brownsblogging

I have a lot of software projects at home that I'm working on for personal or professional reasons.  Continuous Integration is a well known and love tool for developers.  I've rolled my own CI solutions in the past and moved to CrusieControl.NET several years ago.  CCNET is great, but it's not fun to setup and configure - lots and lots of xml and xslt.

I've been playing with JetBrains TeamCity for the last several works and I'm very impressed.  Not only is it's much easier to use (no XML), but it to is free (for me) to use (more on that below).  I was looking for a better home solution, but I was also researching for a better solution for my employer.  We have a very large codebase that takes more than 30 minutes to build.  We have more than 30 developers in 3 states making frequent commits.  Our current CCNET server is queued up with builds all day.  As soon as one finishes (even if it's a failed build) another is waiting in the queue and it immediately triggers the build again.  The quick feedback loop for an automated build is drastically reduced.  It's not uncommon for a build to be broken at the beginning of the day, but the build to not go red until well have the majority of developers have left for the day.

TeamCity also has a "Build Grid" concept that allows you to scale builds out to many physical machines (Build Agents).  I believe this feature can be easily be used to scaled the different modules of the build out to multiple physical machines asynchronously.  TeamCity also has a "Pre-tested commit" feature, I'm very excited about this one.  This allows you to execute a build on the change set being committed before the commit is actually finalized.  This feature will definitely keep developers vested in the build's health.

TeamCity has a nice web console - here are a few screenshots...

Projects View:

Projects and Build Configurations Administration:

Version Control System Roots:

It supports most major version control systems, build tools (Ant, NAnt, MSBuild, Visual Build Pro, FinalBuilder, etc.)

Possibly the best feature is TeamCity's licensing, which is OpenSource and home-use friendly.  The professional server ships with 3 free build agents, 20 user accounts, and 20 build configurations. For me, that means I can have TeamCity use the Dell PowerEdge I have as a build agent, I can have up to 20 users in the system, and I can have it manage up to 20 builds for me.  That's extremely generous in my opinion.  I'm able to use TeamCity at home for free.

That's smart business because I'm going to be pushing my employer to give them a good chunk of money.  If they wouldn't have provided this product to me in this manner, I probably never would have taken the time to fall in love with it.

I've had to build one of these a few times over the years.  If you want a very quick and dirty dropdown of US states in an ASP.NET app, here is the code

