Jay Harris is Cpt. LoadTest

Speaking Engagements

Jay Harris — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 03:53:45 GMT

I enjoy being a speaker. I have learned a lot through my mentors, colleagues, and through other community speakers, and standing before a group of my peers and sharing my knowledge is one way that I can give back to the development community. By linking together my speaking and my blog, I can provide a central repository for the slide decks and demo code for my sessions and make these things available to the audience for further review. Here, you will find all of my slides and code for all past presentations, as well as information about all my past and future talks. This post will also be linked through my top navigation so that it can be easily found, and will also be regularly updated with any new schedules and slide decks.

Thank you to everyone who as attended any of my sessions, and as always, I encourage you to give me any feedback you have via SpeakerRate.

Upcoming Talks

I would love to speak at your user group or developer's conference; please feel free to contact me if you are interested.

Presentations

Dev Basics: The ASP.NET Page Life Cycle

When a request occurs for an ASP.Net page, the response is processed through a series of events before being sent to the client browser. These events, known as the Page Life Cycle, are a complicated headache when used improperly, manifesting as odd exceptions, incorrect data, performance issues, and general confusion. It seems simple when reading yet-another-book-on-ASP.NET, but never when applied in the real world. In this session, we decompose this mess, and turn the Life Cycle into an effective and productive tool. No ASP.NET MVC, no Dynamic Data, no MonoRail, no technologies of tomorrow, just the basics of ASP.NET, using the tools we have available in the office, today.
Slides | Code

Continuous Integration: More than just a toolset

Does your team spend days integrating code at the end of a project? Continuous Integration can help. Using Continuous Integration will eliminate that end-of-project integration stress, and at the same time will make your development process easier. But Continuous Integration is more than just a tool like CruiseControl.Net; it is a full development process designed to bring you closer to your mainline, increase visibility of project status throughout your team, and to streamline deployments to QA or to your client. Find out what Continuous Integration is all about, and what it can do for you.
Slides

Past Talks

June 2009

Dev Basics: The ASP.NET Page Life Cycle @ CodeStock 2009

January 2009

Continuous Integration: More than just a toolset @ NWNUG Monthly Meeting
Continuous Integration: More than just a toolset @ GANG Monthly Meeting
Continuous Integration: More than just a toolset @ CodeMash 2009

October 2009

Continuous Integration: More than just a toolset @ AADND Monthly Meeting

September 2008

Continuous Integration: More than just a toolset @ GLUGnet-Flint Monthly Meeting

Technorati Tags: Speaking,Presentations

Dev Basics: ASP.NET Page Life Cycle, Part 1 [Events]

Jay Harris — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 03:53:57 GMT

When a request occurs for an ASP.NET page, the response is processed through a series of events before being sent to the client browser. These events, known as the ASP.NET Page Life Cycle, are a complicated headache when used improperly, manifesting as odd exceptions, incorrect data, performance issues, and general confusion. It seems simple when reading yet-another-book-on-ASP.NET, but never when applied in the real world. What is covered in a few short pages in many ASP.NET books (and sometimes even just a few short paragraphs), is much more complicated outside of a "Hello, World!" application and inside of the complex demands of the enterprise applications that developers create and maintain in their day-to-day work life. As close to the core as the life cycle is to any ASP.NET web application, the complications and catches behind this system never seems to get wide coverage on study guides or other documentation. But, they should.

A little help on the Page Life Cycle is never a bad thing. In this series, I will go over the events that make up the ASP.NET Page Life Cycle, as well as some tips and tricks on how to get the most out of this event structure while avoiding the traps and pitfalls. Rather than pursuing broad coverage of the entire ASP.NET Framework, we'll dive deeply into the "small" portion that is the ASP.NET Page Life Cycle.

Events of the ASP.NET Page Life Cycle

I want to start at the beginning. The primary make-up of the Page Life Cycle is the events that process any ASP.NET requests. Unlike the public static void main of a WinForms application, where everything based on methods, the execution of a page request is the execution of these events. These events, which execute in a particular order, handle the entire request, including loading all of the controls, processing all of the form data, handling all user-initiated actions, and rendering the page to the web browser. Knowing the order in which these events are executed, as well as the responsibility of each event in processing your request, is important for developing solid, quality ASP.NET applications.

