This weekend I will be doing some server maintenance, since the primary harddrive in the blog sounds like an old Yugo. I'm going to move the blog to a secondary machine so it stays up, but most of my other sites will not be available while I do the swap. Sorry for any inconvenience.

Update : things didn't go as planned. Site was down since this morning. The blog should be back up now (new hd), with the rest to follow..

Just finished doing all the installs, and confirming everything works. The side by side install was easy, painless, and didn't break any 1.1 apps in my smokescreen testing. If your interested, I took notes here. Nothing of interest really, more rambling with myself. I did submit a bug for the doubleclick issue. I was expecting at least some pain, but didn't really feel any. Based on this post by Rob Caron, and reading the suggested doc I will have to repair vs.net 2003 when I uninstall beta2. No biggie, and in a sick way I'd rather see it remove more then it should then not enough :)

I was a bit upset with the ctp install. Although just as smooth, be warned that doing an upgrade will implicitly uninstall your sql 2000 tools along with the database itself, and not bring import any of your server groups. I would even have been happy with a warning about losing the groups, although I should have assumed I'd lose the tools. Other then that, the install seems fine, and I have been able to hook the new tools up to a couple 2k databases here. I guess trial by fire with the sql tools.

Spring is here, and boy am I glad. This was one of the coldest winters I can remember, so its a very welcome change to be in springtime. Of course, being spring, my posting has cut down a bit. I plan to change this in the next week or so. Here are some of the things coming up..

• REST : I've been reading about REST, and I'm interested. Although I'm not convinced, I think REST can offer some interesting benefits over a typical SOAP SOA implementation.
• Ruby : Dynamic typing, blocks, interators, this is one very interesting language. Ordered the book, and plowing through learning this hot little language. Can't wait to get to RAILS.
• delicious.net. : My little wrapper over del.icio.us. Check it out in action on the right bar of the blog home. I need to package it up and release some beta bits and source this week. Also need to host it somewhere (maybe here), anyone know any good svn open source repo's with other .net projects?
• Side by side : With 27 minutes left in my beta2 download, my side by side stories should start tonight.
• I'm sure ill find more to rant about.

I've wished for refactoring in vb.net for a long time. Currently, there aren't any "top tier" options for vb.net, even though the c# guys have a few. I've tried a few of the other offerings out there, and never really found anything that gave me that wow feeling. With vs.net 2005 coming, though, it looks like us vb.net developers will be well taken care of, even if you don't want to purchase some additional addons.

This morning I saw over on AddressOf that Refactor! has a public beta for vs.net 2005 available now. Not only that, but the beta is of a set of community bits that will be free from Developer Express. Fantastic! I think its awesome that Developer Express stepped up to the plate and is offering a community version, since MS cut most of the refactoring out of the base product.

There will be some other options too. Not only will there be a professional version of Refactor! with many more refactorings, but jetbrain's Resharper 2.0 will support vb.net too. Stay tuned as I'm sure I will be reviewing both products in time, as hopefully we can sway management into purchasing some refactoring tools later this year.

From the simplegeek, SaveOurBluths is a site dedicated to saving the Fox show Arrested Development. Arrested Development is a fantastically funny show about a family that's even more dysfunction then your own. If you haven't seen it yet, you should really check it out, its excellent. Of course with Family Guy and American Dad starting on May 1st too, Fox won't have a shortage of programming, but really, can't we have both our Family Guy and Arrested Development? Either case, as SaveOurBluths suggests I'll be sending letters, and telling people how much I like the show (hmm, isn't that what this post does? :)

If you haven't looked outside lately, vs.net 2005 beta 2 was released over the weekend. I've been telling myself that B2 was the time to get serious about 2.0, but now I'm feeling a bit trigger shy to go side by side. Of course VPC is nice, but I think the only way I'll really exercise the IDE is to put it right in front of my face. Anyone tried going side by side with b2 yet?

Was looking around what going on with googlemaps in delicious real quick this fine morning, and saw a link that caught my eye. Buzztracker, which graphicly tracks buzz around the globe. I saw an early beta of this around the holidays, and couldn't wait for CraigMod to finish it up. As usual, excellent work. Check it out!

Another shameless plug since I'm here, make sure to pick up a copy of their book. especially if your interested in some coffee in a can reviews ;) But for an honest view of Japan, nothing beats this book.

This is a great new addition for the webcasts site. In the past I was too lazy to do it most of the time. Although still lazy, I think I'll end up seeing many more webcasts.

My employer is looking to hire a biztalk/.net developer. This is a great chance to get into a small, growing company in a very interesting healthcare related market niche. The position is for a biztalk 2004 developer, with .net experience. We don't really expect to find someone as versed in Biztalk 2004 as we need, though, so the position is open to anyone with .net skills who would want to learn Biztalk, and shows great initiative. The position is in the Hartford CT area. Please contact tranqy at g mail dot com for more details.

Position Description:
Responsible for developing and maintaining our BizTalk 2004 environment as well as performing maintenance development tasks in support of the business.

Requirements:

• Bachelors Degree in Computer Science or related field or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• 3 years proven Application Development experience
• Knowledge of the C# Development Language (VB.Net and ASP.Net as well but not required)
• Strong communication and problem-solving skills
• Ability to manage multiple projects as our business grows
• Excels at communicating via printed material, on the telephone and over electronic services.
• Is self-managed, takes initiative, and can manage customer expectations for support services.
• BizTalk Experience preferred (BTS2004 preferred but BTS2002 ok)

• Responsible for the development and support of our BizTalk environment
• Support Evolutions reporting and development teams by assisting in development of BizTalk maps and orchestrations
• Responsible for maintenance development duties in support of the business
• Work closely with the Technical Operations group to assist in new customer implementations
• Participate in the review, selection and implementation of new technologies
• Work with multi-departmental teams regarding technology and operational issues
• Perform related duties as assigned

Why is it when I copy a value out of a grid box in Query Analyzer there is an implied \n at the end?

