March 7, 2011
Automation
Last week i had the awesome honour of being at a tech talk on Continuous Delivery by “the great” Martin Fowler, Neal Ford and Evan Bottcher, put on by Thoughtworks here in Sydney. I have spent the last two years of my life evangelizing on the benefits of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment to anyone who would hear me all on my own terms and entirely self taught in the dark. I have selected snippets and ideas from other peoples documented ways on how they achieve Continuous Deployment, but the experience of listening to pioneers in this space was a truly awesome experience.
February 22, 2011
Automation
These days IIS has so many bells and whistles installed that it can be hard to find the settings panel that does what you want it to do (or if you’re an IIS 5/6 guy like me you may just get lost in general some times). The one thing that is lacking as a feature in IIS is log file recycling. If you manage an IIS installation of any decent size, you’ll know first hand how quickly log files can fill up a server’s hard disk, and bring it to its knees if not managed properly – how do i take care of this?
February 14, 2011
Automation
SQL Express is pretty awesome as a light weight database server, and when Microsoft released it using the same database engine as the full version they did the world a huge favour. I have seen SQL Express in use on a lot of Virtual Private Servers & development boxes, but in most cases users don’t backup their databases regularly because of the missing scheduled jobs functionality that doesn’t ship in the Express version of Microsoft SQL Server. Like most limitations there is an easy way around this.
February 12, 2011
Automation
Test Driven Development, Behaviour Driven Development, Extreme Programming and many other new-age hippy development methodologies have spread through the development world like wild fire. I believe there is room for one more in the shape of Build Driven Deployment/Automated Deployment - A new source of confidence in the development world. Time to go out and spread the word.
January 27, 2011
InTheKnow
So today marks another day in my Windows Phone 7 development journey: the release of “InTheKnow – Google Analytics on the go!” This app allows you to view your website’s traffic stats anywhere with mobile data coverage or Wi-Fi connection in an easy to read and digest form. No longer do you need to be near a PC to check how that last blog post was received or daily product special is fairing.
January 21, 2011
.Net 4
Some people love them, others absolutely hate them, but if you ask me one of the coolest features in ASP.Net MVC is the Data Annotations that you use to decorate your ASP.Net MVC classes for validation. But one of the coolest things that came along in .Net 4.0 was support for this across the whole framework – even outside of ASP.Net MVC!
January 20, 2011
ASP.Net
Having forms with checkboxes that require users to check them to be valid is a pretty common phenomenon on the internet today, however when thinking about this in terms of ASP.Net MVC it can not always be obvious what the best approach to take is. Thankfully the ASP.Net MVC team gave us the support to create a really simple solution when they added inheritable validation classes to the framework.
January 18, 2011
Mobile devices
So after submitting applications a few times for both myself and a few friends, i have learnt a few a few do’s and don’ts that can make the difference between it taking 2 weeks to get your application in the Windows Phone 7 marketplace, and only a day or two including registration. With the help of the tips below, hopefully i can help some of you avoid any of the frustrations that can come from starting development on a new platform.
January 17, 2011
ASP.Net
Last year i started on a project that allows easy tracking of page views, events and transactions to your Google Analytics account without using JavaScript or a Browser simply using a .Net wrapper. This became GaDotNet. Over the Past 6 months i have had well over 2,000 downloads and many thank you emails so obviously people are finding a use for my code – this can only be a good thing. Now it is time for the project to grow up – so I've moved it to a remotely hosted source repository – CodePlex.
January 10, 2011
Silverlight
Over the past few weeks i have spent a fair bit of time creating Silverlight charts for a few Windows Phone apps I've been writing. The Silverlight charting toolkit’s documentation for advanced scenarios is pretty sparse to say the least. My experience in finding information on working with the DateTimeAxis that you can use on these charts was nothing short of frustrating. This post’s purpose is to hopefully serve to better educate others in my situation.