Leadership musings and hackery from the Perl generation...
A few years ago the Gmail team began experimenting with the concept of interactive extensions to email messages, with the release of Gmail Actions (now called Gmail Email Markup). These simple additions to your HTML email allow developers to add call-to-action type links to your emails, without customers even needing to open your email.
One of the first things you figure out when working with Git is that like other source control providers, you want an easy way to exclude files from ending up on your source control to save yourself uploading items such as binaries and local user files (here’s looking at you Resharper!). By adding a .gitignore file to your repository you easily make this possible (if you’re using Windows, feel free to take a look at my post on creating these files successfully in Windows). The problem you have next is when you add a gitignore rule that’s a little too aggressive and your new project files fail to be picked up by Git, but you’re not quite sure which rule is the cause – this post shows you how you can troubleshoot these issues.
Depending on who you talk to, one of the coolest parts of the new Windows Phone OS coming to devices in the next few months is the ability to run Android apps. Yes, you heard me correctly: you will be able to run Android apps on your Windows Phone 10 device. With the preview releases coming out on a regular basis lately it’s good to see we’re getting a little bit closer to having this ability in everyone’s hands soon, but in the meantime the question really is: how do I get to try this now?
So you’ve got your own personal Git use dialled in, you’ve got a server environment configured with commits flying into your project like crazy, now you’re ready to start leveraging the power of Git with others. New workflows exist for distributed version control systems that offer big gains in terms of developer workflow, interaction, quality assurance and overall delivery process. Let’s take a look at one of them – GitFlow, so we can turn your team’s Git usage up to 11.
So you’ve got got your source code into Git, you’ve learned how to work with your repository in a basic fashion and you’ve pushed it onto another server for safe storage. There are a few more tricks to using Git that will make the journey easier and are worth looking at before continuing. Although you’ll become more confortable with Git’s approach to source control over time knowing that the following features exist and how to use them will save you a lot later.
Centralised Version Control (VCS) providers like TFS and SVN always rely on a central server to store and maintain your project’s source control assets. While Git is an example “distributed” version control (DVCS) it is still most commonly used with developers relying on a central store for everyone to push and pull commits to and from. There are a number of options are your disposal so let’s take a look.
Few generations get to see as many epic battles for mindshare as our recent generations – in the 80’s it was VHS and Betamax and this decade we’ve seen Git and Mercurial duking it out. Developers have voted with their commits, and I’m pretty sure Git won the war. When setting our to use Git there are lots of basic tutorials, but none that approach it from a zero-to-hero in a team environment. In this blog series I am going to trying to set out to change all that by walking you through the steps from working in a non-Git source control environment to using DVCS with other people.
I’ve been lucky enough to get my hands on a Lenovo ThinkPad X240 test device for a review. Lenovo has been making a number of changes to their line of business notebooks recently, and I wanted to get in and get my hands on one to check it out, as a developer first and foremost and a ThinkPad zealot second. The changes made to the new line of devices are numerous – some changes awesome and innovative, while others leave you pondering the overall direction. Will I be buying one? Read on the find out.
Sometimes your ASP.Net sites crash or hang, and you have no idea why. No exceptions, no event logs. This leaves you a little light on places to start your debug investigation journey. Microsoft Developers who live a little closer to the metal (i.e. non web developers) will know of tools like WinDbg, but for web developers these tools can seem a little scary/low level. This post is aimed at allowing you to get a closer view on your ASP.Net website at the time of a failure, without any of complexity of learning WinDbg on your own.
In years past building Visual Studio Extensions have often been considered the realm of the big boys. Staff working at Jetbrains or the Microsoft employees of the world. Last year I saw a talk given by Mads Kristensen aimed at taking away some of this stigma and showing how easy the guys at Microsoft have tried to make it for developers like you and me to just up and write extensions. I’ve been wanting to build one ever since, but haven’t had a good enough excuse to jump right in – until now. Here follows the creation of “OnCheckin Web.config Transformer”.