I bet some engineer somewhere has some counter, lets call it the BScounter, and every time you copy out of Query Analyzer it increments. The same engineer sits back daily giggling like a girl at how many backspaces he has introduced to the world.

[Edit] : Another dev here pointed out that the new SQL Server Management Studio does not do this anymore. I hadn't even noticed yet. yay, no more backspaces!

Just updated to the latest dasblog bits on the server, and changed a couple minor things around. Let me know if you see any problems (besides that everything in the aggregator is new).

The permalinks are now the post titles instead of guids (very cool), and the linkblog on the right is now my code instead of the rssinclude. I hope to have a seperate more funtional linkblog out before I release the code for that. Besides those, just a couple html and css changes to try to clean up some annoyances.

I had plans to posting about code organization this weekend, and saw Scott Hanselman posted on the same topic. Moving to svn gave us a chance to really review how we were doing things, and we changed alot. In the past, projects I have worked on have always been very tightly coupled to the file system. Not that its a bad thing, well it is, you just don't notice it until you see the other side of the fence.

After trying to read pretty much everything thoughtworks on the subject, and really giving a ton of weight to the How to setup a development tree set of posts from Mike Roberts, we came up with a very generic structure that is similar to what Scott posted. It looks something like this :

(VC) = under version control

• Solution Folder
• .svn ;)
• _versioning (VC)
• build
• lib (VC)
• src
• Project (VC)
• _versioning (external)
• Test Project (VC)
• tools (VC)
• buildfile.build (VC)

The tools folder carries complete versions of tools needed to build or run a given solution (eg : nant), and the lib folder houses all referenced dlls, which projects reference by relative path. In fact, everything about the setup is relative now, so a developer can go from creating a branch, to having the branch checked out to a new folder and built in under 10 minutes.

So how does your source tree look?

I will be updating to a newer version of DasBlog this weekend, so there may be a little bit of blog downtime. After I update the bits, I will also be changing my permalink structure. The new DasBlog bits allow the entire site to use named permalinks instead of the guids you usually see around here. When I flip that switch, though, all of my posts will look new to your aggregator again, so I apologize in advance for filling up your aggregator with some old posts.

After creating the new build file, the next natural step for me was setting up the build server. The build server's job is pretty simple, make stuff, and report on that stuff. In my case the stuff is a complete deployable versioned set of assemblies, and some test assemblies. There are a number of benefits to using a build system to automate and report on builds, and I have outlined some in my previous article, but expect more on that soon too. In our case, the build system will be running Cruisecontrol.net, pioneered by the thoughtworks wizards.

So what does it take to actually setup cruisecontrol.net? With 0.8, not a whole heck of alot. Download the binaries, extract them, and add a vdir to the webdashboard folder. Then create a ccnet.config file that looks something like this prototype I created, and sit back and watch your builds fly. When that's not enough, you can even add some flare to your builds :)

Another developer that I greatly respect, and sometimes come out of offices with boxing gloves on being separated by an analyst, has resurrected his blog, now on blogspot. Jason is a great developer, and although we sometimes have very passionate theory discussions, I think we both see alot of value in "creative debates". His last blog died off a little prematurely.. hopefully this one will be around for a while. Welcome back Jason!

Spent this weekend playing with nant again. A while ago I wrote an article on using a number of tools for builds, and really since then have been hands off on our build. It's good that it ran for almost a year without any serious maintenance (besides deleting old builds), but it also means I didn't get a chance to stay up to date on the products. Well, a conversion to svn will change that. Once I had my head wrapped around svn enough, it was time to move on to the builds.

Expect many more details on this, but I wanted to share my prototype build file. I created it this weekend for the del.icio.us.net. api/app I'm working on. One of the major goals of these build files were to move the coupling of the build from the dedicated build machine, to the project itself. This allows anyone on the team to build with the same build procedure the build machine uses, as well as (in a crunch) make a full releasable build from their machine. This is of course only in the work files, but the prototype I made over the weekend is a good starting point for anyone looking for setup a build. The biggest changes to the old build were a) use 100% relative paths (I can have 50 copies of the source in 50 diff locations, and the build will work 100% in all of them) b) remove web projects (same as last ().. yay no more being tied to IIS) c) simplicity rules. I think I attained all of these. You can check out the prototype build file here.

Editing a build file isnt enough either. So then I moved on to ccnet. I will give more details on that in an upcoming post, but feel free to check out the ccnet setup here. If I find 100 builds today I'll have to put it under sspi though :) Sorry for the off port numbers. I need more IPs (anyone know a way to NAT based on host headers without a 5k$ cisco box?)

Edit : Bug in copyWebFiles. Copy task should just copy **, but that path should be in the basedir= of the fileset, and remove the flatten attribute. I'll edit the file when I get home

Misleading title. Sitting here listening to an live acoustic version of Sublime's boss dj, where Brad continually sings "It's so nice, I want to hear the same song twice. Think I will...

I've always been interested in learning more about that other language (java) (well, I guess that would be platform), but have never found the time to sit down and learn it. Probably since I have enough to learn on this side of the fence as it is :) I've always got time for a new podcast or two though, and that's where Zdot comes in. Zdot is a java podcast by Tim Shadel, which (so far in my listening experience) focuses on the lower level code. I've listened to the first three so far, and really enjoying the intro to java. I actually understand some of the concepts of spring now, and I think I need to go back and listen to this dnr again to put things in perspective. I look forward to catching up on this feed and learning a bit about the other side of the tracks. I'm REALLY looking forward to making it to his svn show.