Start

This is where the page object is instantiated, and where the initial properties of the page are set. Page properties such as Response and Request, UICulture (similar to the UICulture property within a WinForms thread), and the value of IsPostBack are all determined and assigned. No controls are available at this time, so do not try to set the value of that TextBox control, as it doesn't exist, yet. Fortunately, no event handlers can be attached to this event, anyway, so there isn't much you can do to customize this processing or to access that TextBox's value property; "Move along. There is nothing to see here." But, be aware that this event does occur after the Constructor, so if you try to access properties such as IsPostBack prior to the Start event, they have yet to be assigned, and will likely be incorrect.

Page Initialization

During page initialization, the controls are created, initialized, and added to the Page's controls collection. This is the first time that you can access a control by its UniqueID. Do note that all control properties are set to their code values, be it from code-behind or code-in-front, regardless of what may be available in ViewState and Form Post values. Control state has yet to be restored, so ViewState and Form Post values have not yet been pushed to the controls. Finally, Initialization (specifically, PreInit) is the only time that the Theme and Master Page can be programmatically modified.

Page Load

Page Load is where control state is restored. If the request is a PostBack, rather than a new request, all available property values are restored from ViewState and Form Post data and pushed to the applicable controls. Under most scenarios, this is where you're going to get what you need from the Database, such as pulling a value from the query string and loading an item with the matching identity.

Validation

The Validation event only applies to PostBack requests, and only when Validators are present in the control collection. The Validate method is executed for each Validator present, through which the IsValid property is set for each Validator. These IsValid property values are then cascaded up to the Page's IsValid property. Be aware that even if all Validators on the page are disabled, the Validation event will still fire; if a Validator is present, Validate is executed, without regard to any other property. Also, note that the Validation event is a child of the Page's Load event, so it is executed within the Page Load event chain, after Page Load, but prior to PostBack Events and LoadComplete.

PostBack Events

Once Validation is complete (if applicable), all PostBack events are executed, including the OnChange event of a DropDownList and the OnClick event of a command button. Post Back Events are also a child of the Page's Load event, executing after Validation and before LoadComplete.

Render

Finally, once all of the data is processed and Post Back events handled, the Page is rendered within the Web Browser. The Render event consists of saving all control property data to ViewState, processing the Page and each Control into HTML, and writing the HTML to the output stream. This is the last opportunity to modify the HTML output.

Remembering the Order

If you are having trouble remembering the order, instead try and remember this simple mnemonic: SILVER; Start, Initialize, Load, Validation, Events, Render.

If you are doing a lot of ASP.NET programming, or anticipate that you will be in the near future, try to commit to memory the order of each of these events, and their scope of influence. Understanding these basic fundamentals of the ASP.NET Page Life Cycle will help ensure that you are executing your custom code at the right time, and in the right order, rather than stepping on yourself by conflicting with the core functionality.

Now that we know the order of execution on Page Events, what is the order of the Controls? Does Page.Load execute before Control.Load? How about the order of sibling controls? What is the order of myTextBox1.TextChanged versus myTextBox2.TextChanged? Also, what are some things to look out for? As this series continues, we will discuss the details of event execution order within the ASP.NET Page Life Cycle, as well as some tips, trick, and traps when developing ASP.NET applications.

Technorati Tags: ASP.NET,Page Life Cycle,Event Life Cycle,Dev Basics,Back to Basics

Speaking at CodeStock 2009 on ASP.NET Page Life Cycle

Jay Harris — Mon, 18 May 2009 13:27:01 GMT

Next month, I will be speaking at CodeStock, a developer conference in Knoxville, Tennessee, held June 26-27. We will be discussing the ASP.NET Page Life Cycle, to help get over the fears and troubles with validation, event handing, data binding, and the conflicts between page load and page initialization.

Dev Basics: The ASP.NET Page Life Cycle

Jay Harris / Session Level: 100
When a request occurs for an ASP.NET page, the response is processed through a series of events before being sent to the client browser. These events, known as the Page Life Cycle, are a complicated headache when used improperly, manifesting as odd exceptions, incorrect data, performance issues, and general confusion. It seems simple when reading yet-another-book-on-ASP.NET, but never when applied in the real world. In this session, we decompose this mess, and turn the Life Cycle into an effective and productive tool. No ASP.NET MVC, no Dynamic Data, no MonoRail, no technologies of tomorrow, just the basics of ASP.NET, using the tools we have available in the office, today.

