Human-Debugger.net

Releasing Features – 2 week process of building a product VS. getting feedback on your idea every day

Shani Raba — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 06:33:27 GMT

Nir just finished coding his new module, simple read-only entrance page that renders grid of products with its name underneath, each name links to the relevant product page.
This feature was deployed a week later. After deploying to production we find out a new bug that wasn’t discover during QA phase.
Our team has 5 developers which each of them committed at least one feature for this release. After cursing and blaming I scanned the latest release notes to find the possible features we just deployed I’ve found out that the bug should be part of Nir’s implementation. of course that Nir already started his next feature and need to have an expensive context-switch to resolve this issue. Additional overhead which can’t be avoided in order to understand whether we need to deploy the hotfix right away or we can wait for the next version, not talking about synching between other bug-fixes.

Sounds familiar? Do you release versions too? Try thinking of releasing features.
Think about it, release the feature when it is DONE. don’t wait for others.

Releasing all features in one planned ahead release, check feature #5 – that will need to be queued till the next release\train

Releasing a feature when it is done. feature #5 will be released when it is ready – no need to wait for the next train

So, Putting the technical details aside and the context switch we already explained, try to think about your product managers – they’re going to love you.

Read more about ideas-code-data

In Delver we started our journey to continuously deploy to production. Read more here.

Meet Nir Altmark, a good friend of mine and a teammate at Delver he is a gifted developer who knows how to get things Done.
Nir just published two new posts about releasing faster and Building confidence between QA and Dev – well written. Read them to have a better understanding about this process.

AppHarbor & Continuous Deployment

Shani Raba — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 23:08:47 GMT

This is my second post about AppHarbor, I suggest you to read my first impression.

I am reading a lot about continuous deployment lately and AppHarbor provide great implementation for simple web applications deployment.

Source Control – Support Git to host your code
Continuous integration – Check build per commit and run NUnit as part of each build
Deployment Script – Each successful commit can be deploy in one click
Rollback – Even after passing build and tests it can be that you still have bugs, so you can simply check older version and deploy it till you commit a fix

Code and publish is so easy, this is by far this better than using FTP for such things and the option to run tests makes it even more fun.

The option to rollback to previous commit\version is trivial but so important. Moreover, by clicking on “show” you can check the build log and see the tests-run.

You can click the tests link to read more about each test

Tip - UrlParameter does not exist:

When first trying to deploy my code it failed during compilation. I got this output:

Global.asax.cs(18,67): error CS0103: The name 'UrlParameter' does not exist in the current context

I am not sure why, it could be that I am using early beta (didn’t update for a long time), anyhow I fixed this by changing the global.asax.cs from using UrlParamters.Optional to "". You can read more here: http://haacked.com/archive/2010/02/12/asp-net-mvc-2-optional-url-parameters.aspx

AppHarbor - The place for hosting asp.net (bonus: Git for newbies)

Shani Raba — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:49:00 GMT

Everyone knows Google app engine But what about .net apps? Meet AppHarbor (Thanks Gadi)

So I wanted to give it a chance and after playing for less than an hour:

Enable you to build \ host \ deploy web apps
Provide both Version control and hosting service
Absolutely free (for now)
Damn simple

Short tutorial on how to do it:

Create your appharbor account + create new application
Hopefully you have Git installed (msysgit downloads)
Init empty Git repository
git init test1
Copy your files to this directory (download from here: https://github.com/appharbor/appharbor-splash )
Add files and subdirectories
git add .
Create your remote repository
git remote add appharbor https://username@appharbor.com/test-178.git
Commit your code
git commit -m 'firstcommit'
Almost forgot, we are working on Git - so don't forget to push...
git push appharbor master

Till here everything should work but I had a small issue, got this error: error setting certificate verify locations:
I've found out that it is all about versions (git --version) - So check yours and upgrade if needed

Here you can find great cheat sheet for Git commands: http://ionrails.com/2009/08/07/git-commands-adding-and-committing-cheatsheet/

Btw, AppHarbor support Databases and Running unit-testing after successful builds – I will post about those features later on.

ReSharper bindings got mad

Shani Raba — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 22:41:55 GMT

Lately my “find usages” (shift+F12) stopped working.

I tried to restore ReSharper again and again but it fails (ReSharper –> find usages –> General –> restore ReSharper)

I’ve found out that some other shortcuts still working (for example: find usages advanced, CTRL+SHIFT+ALT+F12)

Then I checked the visual studio binding (Tools->Options->Keyboard) and find out that ReSharper.Find binding is missing.
I thought about fixing this manually – but god knows what also is not working.

And then I found out the magical button called RESET -> clicking on this and running the restore ReSharper again solve this issue!

Cheers…

Subscribe to the new human-debugger @ feedburner

Shani Raba — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 22:24:05 GMT

Following Oren’s post I thought it would be great to post my feedburner too.

subscribe to my new feed - http://feeds.feedburner.com/human-debugger
I also changed the Rss-Icons to point to the new feed – so feel free to click them

Thanks.

Adding FB:Like to my dasblog

Shani Raba — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 22:17:11 GMT

Finally I’ve found some time to customize my blog with tiny change:

FB:Like Plugin – Whenever you LIKE it – let me know. This will be shared with your friends and help me spread my ideas.

