get going in the right direct.  Ralph Willgos put together a great article on Code Project walking through the steps of getting everything setup so I will not bother rewriting them.  It is a little old and I skipped the steps of setting up IIS and Visual Studio 2003, but the rest of the steps apply.   I will caution you on a couple things.  First make sure you are using the 2.0.x version of Apache, not 2.2.x and not 1.x.  From my understanding and experience Subversion will only work with the 2.0.x version.  The other thing I will caution you on is to not use the download links that Ralph provides.  They have become out of date as newer versions have been released.  I ran into very cryptic error messages when I had different versions of Subversion and TortoiseSVN trying to talk to each other and this caused several headaches.  To get the files simply go to the links that I have provided and grab the latest versions.

That’s about it.  Feel free to drop me a line if you get stuck with Subversion and I will try to help you out.  Also, I’d like to read what everyone else has to say about source control in general and what they think about specific products so feel free to post a comment with your experiences.  I’m also running a continuous integration server for our project, but I will go into that in a later post.

 

Sunday, 17 June 2007 05:00:00 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback - Save to del.icio.us - Digg This! - Follow me on Twitter
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# Wednesday, 13 June 2007
Well I’ve definitely by slacking on my blog posts and I’m sure my frequent visitors have been a little disappointed in me. I have managed to get a new style to the site up and I am still trying to get all the content migrated over.
It’s been a chaotic few months for me as I unfortunately have been forced onto a new career path. Professional Edge closed its doors recently due to what I have been told was a large gap in the sales pipeline. I really enjoyed being a consultant there and was disappointed to leave behind the environment and the individuals I worked with. The sudden change has forced me back into the cooperate environment which strangely enough I swore I would never go back to.
Apparently the job market right now it very hot for .NET developers as I had several offers for development positions. The one thing I did notice from talking with potential employers is that there are definitely what I would consider a lot of bad practices going on. This includes things ranging from not using source control, to poor architecture (or none at all), to even the production database being the same as the test database.
Anyways, while I feel out the cooperate environment in my new job I have also partnered with two other former Professional Edge employees to work on a project that we feel there is a business need for so I’ve been putting in some long days lately and probably will be for a while.
On completely another matter, and to keep this blog post useful, I wanted to post the links to the three podcasts that I make a point of listening to every week. I guarantee that  you would benefit from listening to them as well. 
The first one is Hanselminutes by Scott Hanselman. Scott’s podcast is excellent and covers a wide range of technology topics. He normally covers something related to Microsoft development, but sometimes like today, he talks about the latest tech items that are out, such as Microsoft Surface. The best thing about Scott is that when listening to his podcast you feel like you’ve sat down with a friend to discuss technology over a beer. (Scott, I’d love to buy you a beer sometime.)
The second one is .Net Rocks by Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin. Richard and Carl do a great job of pulling in the top .Net people to interview and do a great job exploring two different topics in two shows each week. If you’re not listening to this one then I don’t know how you can call yourself a .Net developer. 
The last one is RunAs Radio with Richard Campbell and Greg Hughes. Whereas this podcast doesn’t cover .Net it does cover a lot of technologies, both hardware and software that you’ll be interacting with and integrating with as a developer. Today’s podcast was on the latest version of IIS which every ASP.Net developer will be working with in the future.
 Listen to these podcasts! They will keep you informed of what is going on in the .NET community and in technology in general. They all add up to about three hours a week so I normally have plenty of time to listen to them while I am exercising. Just to reiterate you are a fool if you are not listening to these podcasts. They are a fast and easy way to try and stay up to date on what is out there and what you should be investigating further. Technology is changing so rapidly that it is impossible to know what is all out there, let alone learn it all, so I find that listening to these allows me to found out what is there and filter out what I want to explore further.
That’s about it for now. I wish all my former coworkers and friends from Professional Edge the best of luck in whatever they end up doing. As for everyone else, drop me a line if you want to contract out some development work to me.
Wednesday, 13 June 2007 06:00:00 (Central Daylight Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0] - Trackback - Save to del.icio.us - Digg This! - Follow me on Twitter
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