It's a long drive from Michigan to Knoxville, but the conference is worth the trip (the first of two Tennessee conferences I will be attending this year). A few other local speakers will be making the trip to Knoxville, as well. Check out the full session list for more information, and while you are at it, register for the event if you haven't already done so; the cost is only $25 if you sign up before the end of May. I was there last year for the first CodeStock, and I had a great time; I'm excited about this years event, not only because I am speaking, but to see what other new things that people are talking about, catch up with friends, and to meet new people in the community.

I hope to see you there.

Technorati Tags: CodeStock,Speaking,ASP.NET

Virtues and Villainy of Robots.txt

Jay Harris — Fri, 15 May 2009 13:31:37 GMT

You may have heard of Robots.txt. Or, you may have seen requests for /Robots.txt in your web traffic logs, and if the file doesn't exist, a related HTTP 404. But what is this Robot file, and what does it do?

Introduction to Robots.txt

When on a web server, Robots.txt is a file that directs Robots (a.k.a. Spiders or Web Crawlers) on which files and directories to ignore when indexing a site. The file is located on the root directory of the domain, and is typically used to hide areas of a site from search engine indexing, such as to keep a page off of Google's radar (such as my DasBlog login page) or if a page or image is not relevant to the traditional content of a site (maybe a mockup page for a CSS demo contains content about puppies, and you don't want to mislead potential audience). Robots request this file prior to indexing your site, and its absence indicates that the robot is free to index the entire domain. Also, note that each sub-domain uses a unique Robots.txt. When a spider is indexing msdn.microsoft.com, it won't look for the file on www.microsoft.com; MSDN will need its own copy of Robots.txt.

How do I make a Robots.txt?

Robots.txt is a simple text file. You can create it in Notepad, Word, Emacs, DOS Edit, or your favorite text editor. Also, the file belongs in the root of the domain on your web server.

Allow all robots to access everything:

The most basic file will be to authorize all robots to index the entire site. The asterisk [*] for User Agent indicates that the rule applies to all robots, and by leaving the value of Disallow blank rather than including a path, it effectively disallows nothing and allows everything.

# Allow all robots to access everything
User-agent: *
Disallow:

Block all robots from accessing anything:

Conversely, with only one more character, we can invert the entire file and block everything. By setting Disallow to a root slash, every file and directory stemming from the root (in other words, the entire site) will be blocked from robot indexing.

# Block all robots from accessing anything
User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Allow all robots to index everything except scripts, logs, images, and that CSS demo on Puppies:

Disallow is a partial-match string; setting Disallow to "image" would match both /images/ and /imageHtmlTagDemo.html. Disallow can also be included multiple times with different values to disallow a robot from multiple files and directories.

# Block all robots from accessing scripts, logs,
#    images, and that CSS demo on Puppies
User-agent: *
Disallow: /images/
Disallow: /logs/
Disallow: /scripts/
Disallow: /demos/cssDemo/puppies.html

Block all robots from accessing anything, except Google, which is only blocked from images:

Just as a browser has a user agent, so does a robot. For example, "Googlebot/2.1 (http://www.google.com/bot.html)", is one of the user agents for Google's indexer. Like Disallow, the User-agent value in Robots.txt is a partial-match string, so simply setting the value to "Googlebot" is sufficient for a match. Also, the User-agent and Disallow entries cascade, with the most specific User Agent setting is the one that is recognized.

# Block all robots from accessing anything,
#    except Google, which is only blocked from images
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /images/

Shortcomings of Robots.txt

Similar to the Code of the Order of the Brethren, Robots.txt "is more what you'd call 'guidelines' than actual rules." Robots.txt is not a standardized protocol, nor is it a requirement. Only the "honorable" robots such as the Google or Yahoo search spiders adhere to the file's instructions; other less-honorable bots, such as a spam spider searching for email addresses, largely ignore the file.

Also, do not use the file for access control. Robots.txt is just a suggestion for search indexing, and will by no means block requests to a disallowed directory of file. These disallowed URLs are still freely available to anyone on the web. Additionally, the contents of this file can be used to against you, as it the items you place in it may indicate areas of the site that are intended to be secret or private; this information could be used to prioritize candidates for a malicious attack with disallowed pages being the first places to target.