   1: <asp:DropDownList runat="server" ID="StatesList">

   2:     <asp:ListItem Value="AL" Text="Alabama"></asp:ListItem>

   3:     <asp:ListItem Value="AK" Text="Alaska"></asp:ListItem>

   4:     <asp:ListItem Value="AZ" Text="Arizona"></asp:ListItem>

   5:     <asp:ListItem Value="AR" Text="Arkansas"></asp:ListItem>

   6:     <asp:ListItem Value="CA" Text="California"></asp:ListItem>

   7:     <asp:ListItem Value="CO" Text="Colorado"></asp:ListItem>

   8:     <asp:ListItem Value="CT" Text="Connecticut"></asp:ListItem>

   9:     <asp:ListItem Value="DE" Text="Delaware"></asp:ListItem>

  10:     <asp:ListItem Value="DC" Text="Dist of Columbia"></asp:ListItem>

  11:     <asp:ListItem Value="FL" Text="Florida"></asp:ListItem>

  12:     <asp:ListItem Value="GA" Text="Georgia"></asp:ListItem>

  13:     <asp:ListItem Value="HI" Text="Hawaii"></asp:ListItem>

  14:     <asp:ListItem Value="ID" Text="Idaho"></asp:ListItem>

  15:     <asp:ListItem Value="IL" Text="Illinois"></asp:ListItem>

  16:     <asp:ListItem Value="IN" Text="Indiana"></asp:ListItem>

  17:     <asp:ListItem Value="IA" Text="Iowa"></asp:ListItem>

  18:     <asp:ListItem Value="KS" Text="Kansas"></asp:ListItem>

  19:     <asp:ListItem Value="KY" Text="Kentucky"></asp:ListItem>

  20:     <asp:ListItem Value="LA" Text="Louisiana"></asp:ListItem>

  21:     <asp:ListItem Value="ME" Text="Maine"></asp:ListItem>

  22:     <asp:ListItem Value="MD" Text="Maryland"></asp:ListItem>

  23:     <asp:ListItem Value="MA" Text="Massachusetts"></asp:ListItem>

  24:     <asp:ListItem Value="MI" Text="Michigan"></asp:ListItem>

  25:     <asp:ListItem Value="MN" Text="Minnesota"></asp:ListItem>

  26:     <asp:ListItem Value="MS" Text="Mississippi"></asp:ListItem>

  27:     <asp:ListItem Value="MO" Text="Missouri"></asp:ListItem>

  28:     <asp:ListItem Value="MT" Text="Montana"></asp:ListItem>

  29:     <asp:ListItem Value="NE" Text="Nebraska"></asp:ListItem>

  30:     <asp:ListItem Value="NV" Text="Nevada"></asp:ListItem>

  31:     <asp:ListItem Value="NH" Text="New Hampshire"></asp:ListItem>

  32:     <asp:ListItem Value="NJ" Text="New Jersey"></asp:ListItem>

  33:     <asp:ListItem Value="NM" Text="New Mexico"></asp:ListItem>

  34:     <asp:ListItem Value="NY" Text="New York"></asp:ListItem>

  35:     <asp:ListItem Value="NC" Text="North Carolina"></asp:ListItem>

  36:     <asp:ListItem Value="ND" Text="North Dakota"></asp:ListItem>

  37:     <asp:ListItem Value="OH" Text="Ohio"></asp:ListItem>

  38:     <asp:ListItem Value="OK" Text="Oklahoma"></asp:ListItem>

  39:     <asp:ListItem Value="OR" Text="Oregon"></asp:ListItem>

  40:     <asp:ListItem Value="PA" Text="Pennsylvania"></asp:ListItem>

  41:     <asp:ListItem Value="RI" Text="Rhode Island"></asp:ListItem>

  42:     <asp:ListItem Value="SC" Text="South Carolina"></asp:ListItem>

  43:     <asp:ListItem Value="SD" Text="South Dakota"></asp:ListItem>

  44:     <asp:ListItem Value="TN" Text="Tennessee"></asp:ListItem>

  45:     <asp:ListItem Value="TX" Text="Texas"></asp:ListItem>

  46:     <asp:ListItem Value="UT" Text="Utah"></asp:ListItem>

  47:     <asp:ListItem Value="VT" Text="Vermont"></asp:ListItem>

  48:     <asp:ListItem Value="VA" Text="Virginia"></asp:ListItem>

  49:     <asp:ListItem Value="WA" Text="Washington"></asp:ListItem>

  50:     <asp:ListItem Value="WV" Text="West Virginia"></asp:ListItem>

  51:     <asp:ListItem Value="WI" Text="Wisconsin"></asp:ListItem>

  52:     <asp:ListItem Value="WY" Text="Wyoming"></asp:ListItem>

  53: </asp:DropDownList>

From time to time I have to break out skills from my past.  I needed to solve a few problems today that required a VBS script and a couple of batch scripts.  It took me longer than I care to admit to remember how to do this.

So, this post is a reminder for my future self.

Here's how to set a local variable in DOS and use them, as well as how to use a system environment variable (WinDir):

   1: SET INTERNAL_ROOT_PATH=D:\foo\trunk

   2:  

   3: svn.exe update %INTERNAL_ROOT_PATH%

   4: %WinDir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\msbuild.exe %INTERNAL_ROOT_PATH%\Internal.sln /Property:Config=Release

Here is how to load an XML file into XML DOM and parse it using MSXML2 and VBScript.  This is also an example of how to Echo messages to the shell and process arguments

   1:  

   2:     path = WScript.Arguments(0)

   3:     root = WScript.Arguments(1)

   4:     

   5:     gacpath = "D:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 8\SDK\v2.0\Bin\gacutil.exe"

   6:  

   7:     If WScript.Arguments.Count = 3 Then

   8:         gacpath = WScript.Arguments(2)

   9:     End If

  10:     

  11:     WScript.Echo WScript.Arguments.Count

  12:     WScript.Echo "Parsing LibraryManifest: " & path

  13:  

  14:     Set xml = CreateObject("MSXML2.DOMDocument")

