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.

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.

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.

jQuery and Microsoft – Ripple Effects

So a couple of days ago we received good and surprising news that jQuery would be bundled in the next version of Visual Studio and more immediately in ASP.NET MVC.

We are now seeing the ripple effects as DotNetNuke is deciding to add jQuery support into version 5 of their platform.

I hope to see more and more good come of this decision.

World’s simplest source code updater

Update: So, I’ll fess up and admit this wasn’t the simplest. Tim Barcz did this 1 (or 2 or 3) better and simplified the script with:

@ECHO OFF
FOR /D %%a IN (“*”) DO IF EXIST %%~dpa%%a\.svn svn update %%~dpa%%a
PAUSE

I feel like I was trying to start a fire by hitting two rocks together and Tim walked in and pulled out a box of matches.

Many of the projects I watch are hosted on Subversion repositories. I’m tired of right clicking in each directory with TortoiseSVN and clicking “SVN Update.”

So I went the simplest route possible to automate updating source. I have this set of commands in a file called update.cmd. In the morning I double click it and I can see any updates from the previous day.

Of course, you need to adjust the directories and project names for the projects you watch.

rem this script expects svn to be in the path

cd witty
svn up

cd ..\ironruby
svn up

cd ..\subsonicproject
svn up

cd ..\masstransit
svn up

cd ..\spark
svn up

cd ..\crineta
svn up

cd ..\programmingmvc
svn up

cd ..\codecampserver
svn up

cd ..\coregallery
svn up

cd ..\csla
svn up

pause

Chrome

Wouldn’t it be ironic if Chrome wiped out Firefox’s market share, ended up with 10-20% of the market and relegated Firefox to an Opera-like status while everyone else stayed with Internet Explorer?

I like Firefox by the way, I want to see it thrive because of its extensions like firebug and its standards compliance.

In the late 90’s Internet Explorer soundly beat Netscape. Now Netscape’s descendant who has been working tirelessly to gain marketshare for several years could be in jeopardy.

Do you think Chrome poses a real threat to Firefox?