Finally, this file must be located in the root of the domain: www.mydomain.com/robots.txt. If your site is in a sub-folder from the domain, such as www.mydomain.com/~username/, the file must still be on the root of the domain, and you may need to speak with your webmaster to get your modifications added to the file.

Other Resources:

The Web Robots Pages : http://www.robotstxt.org
Wikipedia : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots.txt

Technorati Tags: SEO,Robots.txt

Lansing Give Camp Wrap-Up

Jay Harris — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:55:31 GMT

The event was about giving back to the community. A few weekends ago, April 24-26, 2009, the Impression 5 Science Center held the first ever Lansing Give Camp. The Lansing, Michigan event was a weekend of coding for charities, where nearly 50 area developers and over 10 volunteers gathered to donate their time and complete projects for 13 charities.

The event, which primarily took place in one large room on the first floor of Impression 5, was full of excitement and emotion. Sponsors stepped up to offer additional assistance at the last minute, all to really make the event a success. TechSmith, DevExpress, the MSU University Club, and even Impression 5 all stepped up during the final week to sponsor a meal. The remainder of the meals were covered by collaboration between Microsoft, Wing Zone, Dominos Pizza, Guido's Pizza, Panera Bread, and Dunkin Donuts. Jennifer Middlin of TechSmith and Camron Gnass of Vision Creative also covered our late-night snacks, which included Tacos and "Insomnia Cookies." Nom, nom, nom.

The biggest drama of the weekend had to be Mother Nature's visit on Saturday afternoon. A band of severe Thunderstorms rolled through Lansing on Saturday, knocking out power to the entire facility. We didn't lose any work, since everyone's laptop battery kicked in as soon as the lights went dark, but the loss of power did kill all of the wireless access points, and with it all connectivity to the source control server and to web hosting facilities. However, within minutes, Erik Larson (Director of Impression 5) was on the phone with Eric Hart (Director of the Lansing Center), and the Lansing Center responded heroically by providing us with a temporary home with power and internet access until power was restored at Impression 5. Between three teams shipping of to local coffee houses, and the rest all taking the trip across the street to the Lansing Center, everyone was able to continue working on their projects with minimal delay. I extend a huge "Thank you" to the Lansing Center for helping us get out of a jam that could have been a major detriment to the success of our weekend.

However, it was the closing ceremony at Lansing Give Camp that stole the show. There were many emotion-filled faces throughout the staff and crowd as each project conducted a presentation of their output, demoing their wares, and each charity saw dreams achieved and went home with a year of free hosting from LiquidWeb and an "everything you need to maintain your site" bag of software and books from Microsoft. Each of the attendees even went home with one or two prizes, which included books, hardware, and software from Microsoft, books from TechSmith, and software from DevExpress, Telligent, and Telleric.

It was a great event. The charities were happy. The developers were happy. It was all a huge success. And I can't wait until next year.

Lansing Give Camp in News and Blogs:

Great Lakes IT Report : Lansing GiveCamp Develops Free Software for Nonprofits
Lansing Capital Gains : Give Camp Brings $50,000 in Tech Talent to Local Charities
AM Lansing : On-Air Interview with Jay Harris on Lansing Give Camp
The Wit and Ramblings of David Giard : Lansing Give Camp Success
The Wit and Ramblings of David Giard : McWherters and Harrises on the Lansing Give Camp

Technorati Tags: Lansing,Give Camp,Charity

Attend Give Camp or the X Conference? Both!

Jay Harris — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 20:55:41 GMT

Torn between attending Lansing Give Camp or the Kalamazoo X Conference?
You don't have to choose; do both!

Give Camp or X Conference?

The first ever Lansing Give Camp is being held April 24-26. The first ever Kalamazoo X Conference is being held April 25. The sessions of the X Conference offer a great opportunity for learning and for improving your craft. For $20, you can't beat that. But Lansing Give Camp is a weekend of giving back to the community by helping out local charities. Coding for a cause; you can't beat that, either. Two amazing events, slightly more than an hour from each other, are being held the same weekend. It's like a bad case of deadlocked threads. Kalamazoo or Lansing? Lansing or Kalamazoo? How do you choose between them?

You don't have to choose. Go to both.

Spend the weekend in Kalamazansing!

