Need a source code control solution?

If you are looking for a source control solution...

You should definately check out and read up on Subversion (SVN), TortoiseSVN and Ankh. Subversion is the version control system. It can run under a windows service, file system type repository or under Apache.

We have it running with Apache on a port other than 80. TortoiseSVN is for windows shell integration. Ankh is for Visual Studio IDE integration. There are articles out there that talk about how to use SVN with SQL server.

SVN uses a different process than VSS. It doesn't really do locking. It's more of an optimistic merging/updating process when needed. The documentation covers in depth how the tool/process works http://svnbook.red-bean.com/

We are successfully, using these products at work. They are far superior to VSS. At home, I use Ankh and TortoiseSVN with an external USB drive for the file repository.

http://subversion.tigris.org/ http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/ http://ankhsvn.tigris.org/

Bryan

Developer Tool: Digital Camera

I have found having a digital camera to be an indespensable and freeing tool. One of the ways I have used the camera is to take a picture of design work done on a whiteboard. We then stick it in OneNote notebook which is shared out for the team.

Taking a picture keeps the process simple. You are constrained if you want to change the design, but it's easy to just do a new drawing on the white board, working off of the existing digital version. I have found this process to be more lightweight and creative than huddling around a monitor and trying to do something with Visio.

And with the resolution of today's camera's, I've been able to pictures of print outs or blue prints at a high enough resolution that they are legible when viewed on the computer.

The other day when we were having difficulty describing a prolbem to a component vendor's tech support, we used the camera to shoot a short ~1 minute video that showed the problem. We uploaded the video to a website where the tech guys could view it and we had our answer the next day. It was way quicker and easier than trying to put together a sample project with a readme to illustrate (if it behave the same for them!) the problem.

To make the process painless, it's important to have a media reader attached or built in to your computer for pulling the images off of the SD, XD card whatever. I have found it's simpler to just work with the media rather than mess with hooking up the camera to USB and going through it.

Vista Sidebar Gadget

I put together a little Vista Sidebar Gadget. Using the information found here and more specifically here, it wasn't difficult to do. The gadget I created is useful for those that follow the Legislative process of the Missouri House of Representatives.

EarthLink Non-Existent DNS redirection

EarthLink,

Your spreading of your new program finally hit the DNS servers that I use on my EarthLink DSL. And at first blush it had all the appearances of browser hi-jacking.

So no matter how you paint it, you may not be technically "browser hi-jacking" but you accomplished the same thing.

http://blogs.earthlink.net/2006/08/handling_dead_domains_1.php

Your blog claims you are doing this to enhance user experience. That's BS and you know it. The real motivation is ad/click revenue.

This feature is no different than when someone hacks a DNS server and repoints a domain.

The only acceptable course of action for EarthLink is to disable this "service" and issue an apology to users.

Are you getting a "removed by HIPS FW" ?

Are you not seeing things you normally would when you surf the web? When you view the html for the page do you see a comment that content was "removed by HIPS FW" ?

The answer is that CA's Firewall product is blocking them. It is configured out of the box to block banner ads. Well, sometimes what it identifies as a banner ad isn't. For instance this one: http://banners.wunderground.com/banner/bigwx_both_cond/language/www/US/MO/Sedalia.gif

To solve this problem, go to CA's Personal Firewall settings. Go to the Privacy group, then configure the Ad/Pop-Up blocker to not block banners.

As another person pointed out, you may also need to check out the Cookie Control advanced settings. I found that in order to get some sites to work properly, I had to allow the private header information to go out.

Extreme Programming: Science or Philosophy?

I am going to build this posting in an iterative fashion. So, don't be surprised if you see it show up again in your feed reader.

What makes something scientific? Provides a way that the hypothesis can be proven false.

Philosophy requires a paradigm shift. Until you are "enlightened" you just won't get it. You can't prove it wrong.

Kent's background and viewpoint.

Ron's background and viewpoint

My experience in spreading the word about XP practices has been primarily one of elightenment. There is a lightbulb that just clicks on when the other party "get's it".

Customer Proxy

When you don't have the customer handy, a good person to represent the customer is the trainer. In my experience, the organizations trainer has been in touch with the needs and practices of the workers. I've repeatedly heard and experienced that the training room is a place where the workers open up with ideas, thoughts and concerns about the software or processes.

Reflector for disassembly

This is a great free tool that let's you analyze, and decompile .Net assemblies in your choice of IL, VB or C#.

There are a number of plug-ins available too. Use Reflector in conjunction with the File Disassembler plug-in for recreating lost source code.

What does TEAM mean to you?

Some people use the word team to say that they work with other people together. For instance in the traditional big shop, the Architect works with the developers and testers. Everyone has their pigeon holed tasks.

In our small team, team means that anyone is capable of doing the job. While I may be responsible for overall direction as team lead, anyone can do all of the tasks. From working to manage the work, the needed documentation/status reports, business analysis, development and testing. This arrangement has been very beneficial for us in terms of integrating new people and coping while people are out a week at a time.

