Dave Donaldson

I’ve never actually written a “Top X Posts” post to end the year before, so I figured, what the heck, I’ll do one this year. As Phil points out, “I find that somewhat narcissistic, so you know I’m going to do that”.

I’ve been running 64-bit Vista for awhile now and have experienced almost zero issues. One of the nice things about 64-bit operating systems is their ability to continue to run the thousands of 32-bit applications just fine. In Vista’s case, it even goes so far as to segregate the installation of 32-bit apps and 64-bit apps into separate locations: 64-bit apps default to C:\Program Files while 32-bit apps default to C:\Program Files (x86). Heck, you can even run 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the same app side-by-side.

One of the things I wanted to do while on Christmas break was to begin building a custom web site for our travel baseball organization. The existing one is outdated and horribly designed and while I’m by no means the World’s Greatest Web Site Designer, I’ve been around long enough to have an understanding of what good design looks like.

Almost every project I've ever worked on has had dependencies on external projects, whether it was web services, components, or libraries, and working at Telligent is no different. But what's been interesting is how we manage internal dependencies, especially with regards to building Community Server.

Like many people, this is my last work week of the year. After this Friday I am officially off work until Jan. 5, 2009 (but only for two days because then I'm off again the rest of that week for CodeMash, hehe), and I'm really looking forward to it. It's the first time since before I was a consultant that I've had the last two weeks of the year off, and it's even better this time because it coincides exactly with my kids' Christmas break from school.

For everyone out there on Xbox Live, you've no doubt updated your Xbox 360 console to the New Xbox Experience (NXE) by now. I won't go into all the new features here, but I did want to point out something everyone might not be aware of yet: that you can add your Xbox Live avatar to any web site now.

If you've read my blog at all over the last couple weeks, it's pretty obvious that I've taken a liking to PowerShell; however, it's not been all sunshine and daisies. PowerShell definitely has a learning curve, causes a lot of trial-and-error, and is not without its frustrations.

For all you .NET-ers, you know how during your development cycle you set debug="true" in web.config, and then when you get ready to release your application you have to remember to switch it to be debug="false"? And how many times have you had to re-deploy your web.config all because you simply forgot to do that? Yea, me too, but I've figured out a way to automate this using PowerShell, and not only that, I've discovered how to do it in only five lines of code.

To help automate our functional testing, I need to use PowerShell to create the IIS application required to run Community Server on our build server. After searching around, I found some articles that showed how to programmatically create a virtual directory, but what I need is a virtual directory that is actually an *application* in the eyes of IIS.

One of the great things about having a blog is getting comments from people. Some posts get no comments, some get one or two, and then there are some that generate several comments, effectively turning those posts into discussions. But there are downsides with a basic blog commenting system, such as the lack of threaded replies and the inevitable comment spam.

As we've changed our development process to now work in feature teams and feature branches (much more on that in a later post), one of the things we're discussing is whether or not to keep the branch history once a branch has been merged back into trunk.

My PowerShell scripting madness continues, with the need to automate the setup and teardown of a SQL Server database in prep for running automated functional tests. Here's what I came up with:

If you've used TortoiseSVN for any length of time, you've no doubt encountered a situation where it tells you to run the Subversion "cleanup" command. This happens when TortoiseSVN needs to clear inconsistencies in your local copy, which means that under-the-covers it needs to re-execute log files within your .svn folders to get things back to a happy state. And usually when this happens, it's easy enough to simply right-click on the offending folder, go to TortoiseSVN, select Cleanup, and you're good to go.

When using a source control system, there are certain files and folders you normally want to exclude from source control. For instance, on projects developed with Visual Studio, you almost never want to check-in your bin and obj folders, nor should you ever check-in any .user or .suo files.

Like with any new technology, getting started with PowerShell was not without a few hiccups. One of the first issues I ran into was how to properly pass script locations to PowerShell so that it could actually run them.