Kalamazoo X Conference and Lansing Give Camp have partnered together. Lansing Give Camp will have special projects that will accommodate X Conference attendees. Kalamazoo X Conference is waiving its registration fee for anyone attending Lansing Give Camp. Friday night, come out to Give Camp. Saturday morning you can grab a shower (thanks to a partnership with the Lansing YMCA), and head out to Kalamazoo. When the event is over, finish out the weekend back in Lansing, coding for a cause. It's almost like one big event, spread between two Michigan cities. Kalamazansing.

I want to go to Kalamazansing!

Sign up Lansing Give Camp at http://www.lansinggivecamp.org. The registration form includes an option to sign up for the X Conference, too. We'll take care of the rest.

Technorati Tags: X Conference,Kalamazoo,Lansing,Give Camp,Kalamazansing

Lansing Give Camp 2009, April 24-26

Jay Harris — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:50:07 GMT

On April 24th-26th, 2008, the local software development communities will pool their talents to put together the first ever Give Camp in Lansing Michigan. The event will be hosted at the Impression 5 Science Center in downtown Lansing. For more information, please visit the event's web site, http://www.lansinggivecamp.org.

Lansing Give Camp

April 24-26 at the Impression 5 Science Center
200 Museum Drive, Lansing, MI 48933
http://www.lansinggivecamp.org

What is a Give Camp?

A Give Camp is a weekend-long event where software developers, designers, and database administrators donate their time to create custom software solutions for non-profit organizations. This custom software could be a new web site for the nonprofit organization, a small data-collection application to keep track of members, or an application for the Red Cross that automatically will email a blood donor three months after they've last donated blood to remind them that they are again eligible to donate blood. The only limitation for a Give Camp project is that it must be scoped to be completed within a weekend.

During the event, developers are welcome to come and go as they please. The event will continue 24/7 from Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon, and developers can choose to go home in the evenings or camp out for the entire weekend. Showers are not available at the Impression 5 facility, but the Lansing YMCA--just down the street--is donating their facilities throughout the weekend for any Give Camp attendees.

How can I help?

If you are a developer and are interested in attending, please go to the event web site and register for the event. We are looking for developers of all skill levels to help out, from students to senior developers, and for developers of all skill sets, including designers, developers, database administrators, and more. If you can code, we want you there!

What about Sponsorship?

Lansing Give Camp is seeking cash donations of any amount, or the sponsorship of a meal. A meal sponsorship would entail funding breakfast, lunch, or dinner for roughly 100 volunteers. Typical meals would be sandwiches, pizza, or BBQ. As consideration for your donation, your organization’s logo will be added to the Give Camp web site, along with mention during the opening and closing sessions.

Technorati Tags: Lansing,Give Camp,Charities

[Fixed] Adding DotNetKicks FeedFlare to FeedBurner

Jay Harris — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 13:07:41 GMT

FeedBurner used to allow adding DotNetKicks FeedFlare to your feeds. Even today, the FeedFlare catalog lists "Kick It" using DNK's FeedFlareUnit file. Unfortunately, when adding this file to FeedFlare using the link given in the catalog, the unfortunate user receives only a JavaScript alert of "We could not find a valid FeedFlare file at that location" instead of an enhanced feed. Why? No XML Declaration is contained within DNK's XML file.

Example XML Declaration

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

By adding only an XML Declaration to the top of the file, FeedBurner is now able to properly parse the document, and add the new flare to a feed. This would also apply to any custom FeedFlareUnit that you develop; be sure to add an XML Declaration to your XML.

Corrected File for DotNetKicks

Download: kickitflare.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<FeedFlareUnit>
  <Catalog>
    <Title>Kick it</Title>
    <Description>Kick this story on dotnetkicks.com</Description>
  </Catalog>
  <FeedFlare>
    <Text>Kick it</Text>
    <Link href="http://www.dotnetkicks.com/kick/?url=${link}" />
  </FeedFlare>
</FeedFlareUnit>

I have logged a ticket with DotNetKicks on their Google Code issue tracker. Hopefully, as opportunity allows, they can update the file on dotnetkicks.com so that the FeedFlare catalog entry will work once again. Feel free to add DotNetKicks FeedFlare to your FeedBurner feed using the file link above until they have an opportunity to address the ticket.

Adding DotNetKicks FeedFlare to your FeedBurner Feed

To add the "Kick It" FeedFlare to your existing FeedBurner feed:

Copy the URL for the updated kickitflare.xml file to your clipboard:
http://www.cptloadtest.com/content/text/kickitflare.xml
Log in to FeedBurner at http://feedburner.google.com
Navigate to your feed details, then to the Optimize tab, then to FeedFlare
Paste the URL into the textbox, and click Add New Flare.
As desired, check the appropriate checkboxes to add the flare to your RSS feed and to your site.
Click the Save button at the bottom of the page.