  15:     With xml

  16:         .async = False 

  17:         .validateOnParse = False 

  18:         .preserveWhiteSpace = True

  19:         .resolveExternals = False 

  20:     End With

  21:     result = xml.load(path)

  22:  

  23:     Set moduleNodes = xml.selectNodes("//LibraryManifest/Module")

  24:  

  25:     If Not moduleNodes Is Nothing Then

  26:  

  27:         For Each moduleNode in moduleNodes

  28:             

  29:             Set assemblyNodes = moduleNode.selectNodes("Assembly")

  30:             

  31:             For Each assemblyNode in assemblyNodes

  32:             

  33:                 For Each attribute in assemblyNode.Attributes

  34:                     

  35:                     If attribute.Name = "Name" Then

  36:  

  37:                         file = root & "\" & attribute.Text

  38:  

  39:                         'WScript.Echo "file: " & file

  40:  

  41:                         Set shell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

  42:                         gacutil = gacpath & " -uf " & attribute.Text

  43:                         Set out = shell.Exec(gacutil)

  44:  

  45:                         Do While Not out.StdOut.AtEndOfStream

  46:                             WScript.Echo out.StdOut.ReadLine()

  47:                         Loop    

  48:  

  49:                         Set shell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

  50:                         gacutil = gacpath & " -if " & file

  51:  

  52:                         Set out = shell.Exec(gacutil)

  53:  

  54:                         Do While Not out.StdOut.AtEndOfStream

  55:                             WScript.Echo out.StdOut.ReadLine()

  56:                         Loop    

  57:  

  58:                         Set shell = Nothing

  59:                         Set out = Nothing

  60:  

  61:                     End If

  62:                 Next

  63:             Next

  64:         Next

  65:     End If

  66:     

Two product efforts at Microsoft have spun up this year and both are new implementations of very old ideas:

1. ASP.NET MVC Framework - Microsoft's upcoming implementation of a Model View Controller architecture for their web application platform.  MVC has been around for a long time on other development platforms, but only recently has there been a push in the .NET community demanding for this.
   
2. ADO.NET Entity Framework - Microsoft's next rev of data access technology (ADO.NET) contains a lot of new ways to work with data.  EF is their implementation of an Object-Relational Mapping framework.  Again, OR Mapping has been around for a very long time on other development platforms such as Java, but only recently has there been a push in the .NET community asking for this.

My personal opinion is the recent increase in the popularity of Agile development methods has had a large part in driving out these products from Microsoft.  Agile development tends to accentuates everything in a development ecosystem - the good and the bad.  Agile teams using the .NET platform have been feeling a lot of pain in certain areas - namely, data access and web app development.  Writing automated-test-friendly code using these parts of the framework has been a nightmare for me personally, and I know there's scores of people that feel the same way.

To be fair, there's a large part of the .NET community that just doesn't care about any of this.  By and large, they don't care about Agile and they don't care about automated test friendliness and they think the current implementations of ASP.NET and ADO.NET are just fine.  I'm not going to argue with any of that because those people are in the best position to know what's best for them.  However, there are people out there that loudly crying for change, and I'm one of them (though most of my crying is done in my own head).

What's really interesting I think is to watch how the MVC team has went about this charge in comparison to the EF team.  I pay a lot more attention to the MVC stuff just because I've been a long time reader of Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, and Rob Conery (the 3 main guys Microsoft hired to make lead the MVC effort).  If you read through these guy's blog's and the content they're producing to support this product, their "this is for a certain set of people with a certain set of concerns that doesn't apply to everyone and we want this product to delight those people" attitude is obvious, which is very refreshing.  Scott posted some very cool video's of his talks on MVC at Mix this year.  This refreshing attitude shines thoroughly repeatedly in these talks.

Dan Simmons from the Entity Framework team posted a break down of the data access technologies in ADO.NET and compares and contrasts them for different types of jobs.  As expected, the Agile/TDD zealots are pounding on him (i.e. Jeremy Miller and the CodeBetter crew).  The zealots don't like the EF team's model and they take every opportunity to remind them of that.  The EF team seems view these folks and their viewpoints as a small subset of the community.  They seem to be applying the 80/20 rule, and they seem to think that if only 20% of the community is pissed, then that's pretty good.

