I have recently had a couple of interesting discussions with a different people on twitter and “the real world” about the use of third party build dependencies such as unit testing frameworks, database versioning tools and other command line executables in your build. The topic of these discussions has been about where these dependencies should be located, inside your project, or installed on your build server.

While writing list navigation and search features in websites today there is a constant need to find/replace and play with query string elements, so that you can easily manipulate these mystical items while you’re carrying them around in your website’s URLs. I have a few little methods I’ve used over the years and carry with me project to project, and this post is putting them on the record for easy access later.

Last year I wrote a post on how to setup an ASP.Net HttpModule that detects and redirects mobile devices so that you can show a different version of your site to users browsing your site using whatever hot new mobile device is going around. Since then the lay of the land has changed a bit, so i thought it was time to reassess the solution i recommended and offer you a new updated one for 2011. The great thing about this solution is it’s a lot more future proof, so hopefully i won’t have to write another blog post next year.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.