Jonathon Rossi

Migration to Octopress

2012-11-07T12:04:49Z

I’ve been very quiet on this blog for quite some time now. I partly blame my limited use of my blog on the dread of having to use the poor WYSIWYG editor that shiped as part of the version of the Subtext blog engine my blog was running.

I’ve finally taken the plunge like many others to move to a blogging platform where the server side is powered by just static files generated from clean Markdown files reducing vender lock-in if I decide to move to another blogging platform in 5 years time. I’ve chosen Octopress (which builds on Jekyll) as it provides all the goodies that a usual blog needs.

I’m not going to explain how easy it is to set up, as I’ll let others do that, but I’ll provide some resources that I found useful:

Octopress has built in support for Disqus Comments, but since the value of the comments on my blog since I started have been so low and the spam ratio so high, I’ve decided to not have any comments on my new blog, and have enabled the twitter integration if anyone would like to discuss any of my posts.

Octopress’s script to generate a new post (rake new_post) does not seem to handle time zones very well by default, everything will work fine as long as you stay in the same time zone. This caused me problems when I was manually migrating the content from the Subtext database. I made a change to the new post script to always store the UTC time in the post’s “front matter” which you might fine useful.

That’s all from me for now, but I hope to make more use of my blog, because reflecting over my blog posts of the last 5 years has shown me that I’ve definitely come a long way and that I now more than ever have something to contribute back.

Azure Endpoints and Load Balancing at the Brisbane Azure User Group

2012-05-26T13:40:00Z

Last week (16 May 2012) I presented at the 4th Brisbane Azure User Group for a session on Azure endpoints, load balancing and the Azure Traffic Manager. I’ve uploaded my slides and a screenshot of the demo application to test the Windows Azure Traffic Manager.

Download Slides

Sync TeamCity build configurations with Git branches

2011-11-27T15:18:00Z

A few months ago at work we moved from Subversion to Git, which has caused us to make many process changes within our development team. By forcing everyone to work in a new Git branch for every task has added overhead to the build management process. Several of us have slowly been getting tired of manually creating new TeamCity build configurations just to run a single build that we later have to manually remove after our release managers have merged our changes.

To remove some of this burden we needed TeamCity to automatically create configurations for all our private development branches, so in lieu of the excellent JetBrains team building this feature (TW-16052), I very quickly wrote an app that does just that for us.

I was asked by a few in the TeamCity issue above to provide the code we are using, so I have uploaded a slightly modified version of the code to GitHub. The app is written in C# and uses the libgit2sharp library, but could easily be ported to another language or the command line tools respectively.

So that a few things make sense when you read it, our private development branch convention is “private/username/anything”, so with a single TeamCity project for these branches it will name them “username-anything”. You’ll see that when it creates the build configuration it creates it from our branch template and sets the BRANCH_NAME configuration variable, which we use as the Ref name in a VCS root (i.e. %BRANCH_NAME%).

https://gist.github.com/1397643

Castle Visual Studio Integration 0.4.0

2011-03-07T05:46:27Z

I have been extremely quiet on my blog for the last 12 months or so, however I’m alive and well, I just haven’t had much to say.

After many requests for Visual Studio 2010 support for Castle Visual Studio Integration, I did the pretty painless work back in November 2010, but just didn’t get around to releasing it.

You can now download the source code from GitHub and get the binaries via the Visual Studio Extension Manager. See the CVSI page for full details.

Bricks - A Preview of a .NET Package Manager

2010-04-11T11:02:40Z

Today, I am announcing the first public preview of a RubyGems-inspired package manager for .NET, Bricks.

Bricks is very basic at this point, however over the coming months I intend to continue improving it and its central repository to benefit both myself and the wider community. At the moment the only thing I can guarantee is that things will break because supporting backwards compatibility is not important.

I welcome you to download and take a look at Bricks. If you have ideas or want to discuss things I would prefer the discussion to occur on the mailing list, rather than the comments here.