Tip #1 - FB:Like Plugin
If you are using dasblog and you want to add this to your theme use the PermaLinkUrl macro - href=”<%PermalinkUrl%>”

Tip #2 – measure using FB insights
You can track the trends here http://www.facebook.com/insights BUT in order to see it you should add meta-tag your head <meta property="fb:admins" content="user_id" />

Have fun.

Delver – Shop With Your Friends

Shani Raba — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 20:07:42 GMT

Delver is a “Social Shopping Platform”, You are more than welcome to check our website at www.delver.com

We are still in “closed beta” but, leave me a comment or an email and I will send you an invitation.

We also opened our Blog where we will post about new features, technology and other cool stuff.

Video Streaming – installing on IIS and Apache

Shani Raba — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 22:01:30 GMT

After we understand what video stream is all about and we wrote our first piece of SWFObject in Javascript. let’s try to have this working on our servers, of course that such things tend to fail. But let’s understand why…

First thing we need to understand is whether such failures occur due to my code, file format or server configuration.
let’s have a simple check trying to access the file directly using our browser.

IIS7:

configure your IIS to serve the following files: swf and mp4 using Static Content

<add name="FlashFiles" path="*.swf" verb="*" modules="StaticFileModule" scriptProcessor="" resourceType="File" requireAccess="Script" />
<add name="VideoFiles" path="*.mp4" verb="*" modules="StaticFileModule" scriptProcessor="" resourceType="File" requireAccess="Script" />

Setting handler(s) won’t be good enough, requesting the server again will return “404.3 – mime type missing”.
Don’t worry Adding new mime type to IIS 7 - is easy:

<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <staticContent>
            <mimeMap fileExtension=".mp4" mimeType="video/mp4" />
        </staticContent>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

Apache:

While installing the static content on our static servers (apache) – we’ve found out that requesting the files from firefox return with “no content length” and “incorrect mime type”
adding the correct mime type to the /etc/mime.type

video/mp4     mp4

Check the Request\Response we’ve found out that our servers are still returning compressed response , googling it find out that Firefox cann’t handle gzipped video stream,
compression was selectively disabled by adding the following line to /etc/httpd/conf.d/static.d/static.conf:

SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png|mp4)$ no-gzip dont-vary

Apache solution provided by Tomer G.

Video Streaming – SWFObject + JQuery

Shani Raba — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 21:28:23 GMT

You can read here my introduction about video streaming.

In order to embed rich media content into web pages and have our code compatible with different browsers we will use the SWFObject 2.2.
The SWFObject will render the right tags for the right browsers.

Here is a short, unobtrusive JS for showing your movie:

   1:  $(function() {

   2:    var videoBase = 'http://static-server/';

3:

   4:    $('.VideoTeaserArea').click(function() {

   5:      $(this).openLightBox("<div id='media'></div>");

   6:      playMovie('intro-movie.swf');

   7:    });

8:

   9:    function playMovie(videoFile) {

  10:      var videoUrl = videoBase + videoFile;

  11:      var att = { data: videoUrl, width: "640", height: "378", allowfullscreen:true};

  12:      var params = { flashvars: "autostart=true"};

  13:      var id = "media";

  14:      var myObject = swfobject.createSWF(att, params, id);

  15:    }

  16:  });

- line 2: Our movie directory, better place such content on static server or even CDNs.
- line 4: VideoTeaserArea is a class name that we spread all over our site - clicking on it will trigger the movie.
- line 5: openLightBox – on our site the movie will be opened in a light box.
- line 11: the videoUrl, will be seen in the configured size. allowfullscreen is false by default. read more here
- line 12: flashVars will be used here in order to have our movie start as our light-box will be opened.
- line 13: The placeholder we want to replace while loading the movie
- line 14: Add reference to the swfObject.js in order to have its instance(read bellow). The createSWF method is a low level API which enable combining with other Javascript libraries.

in order to have this code running we must add script tag:
<script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"></script>

Now, after having embedding SWF to our site - Let’s understand how to make this work on IIS and Apache.

Video Streaming - introduction

Shani Raba — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 21:25:34 GMT

So our mission is to have our website play a short intro movie.

Wiki Definition

“Progressive download is a term used to describe the transfer of digital media files from a server to a client, typically using the HTTP protocol when initiated from a computer. The consumer may begin playback of the media before the download is complete. The key difference between streaming media and progressive download is in how the digital media data is received and stored by the end user device that is accessing the digital media.”

Actually the “progressive download” feature implemented in most media players allows them to begin playing the file as soon as enough data received.

File formats: SWF VS. FLV

Both are Adobe formats.
FLV is a video container, intended to contain only audio\video
SWF can contain animations, games, applications and videos
SWF uses a lossless compression and is limited to a certain number of frames. Due to it is not compressed some files can be too big for use in the internet.
Large websites like Google, Amazon are using the FLV file formats

After this short explanation, we are ready to start:

Create a video file in a common streaming media format (in our case: Camtasia -> SWF, mp4)
Upload the files to your Web Server
Check whether this link is working from common browsers
Link from you Web Pages (HTML tags or JS)

In the next posts we will talk about steps 3 and 4.

For now you can keep reading about step 1 - here