Technorati Tags: Blogging,DotNetKicks,FeedBurner,FeedFlare

Dev Basics: What is Continuous Integration?

Jay Harris — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:25:01 GMT

Scheduled Integration is hard. I remember being involved in projects where developers would get a copy of the latest source code and a task, and race off like horses at the track while they spent a few weeks implementing their assigned feature. At the end of these many weeks was a scheduled integration, where all developers in the team would reconvene with their code modifications, and try to get their respective code to play well in a single sandbox. Project managers always seemed to expect that this would be a quick and painless process, but, of course, it never was. Reintegration of the code sometimes took just as long as the implementation, itself. Even if developers are all working in one big room throughout the project, the code remains isolated, never shared or reintegrated. Fortunately, Continuous Integration specifically focuses on this problem by reducing (and often eliminating) the end-of-project reintegration cycle through a continuous constant integration process.

Continuously Integrating your Mind

For a moment, compare the process of software development with the process of learning new technologies in your field. In the past few years of Microsoft's .NET platform, we've seen .NET 2.0, Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Presentation Foundation, Workflow Foundation, Extension Methods, Generics, Linq, Dynamic Data, ASP.NET MVC, and more. For a developer that has not kept up with the latest trends, to suddenly and quickly catch up with the bleeding edge would be a major undertaking, and psychologically intimidating. This Scheduled Integration approach to learning can be overwhelming; the learning process is isolated, and only occasionally reconnects to the latest technologies. However, a developer that has kept up with the trends, learning through a continuous integration process, has been constantly updating, constantly learning the Next Big Thing over these past few years; this developer is already long familiar with .NET 2.0, WF, WCF, WPF, Generics, and Linq, and is now working on only Dynamic Data and MVC. The Continuous Integration process ensures that those involved are current with the latest developments in their project, and that the overwhelming burden of integration at the end of a project is instead simplified by distributing it throughout the course of the timeline.

Core Continuous Integration

At its core, Continuous Integration, or CI, is a development model where developers regularly commit and update against their source control repository. By committing (giving everyone else access to your code changes) and updating (getting code changes from everyone else), the scheduled, tedious integration process at the end of the project is eliminated. Added on top of this single fundamental, is ensuring the code works: Automating the build through scripting frameworks like Make, MSBuild, or NAnt helps developers validate their status quickly, by invoking a validation step that not only compiles, but executes a suite of unit tests against the code base. Validation results, along with the latest valid code, are then made easily accessible to anyone on the team.

The ten tenets of Continuous Integration are:

