ReSharper 4 EAP – 764

I just downloaded and installed nightly build 764 of ReSharper 4. I usually don’t go this bleeding edge, but I’m feeling a little dangerous.

Most people I’ve read say that these builds are pretty stable by now. I’ll post with an update by the end of the week.

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Source Control Thoughts

I was catching up on some ALT.Net reading on the Yahoo Group and came across this gem on a thread talking about people’s favorite version control:

I was informed recently that I may have to contribute to a project that’s using VSS… I immediately thought of this quote about VSS by a MS employee “Visual Source Safe? You’re better off printing out your code, putting it through a shredder, and lighting it on fire.”

Just to be fair, if you have your source stored in Visual Source Safe, that is better than nothing. But you can do much better with little effort.

VSS still doesn’t have atomic commits to the best of my knowledge.  What other kind of database that stores information as critical as your source is allowed to get away with non-atomic commits?

If you have had your source stored in VSS for at least a year and you are the admin, how many times have you had to run the database analyzer? And how many times has it told you that your repository or a block of files have been corrupted?  If your repository has been corrupted at least once, you should have red flags all over the place.

Think of this in terms of your regular databases.  If your SQL Server/Oracle/MySQL databases frequently gave you “your database has been corrupted” messages would you keep using that database?

So once again, you can do better. Here are two good options – there are many more.

I think the easiest sell is using a tool like Subversion.  It is a stable and widely used repository.  There are excellent client and admin tools available for many platforms.  I have used Subversion off and on for the last 4 years and heavily for the last 2 years and have been very pleased with it.  It is stable, reliable, accessible and it is actively being improved and developed.

If you are a larger company in the Microsoft space and you have plenty of money budgeted for your source control strategy you might look at Team Foundation Server. I’m using this on an open source project and have been satisfied with its performance and usability. My only gripe so far is that it does poorly in a disconnected scenario – Subversion really shines here.

More on Firefox 3 memory usage

Ajaxian has a great article on Firefox 3 Beta 4 memory usage. I installed this beta and the memory usage is definitely better.  On the downside it crashes constantly with Yahoo!Mail so I can’t really use it until that clears up. I’ll give it another try after it gets out of beta.

My initial observation about Firefox 3 Beta 4 was that Yahoo!Mail and GMail both loaded in a fraction of the time that it used to take.  Of course Yahoo!Mail crashes so soon afterward that it isn’t useable for me, but there is no question that the Javascript and/or rendering engine is considerable faster than in FF 2.

Cedar Rapids 2008 Launch Event

This Monday, March 17th, is our CRIneta.org Visual Studio/SQL Server 2008 Launch Event.  If you want to learn about the new products and you want to have a great time and win from a huge pool of excellent prizes, then go to CRIneta.org and RSVP to be a part of this event.

Tim Barcz, Greg Sohl, Arian Kulp and I are presenting sessions on Visual Studio enhancements, Linq, IIS 7, C# 3, the new .Net Framework features and the new SQL data types.

We have room for 50 people and 38 are RSVP’d already, so don’t wait too long. We are doing the Launch at the Marriott on Collins road in Cedar Rapids. Check the website for more details.

Geek Lunch at the Lindale Mall

Tim Barcz our new CRIneta.org president is starting to coordinate some geek meals up here in Cedar Rapids, IA. It should be good for our tech community because we usually just get together once a month.  Sounds like we might have 10 or so people show up.  Anyway, we are meeting at noon at the Lindale Mall.  Watch crineta.org for when we do this again.

Iowa Code Camp – Spring 2008

We are planning our first ever Iowa Code Camp.  It’s going to happen at the University of Iowa’s Conference Center in Iowa City on Saturday May 3rd.

The details are coming together nicely and we already have about 1/2 of our speakers in place.

Our current sponsors are:

• University of Iowa
• Microsoft
• And several others are in the works

We are currently looking for more sponsors to provide some good food, drinks and prizes.

If you are interested in helping in any way, leave me a comment and I’ll make sure to pass your information on to the right person.

