You can stop putting Change History in source, it’s 2008

CHANGE HISTORY
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AUTHOR            LAST MODIFIED  DESCRIPTION
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v-someone        2008-08-21       Initial Version

It’s official, we are at the end of 2008 and there are lots of good source control tools out there(some of the best are free).

You don’t need to keep putting change history comments in your source if you are using source control. If you add comments when you commit your code this will be handled for you.

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Unity at CRineta

Jeff Brand from our North Central Microsoft office came to CRineta and gave a very good talk on Unity, Microsoft’s dependency injection container.

From my experience when people talk about IOC/DI they end up skipping basic concepts, but Jeff didn’t. It was really good because he went back to the very beginning and built a live code example along the way. And as he built the code base, he introduced all the core concepts.

I learned a lot and think I’ll introduce Unity into my current project. Structure Map has been on my list to learn for awhile, so I’ll probably use it to compare for usability and features.

Iowa Tech is Heating Up

Early this year I blogged about the general state the .NET community in Eastern Iowa and Iowa in general. Some of the goals on January 1st were to see more techies blogging, more speaking, to run our first camp and to see the tech community grow in general.

So here is an update. We had an incredibly successful first code camp at the University of Iowa conference center on May 3rd. We had around 130 people attend over the course of the day with about 25 people presenting.

On the blogging front, Tim Barcz has really taken his blogging up a notch and has moved over to the devlicio.us community. Chris Missal has been doing some nice work with ASP.NET and jQuery and I hope to see some more good blogging from there.

Bryan Sampica, Javier Lozano and D’Arcy Lussier(well he’s Canadian, but that’s close enough) are writing “ASP.NET 3.5 Programmers Reference“. This is very cool to have two Iowa authors writing a major programming title.

I’m sure there are other good bloggers in Iowa who are doing good writing, let me know in comments who else is out there.

Our next code camp in Iowa is just a couple of weeks away on November 8th. It is being held at the DMACC West campus in West Des Moines. We have great speakers from Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, Kansas, Texas and Ohio. We are also introducing a new format called a fishbowl in two of the sessions. Register here if you haven’t already.

The Cedar Falls / Waterloo area is getting a new Ineta group (tentatively Cedar Valley INETA) headed up by Josh Flory. We hope to see good things happen up north.

CRineta webcasted it’s first user group meeting presentation in October which was interesting. We have some work to improve this medium, but it has a lot of potential for reaching people that can make it into the meetings. Josh Flory is the primary person who made this happen, so thanks to him.

The University of Iowa has a new Ruby group as well, which is a great development.

We have 2 1/2 months left in 2008 so let’s finish this year off well.

By the way, Tim Barcz, Derik Whittaker and I might have some big news in a week or two but I can’t officially announce it yet.

ASP.NET MVC goes Beta

I just saw that ASP.NET MVC went beta based on a tweet from Kevin Dente. Time to do some upgrades and see what is new and changed in this release.

jQuery, MIT and GPL

/*
* jQuery 1.2.6 – New Wave Javascript
*
* Copyright (c) 2008 John Resig (jquery.com)
* Dual licensed under the MIT (MIT-LICENSE.txt)
* and GPL (GPL-LICENSE.txt) licenses.
*
* $Date: 2008-05-24 14:22:17 -0400 (Sat, 24 May 2008) $
* $Rev: 5685 $
*/

This text is the header in the jQuery 1.2.6 release. It’s obvious that it is dual licensed under MIT and GPL, but isn’t it still weird that Microsoft will support and will package a library with text that says “GPL”?

Props to the people at Microsoft who took the risk to push for this really good 3rd party JavaScript library.

YUI 2.6.0

In case you missed it, YUI did a nice update recently to version 2.6.0. A lot of controls like the Rich Text Editor have made it out of beta and there are some new one added like the Carousel.

I’m looking forward to testing these updates in several ASP.NET/ASP.NET MVC projects.

Continuous Integration with TeamCity follow up

The presentation last night went really well. We had a steady stream of questions and there seemed to be general interest in the topic.

We talked about what Continuous Integration is and then I introduced a build configuration that I had pre-configured around a sample ASP.NET application. For some reason I couldn’t get the jabber notifications to work, but they had worked flawlessly before.

After talking with several people I’ve clarified a couple of points that will help the next time I present the talk, likely at the Iowa Code Camp. Thanks for all of the feedback and questions.

Here are the slides from the talk if you are interested.