Maintain a Source Code Repository
Use a code repository, such as Subversion, Bazaar, or even Visual Source Safe. This allows a central point-of-truth for the development team, against which code can be committed or updated. This even applies to a development team consisting of only one person, as a local hard drive alone cannot provide change logs, revision differences, rollback capability, and other benefits of source management.
Commit Frequently
As other developers commit code changes, your local version of the code will get further and further from the revision head, thus increasing the likelihood of a conflicting change that will need manual resolution. By committing often (and by association, updating even more often), everyone can stay very close to the revision head, reducing the likelihood of conflicts, and reducing time to integrate code and functionality.
Self-Testing Code
"It compiles" is not sufficient criteria for determining if a project is ready for delivery or deployment to the client. Some level of testing must be conducted against each compile to measure application quality. Using unit tests, functional tests, or some other form of automated acceptance tests, the code can evaluate itself against expected outcome, providing a much more accurate and granular metric for readiness.
Automate the Build
Using Make, NAnt, MSBuild, or similar frameworks, consolidate execution of your full build into a single command, or a single icon on your desktop. These scripts should execute a full compile, and run your full suite of testing and evaluation tools against the compile.
Build Fast, Fail Fast
Even if your build is automated, no one wants to wait 30 minutes for the build to complete. Building your code should not just be a lunch-break activity. Keep the build fast to enable developers to do so as often as possible. And if there is a problem, fail immediately.
Build Every Mainline Commit on an Integration Machine
We all have applications on our local desktops that will not be present in Production. Instant Messenger, iTunes, Visual Studio, and Office are all common for us, but rare in Production. However, these applications can conflict or distort build results, such as a reference to an Office assembly that is not included in your deployment package. By executing the automated build on an integration machine (iTunes free, and using a CI suite like Hudson or CruiseControl), you can increase confidence in your application and eliminate "it works on my box!"
Automate the Deployment
Manual code deployment is a mundane, highly repetitive, error-prone, and time-consuming process that is ripe for automation. The time commitment adds to the stress when QA requests yet another deployment to the testing environment, particularly when all of the developers are in 80-hour-week crunch mode. In turn, this stress reduces deployment quality; environments often have configuration differences, such as different database connection strings, credentials, or web service URLs, and often only one configuration change needs to be overlooked to cause the entire system to malfunction. Automate this task, so that it can be executed easily, dependably, and often.
Test in a Clone of the Production Environment
In addition to Office and iTunes not being a part of the production server build, there are aspects of the production environment that are not a part of the desktop environment. Server farms, federated databases, and load balancing are examples of things that do not exist on the developer desktop, but do exist in production, and can cause surprises if they are not considered during development and testing. Consider the haves and the have-nots in your test environment, and eliminate these surprises. And if the cost of another production environment is out of reach, consider Virtual Machines. VMs have significantly reduced the cost of creating a watered down test environment that still has things like server farms or database clusters; even if you cannot exactly replicate your production configuration, mitigate your risk by reducing the differences between your test and production environments.
Everyone Can View the Latest Build Results
The underlying driver behind Continuous Integration is transparency and visibility. Communication enables both transparency and visibility by allowing everyone on the team to know the full status of the build. Did it compile? Did the unit tests pass? Which unit tests failed? Did the deployment work? How many seconds did it take to compile the application? Who broke the build? Continuous Integration suites, such as Hudson or CruiseControl, provide reporting mechanisms on build status. Make this status available to anyone, including project managers, and even the sales guy.
Everyone Can Get the Latest Executable
On a software development project, communication is more than just green icons (successful builds) and red icons (failed builds). Communicate the ones and zeros, in the form of your compiled application, to your team. By allowing other developers, testers, and even the sales guy (perhaps for a demo) to get the latest bits for themselves, developers can focus on writing code.

Benefits of Continuous Integration

By continuously integrating all new code and feature sets, development teams can eliminate that long and tedious scheduled integration effort, which reduces overall effort, time line, and budget. Through self-testing code and building every mainline commit, code is continuously tested against a full suite of tests, allowing quick analysis and identification of breaking changes. Through the easy accessibility of the latest bits, the team can test early and often, allowing quick identification of broken functionality, and for early identification of features that don't quite align with what the client had in mind. And finally, the immediate and public feedback on the success or failure of the build provides incentives for developers to write code in smaller increments and perform more pre-commit testing, resulting in higher quality code.

I consider Continuous Integration to be an essential, required part of any development effort, every time. I started using CI in 2004, and I have since become dependent on it. I even have a Continuous Integration box at home, validating home projects for my development-team-of-one, and I am comforted by having a Continuous Integration server analyzing and validating every code change that I make. I break unit tests as often as anyone else does, and there still continues to be plenty of times that I even break the compile. At least once, every developer among us has checked in the project file while forgetting to add myNewClass.cs to Source Control. It will break the compile every time. Fortunately, Continuous Integration is always watching my code commits; it will let me know that it could not find myNewClass.cs, every time. And my application's quality is remarkably better for it. Every time.

Technorati Tags: CI,Continuous Integration,Developer Basics

Changing of the Guard at Ann Arbor .Net Developers

Jay Harris — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:38:25 GMT

February was election month for us .Net Developers in Ann Arbor, Michigan. On February 11th, during the monthly meeting, the Ann Arbor .Net Developers user group held its annual elections. After serving as the group's leader for the past 3 years--ever since the group was formed--Bill Wagner decided to hand over the reins. When the election dust settled, I stood as the second President of the Ann Arbor .Net Developers. I appreciate the honor and the opportunity given to me, and I look forward to serving the group for 2009.

The Elected

President: Jay Harris
Vice Pres: Scott Zischerk
Secretary: Darrell Hawley
Treasurer: Eric Bratton

That evening, after the meeting, we held our first board meeting, as we were responsible for filling the two appointed positions: Program Chair and Webmaster. As the group has grown, so have these two roles. Program Chair turned into a catchall for most of the membership and speaker management, and was an overload for one person. Webmaster had changed, too, as the group's web site is no longer the only communication medium we employ.