Javier has already posted the Code Camp on bostondotnet.org

Better Firefox Memory Management

Most of the time Firefox 2 has been a great browser (I use FF2, IE7 and Opera9 for the record). The issue I kept having was that if I didn’t completely close out of an instance of Firefox every day or so its memory usage went through the roof. 

Now Process Explorer shows the private bytes up to 200+ megs when I have a lot of tabs open, but when I close down old tabs, the memory usage comes back down proportional to how much I’m doing with Firefox.  This is what you would expect. 

Before it would creap up to 250 megs and would just keep climbing even if I went back down to a single tab.

The only changes on my system that have happened between a couple of months ago and now are these: 1)Firefox was reved to 2.0.0.11   2) I installed Firefox 3 Beta 1 for a time and then uninstalled it and Firefox 2 and then reinstalled Firefox 2. I’m guessing that Firefox 2.0.0.11 finally fixed some memory issues. 

Anybody else experience this?

A New Year in Iowa

2008 is here and it’s freezing (about 4° F, without wind chill) cold. I pulled out my snowshoes today and hiked for about 40 minutes into a strong headwind. It was a good hike, but I had to duck into a culvert a couple of times to keep my face from freezing. I hope to be outside much more this year (biking, canoeing, hiking, fishing and snowshoeing).

On the tech front I’m going to blog more consistently. Iowa doesn’t currently have many prolific tech bloggers, so I think its time we banded together. Here are a few of the Iowan techies I know: Tim Barcz, Javier Lozano, Arian Kulp, Nick Parker, Tim Gifford and Bryan Sampica.

We are planning the first ever Iowa Code Camp possibly on Saturday March 1st.  There will be more to come on this. If you are interested at all in helping out, please contact me and I’ll get you plugged in. The website is certainly not ready, but I’ll be working on it as I have time.

CRIneta.org held even in attendance and stabilized a bit this year. I’ll likely be president again this year; I’d like to keep the stability and grow the group in 2008. We’ll bring in two Ineta speakers and might get to bring a third national speaker if things work out with one of our sponsors. We’ve also had an excellent experience with our local speakers and want to keep them presenting (Javier, Arian, Nick, Mike Jackson, Eric Johnson and Bryan).

Happy new year.

ASP.Net MVC Quickstart

The MVC Toolkit has finally been released as a CTP. Go here to start out – this is the official page with all the links and info you need. Here is the official quickstart link.

Update: 1/17/2008

Jeffery Palermo has a great list of his links to get you started.

Links for ASP.Net MVC Reading:

Scott Guthrie is the grandmaster of this project and has posted extensively on different aspects of the MVC framework. Here are some quick links to get you going.

Original post about ASP.Net MVC: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/10/14/asp-net-mvc-framework.aspx

MVC Part 1: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/11/13/asp-net-mvc-framework-part-1.aspx

MVC Part 2(URL Routing): http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/12/03/asp-net-mvc-framework-part-2-url-routing.aspx

MVC Part 3(Passing ViewData): http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/12/06/asp-net-mvc-framework-part-3-passing-viewdata-from-controllers-to-views.aspx

MVC Part 4(Form editing and posting): http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/12/09/asp-net-mvc-framework-part-4-handling-form-edit-and-post-scenarios.aspx

Jeffery Palermo of CodeBetter and Party with Palermo Fame has written some about the MVC bits as well. He has an mvccontrib project.  Read about the guidelines for participation.

Rob Conery talks about how to use use a RESTful architecture with ASP.Net MVC.

Nikhil Kothari has a great post showing how to build a basic app.

Links for Listening:

Polymorphic Podcast with Jeffery Palermo: http://polymorphicpodcast.com/shows/aspnetmvc/

If you want the best information on the ASP.Net MVC there are a couple of other people you should be paying attention to: Phil Haack and Fredrik Normén.

I will be updating this post with more information as I find it out.

Well I have some digging to do. I need to get the bits installed for some client work that will be using MVC early next year.

 

FolderShare is back up

I went online at about 5:30am and FolderShare was back online and working well. FolderShare is branded as a Windows Live Service; I wonder if it is going to become an integrated first class part of Live?