What I think Dan is missing here, unlike the MVC team, this 20% of people that are displeased with their model, is the majority of people that care about this stuff.  The other 80% are the people that don't care about Agile and don't care about automated-test-friendliness.  They are the people that are more than happy cranking out dataset based app after dataset based app.  I would argue, they are the definitely NOT the people that are creating conceptual data models for reuse across their domain (the EF's big selling point).  I think the EF team needs to watch the MVC team and start listening to the zealots.  Those zealots are your customer.

My prediction:

1. ASP.NET MVC Framework:  Huge Success
   
2. ADO.NET Entity Framework:  Huge Failure

I would love to be wrong about #2.  #1 seems to already be in the bag :)

Ya know the class Windows XP open file dialog?  This thing...

That left hand nav bar looks so interesting, but it's not.  Well, it might be interesting for people who frequently open files from the Desktop without double-clicking them from there.  I rarely, if ever, do that.  However, I would love to be able to create my own entries in that left hand nav area.  There's a short list of about 5 locations that I FREQUENTLY open files from that need to be located deep in some folder structure of my own creation.

I wrote about TeraCopy and Direct Folders from Code Sector a few days ago, and today I was able to explore Direct Folders a bit more and I stumbled upon quite a gem.  Direct Folders lets you customize the open file dialog in exactly this manner.

This...

Produces this...

I couldn't be more thrilled about this freature.  Why Microsoft doesn't delivery native features like this with Windows, I don't know.

I love utility software.  I love software vendors like Moon Software, that produce targeted utility software like Password Agent and Backup Magic.  I was reading Jon Galloway's blog the other day and found his write up about TeraCopy from Code Sector.  TeraCopy has some nice features beyond what Windows gives you, such as restartable copies, but it also make Vista tolerable when copying files.  It's a must have for Vista users or anyone that like RoboCopy.

While snooping around Code Sector's site, I found DirectFolders.  I'm downloading it now, so I can't speak to it personally, but it like a very handy Windows Shell extensions that gives you a lot of nice quick-find capabilities for commonly used directories on your file system.  Here's a short screencast that shows off what it does.  This looks enormously useful.

These two utilities look like they might make my short list of utility software along with SlickRun and ClipPath.

With the exception of the developer platform and tooling products, I've been thoroughly confused with Microsoft's product strategy for a couple of years now.  They've been acquiring companies at a fair steady rate, but the acquisitions have seemed fairly random.

In March of 2005 Microsoft acquired Groove Networks.  This is where Microsoft picked up Ray Ozzie - the braintrust of Groove.  Ray is now Microsoft's CTO

Microsoft launched its Windows Live in November of 2005.  It was prettier than MSN and very startup-y in it's branding, but I believe it quickly just got thought of as a re-skinning of MSN.

At roughly the same time Microsoft acquired FolderShare and appeared to slowly rebrand it as another Windows Live* service, but it remained more or less the exact same technology the acquired.

In Office 2007 Microsoft rolls up Office Groove.  I've never taken the time to really look at this product, but my assumption has always been that's its basically the old Groove product but rebranded as Office and Sharepoint-enabled.

There's was a lot of buzz yesterday and continuing into today... and now it's all starting to make a lot more sense.  This looks extremely interesting.  Watch this video on Channel 10.  This appears to be FolderShare + Groove + Remote Desktop + ActiveSync.  I'm sure there will be hooks in here for Windows Home Server as well.

This looks very exciting...

I'm trying to build up my arsenal of tools around Vista now that I've committed to it.  My copy of Nero 6, won't install on Vista and to be truthful, I'm not sad.  Recent versions of Nero has turned into bloat-ware.  I never felt good about installing it when I saw what all came with it on top of the basic burning functionality I was looking for.

After a little googling, I stumbled across Astonsoft's DeepBurner.  It's a CD/DVD burner for Windows that supports Vista and they offer a free version.  This reminds me of early versions of Nero - i.e. simple and easy to use.  It allows to create data and audio CD's and DVD's and it also provides the semi rare feature of burning ISO files directly to disc.

I'm pleased with my new alternative to Nero.  Now I'm off to find a copying utility for Vista :)

UPDATE::

On a funny aside, I just noticed that Nero6's .iso file is bigger than Office 2007 Ultimate.  Nero has officially became bloat-ware in my book - 691MB?  Wow