We restructured these two appointed positions into four. Program Director is responsible for knowing what people want to learn about, and making sure that our schedule is booked solid with great speakers. Webmaster has been rebranded as Communication Director, and is the public voice of our group; the position is responsible for any articles and communications published by the group, and for maintaining the web site, Twitter, Facebook, and all of our other various methods of getting the word out. Membership Director is one of our entirely new roles, responsible for maintaining demographics on the group, membership listings, and swag. Finally, we wanted to ease the burden on our group membership and work towards eliminating our member-dues fiscal model; the new Sponsorship Director is responsible for finding sponsorship funding to help run our group.

The Appointed

Program Director: Mike Woelmer
Membership Director: Dennis Burton
Sponsorship Director: Brian Genisio
Communications Director: Len Smith

The new board has some great ideas for the upcoming year, and I am excited to be a part of it. In addition, a sincere thank you goes out to the departing board members, Bill Wagner (President) and Dave Redding (Vice President); we appreciate the effort that you have put in to this group.

Technorati Tags: AADND,User Groups,Ann Arbor .Net Developers

Quick Tips: Changing Subversion Commit Comments

Jay Harris — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 21:54:45 GMT

Have you ever made comments when committing in to source control that you wish you could take back? Perhaps in a rage, you entered "Jimmy's code was a pile of fermenting humus that didn't work. So I fixed it!" Now you realize that Jimmy will see it, your boss is going to see it, and you want to change the comments to something that has a bit more tact. Or maybe your reason is far less malicious: you identified a major bug that you just committed, and you would like to update the comment log to say "Don't use this revision. It has a major bug."

In Subversion, the comments can be updated long after the original commit. Log messages are just a property on the repository revision.

svn propset --revision <REVISION> --revprop <MESSAGE> <URL>

<REVISION> : The revision number of the target log message.
<MESSAGE> : The value of the new log message, wrapped in quotes if necessary.
<URL> : The base URL of your repository. Since this applies to a revision property, rather than a file property, only the base URL of the repository is needed, rather than a URL directly to a file.

Now your malicious revision comment can be overwritten by:

svn propset --revision 123 --revprop "Fixed issue #17" http://svnserver/myrepos/

But next time, do try to be nice to Jimmy.

Technorati Tags: Subversion,Quick Tips,Programming

Visual Studio Macro: Modify Text Editor Font Size

Jay Harris — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:38:48 GMT

Increasing or decreasing the font size of your code in Visual Studio's text editor is almost required whenever VS is fired up on a projector. Anyone who has had to demo code, or give a talk at a user group, or present new technologies to their team has experienced the pain of increasing the font size through the Tools -> Options menu, followed by an inquiry to the crowd: "How's that? Is this font size readable by everyone?" Often times the selected size is not quite the right solution, and the process is repeated. Life as a presenter would be easier if only you could modify the font size through a simple keyboard command, similar to how browsers enable you adjust the font through the ctrl+ and ctrl- commands.

Macros.Samples.Accessibility.DecreaseTextEditorFontSize
Decreases the text editor font size in Visual Studio

Macros.Samples.Accessibility.IncreaseTextEditorFontSize
Increases the text editor font size in Visual Studio

Fortunately, this is easy with the help of Visual Studio's Sample Macros. To help show you the ropes of writing custom macros, VS ships with a collection samples, and two of these samples respectively increase and decrease the font size of the text editor. Right out of the box, Visual Studio comes with the ability to modify the font size for your code; all that remains is mapping these macros to the keyboard.

Mapping to the Keyboard

Anchoring these macros to specific keyboard commands is a simple process.

From Visual Studio, access the Tools -> Options menu.
In the Options window, navigate to Environment -> Keyboard.
Using the "Show commands containing" input, enter in IncreaseText or DecreaseText. The list of available commands will automatically filter as you type, reducing the list to the applicable macro.
Select the macro command, and select the "Press shortcut keys" input, and enter your desired keyboard command. Click the Assign button to set the command. I use "Ctrl, Alt, Shift, =" (plus) and "Ctrl, Alt, Shift, -" for my Increase and Decrease commands, respectively.

Technorati Tags: Visual Studio,Presenting,Speaking,Macros