Because everyone can do the work doesn't mean there aren't specialities.  Quite the contrary.  A really good team will be a blend of people with different backgrounds, skills and strengths which complement each other.  A shared vision with a project that has been broken down into achievable goals helps to focus the team on the work.

Another very important aspect of the team is respectful communication and understanding.  Feedback is important. In a functional team the members let each other know when they are not understanding the other persons view or actions as well as when things are going well.  Don't delay the feedback.

XP Code Review

If it's good to do a code review, do it more frequently. This is one of the things that happens when you do pair programming. The code is continuously being reviewed by the pair. However, when you a have a very small team you probably won't have much "promiscuous pairing" going on. Then you can do a daily team code review. It won't take much time because you're only going over today's work not a whole release. Be sure to leave enough time to refactor too!

Spammer's domain name masquerading

It looks like my domain name has been picked up by some spammer's.

My domain name starts with an "early" letter and is nice and short, so it probably caught their attention.

Now, what's happening is that they are forging mail from my domain and submitting it through SMTP servers that aren't doing authentication. So now, I'm getting all sorts of bounced messages.

Seems to me that a couple of things could be done to help alleviate this sort of spamming:

• All SMTP servers should require authentication
• All SMTP servers should only take mail for their domains
• Spam scanners should block messages that weren't submitted through a SMTP server that matches up with the domain name
• Spam scanners should NOT return undeliverable messages, it just chews up more bandwidth.

Huddle 'round the projector

When it comes to doing a code review or project review, nothing beats huddling around the projector! Even with multiple monitors you can't get more than a couple people crowding in to see the material. Since we have a big white board we can just wipe it clean and connect a projector up to one of the computers video lines. Instant big screen code review in the development area! There's still enough open whiteboard to jot notes or mark up what's being displayed. Now if I could just get the big dogs to spring for a smart board!

I think it'd be awesome to pair (or mob program) using a dual or triple projector set up on a wall!

Interfaces are cool

I'm talking about OO interfaces. They came in handy recently when I was working on some code (Java) that launched a web browser as the result of a message that was received. In my test I was primarily concerned with the message I would receive back from that code.

So, the answer for me, was to extract the interface that I needed for the call to the web browser. Then I created a "mock" web browser that didn't do anything. So, when my tests are run the functional code around the call to the web browser is exercised and I don't have a bunch of open web browsers on my system.

You can do something similar if you are wanting to do some processing on the content received from a web page. Actually going out to the internet and pulling information is an expensive operation. Instead you can create a "mock" web browser class that has hard coded the expected web responses.

I've also been working on some C# code that involves communication between applications. By using an interface specification for the communications layer I can swap out the communications layer at will. For testing I'm using a mock object that implements the interface. Now I'm able to experiment with a variety of technologies for implementing the communications layer and I can choose the one that works best. Or I'll be able to choose the one that works best for a given situation. Definately cool stuff.

In summary, interfaces are a useful tool to keep in your bag of TDD tools.

Crystal Reports and TDD

It is my experience that doing TDD (test driven development) could help avoid some pain with Crystal Reports. Suppose that you have a column of floating point numbers that go out to 6 places. You want to display those numbers to the user rounded to 2 places. Then you are going to display the sum of the numbers displayed. This is where the fun comes in. It was our experience that the sum being displayed is the sum of the unrounded numbers that was then rounded to 2 places. This is entirely different than rounding first and then summing.

So what is the answer? The answer is in the pink book. TDD of the presentation layer is tough. Keep the presentation layer thin. TDD the business logic that puts together the numbers that will be displayed, include the rounding and summing. Pass a dataset or multiple datasets with the data to your Crystal Report. Now your presentation layer is thin and doesn't have to know anything about where the data came from. (No redirecting of databases at run time!)

My XP Team's progress

A recent topic of discussion in the XP2E yahoo group got me thinking a little bit about the progress our team has made in adopting XP, some of the issues we're encountering and where we're going.

We've read the XP2E book as a team and are following on with the XP Installed book. The XP2E book helped us with a lot of the theory and we started down the road together. With the Installed book we're picking up some more "how to do it" material.

• We've physically opened up our area and are enjoying the improved communication.
• We're pairing up most of the time. We notice when we don't (more errors and slower).
• We're holding each other accountable to standards.
• We are still building our TDD, program by intention skills.
• We are getting a lot more user involvement, but not co-located.
• We are having few (near zero) minor defects found in production.

• We're still getting a handle on stories and points.
• We're working out issues with testing and data bound controls.
• We're having problems with integration - we need to install a CI server.
• We're looking to swap out VSS for SubVersion.
• We are going to work on picking up design patterns soon.

And as always, how do I test this object that is generated by the ORM tool and expects to see a database on the back end?

This week we moved 3 releases (different projects) to production. All of them sailed through testing with no defects. We have 1 more system pending release and 2 more in testing. Overall, a pretty good feeling.

The weekly planning and keeping focus on those goals is an extremely important thing for our team. The morning stand up helps us to keep our focus.

NUnit - ExpectedException with Custom Exception

While the NUnit docs give a good example of how to test for system exception types, it leaves you hanging on how to capture the custom exceptions that you are throwing. For instance, you might do something like:

throw new Exception("SSN should be formatted 123456789");

How do you set up your test attributes for this exception?

In VB:

<Test(), ExpectedException(GetType(Exception), "SSN should be formatted 123456789")>
        Public Sub ValidateSSNFormat()
        ' code that will cause the routine to throw the expected exception

In C#:

[Test]
[ExpectedException(typeof(Exception),"SSN should be formatted 123456789")]
public void ValidateSSNFormat()
// code that will cause the routine to throw the expected exception

DIY PVC Flute

Have you been thinking about learning to play flute but the cost of purchasing a flute has been holding you back. Well if you're a do-it-yourselfer check out Mark Shep's website and book. Following Mark's instructions I was able to build a PVC flute in no time at all. I've been having some fun playing with it. Next week I'll build one from CPVC.

RSS Bandit

Well, after the issues I had with NewsGator I explored some other news aggregators. I used Attensa for a while now and have been fairly happy with it. However, it is tied to a single machine. Then a recent update broke it and after several attempts at figuring it out and getting it going again, it was just easiest to drop it. I tried the NewsMonster aggregator that works (s'posedly) with FireFox but no go. It wouldn't install and work correctly. I did check out some of the RSS readers on www.codeproject.com but had some issues with one that appealed to me. So, now I'm using RSS Bandit. Having it not tied in to Outlook has actually been a good thing. It has a handy configurable synch feature. I used it to save settings/state to a flash drive. Then when I got home, I installed RSS Bandit on the home machine and downloaded from the flash drive. RSS Bandit went out to the web and pulled the content. I was good to go. Ironically, I should be able to synch with NewsGator OnLine too. Since I've already paid for that, I might give it a go.

MS Word 2000 and Visual Studio 2003 Interop

The other day a friend of mine was asking me about reading content from a Word document. To me, this was an interesting question. I'd previously been exposed to Excel Interop and was somewhat intrigued by his problem.

After a quick search of the web I came across numerous solutions on how to write to a Word document but nothing on reading from one.

So, I put together a small VS2003 solution in VB with some NUnit 2.2.2 tests as a "spike" solution. I am making available the solution at http://www.dbbear.com/WordInterop.zip for a limited time? (maybe) I hope that other's might find the simple class and unit tests handy.

Note: updated based on feedback. Better clean up with finally block.

NewsGator sucks

Right now I am harboring a lot of ill will towards the Newsgator folks. I was one of those that bought the Outlook version early on. You know the one that you'll never have to update again? Well, it didn't take 'em long to figure out that wasn't going to work so they switched their business model to where the Outlook version is part of the business package. But hey, we'll give the existing users a "free" upgrade to the 2.5 version and 2 years of service. After that though you have to pay every year. In a bit of a revolt? many people were sounding off with, whatever, I'll just keeping using this version with out all of the other new features. I simply don't need them. That's the camp I fall in to. Well the folks at NewsGator put their thinking camps on and figured out that they could turn off service to 2.0 clients.

The online synchronization support for NewsGator Outlook edition 2.0 will be switched off on Tuesday, November 8, at approximately 5pm MST.

If you are using Outlook edition 2.0 in synchronized mode, you will need to upgrade to Outlook edition 2.5, which has greatly enhanced synchronization capabilities.

Existing 2.0 customers can get a free upgrade to 2.5, along with a free 2-year premium NewsGator Online subscription, by following these instructions.

But, hey, what am I complaining about, they gave me a whole 34 or so hours notice from the date/time on the email to turning the service off. To frustrate me even further the install process nuked all of my default folder settings for the feeds I'm subscribed too. Nice huh? Then, they proceeded to download the ENTIRE CONTENTS of ALL the feeds. Only about 800 items to wade through. GRRRRR. And guess what else, they didn't fix the post to Blogger bug. I'll have to reinstall that. IS THIS THE FUTURE OF WEB SERVICES? You thought Microsoft had a monopoly with Office, etc. At least they can't turn off your Office 97 installation.

I'll definitely be looking around for a different service.

Update: Now neither of my Outlook Edition machines are synching. Lovely.

Update 2: After having the synch fail, ALL of my specified folder settings have been lost AGAIN.

Update 3: After 3 days, I got an email back from NG tech support. They pointed me to "Greg's" blog where he says it's just the synching which will quit working. One of the main reasons people bought the lifetime Outlook version.

My favorite part of the response: "If you still have 2.5 installed can you describe the problems which you have?" I thought I had outlined them pretty well here. But as of this moment, I don't have NewsGator installed.

NewsGator really screwed up on this whole deal. They should have just sucked it up and let the 2.0 folks continue on with what they have. And then try and entice them to switch to one of the newer plans with better features and service. Depending on what we see in OutLook 12 or Windows Vista RSS, the need for NewsGator Outlook edition will be obviated. The NG WebEdition and Synch Service is where they will be making money down the road. That's why they had to figure out a way to pull the plug on the existing lifetimers. It all smacks of the PayPal "free now and free forever"