Finally.  A book on NHibernate!!!

I was the first to guess that this was the secret news so I suppose I will be getting a free copy.  Maybe I can be a technical reviewer for them (though I’m sure they already have one lined up).

Pierre Henri Kuaté should do an excellent job with the book, especially knowing that Bauer and King are behind him!  (If you don’t already know, they wrote the original Hibernate in Action — which is a must-have)

I gave a talk on Continuous Integration last night at the Houston Sark Office.  Thanks to all who attended.

We had pizza and discussed some of the processes and principles behind CI, as well as some of the tools to get you there.  I did a live demo of an app, connected to source control and a build server.

A-la Jeremy Miller, I had my CCTray audio clips setup, so when the build failed, you’d hear Napolean Dynamite say “Freakin Idiot!”

I think it went well, however for those of you who attended, I’d really like to hear your thoughts!  Please take a second to leave a comment.

Here are the files used in the demo:

continuous integration.zip (8323 KB)

(included are the sample project, cruise control config, and power-point slides)

I left out the build server installation because it was over 70mb.  It consisted of Subversion binaries, Nant, and a Cruise folder with some project state data.

I got amazing help from Jean-Paul Boodhoo, who has a 9 part NAnt starter series, which ends on a screencast of setting up CruiseControl!

Additional resources were:

• James Shore – Continuous Integration on a Dollar a Day
• Martin Fowler – Continuous Integration
• Pragmatic Project Automation by Mike Clark 
• Expert .NET Delivery with CruiseControl and NAnt by Marc Holmes

Many of you already know, I got married to Silvia on December 30th, 2006!

We had a beautiful ceremony with lots of friends and family.  Everyone had a good time.  My wife and I are quite the happy couple!  As promised, here are some pictures from the wedding.  The entire album is avaiable on flickr.

 

In my search for the one-command automated build, I’ve often stumbled upon how to deal with the database while writing code on a multi-developer project.

Most of us use source control, however only a small fraction of us actually store the database scripts in source control.  This is a powerful tool that is often missed completely.

This is a development process I see frequently:

• get the latest version of the source from VSS
• exclusively check-out the code files you need
• make changes to the code and the database to enable your new features
• check in the code once it is all done
• do a sql compare to the dev/test databases to get a delta script
• run the compare script in the test environment and deploy the project to test.

There are a number flaws in this process, but it doesn’t stop people from continuing along this path for an entire project.  Rather than point out everything that scares me from that list, I’ll focus on the database portion.

What’s wrong with just making changes and then doing a SQL compare?  Well, for starters… that compare script is used once and thrown away.  It is never checked into source control.  If we need to restore the state of an application as of 4 months ago, we can do it with the code, but not the database.  The database only stays on the current version, and there’s no going back.  Another drawback is that the process is a manual one, and we want to get into automation.  Lastly, SQL Compare (and SQL Delta) are both licensed tools, and not all of us can purchase them.  At home I cannot justify the cost, so I am forced to come up with something else.

The Ruby on Rails community is lucky.  Baked into the Rails framework is something called migrations.

Let’s say you’re on a ruby project for managing houses for sale.  You get a new feature request where you want to know how many bathrooms a house has (strange request, huh?).  You make the changes to model (adding a bathrooms property) but now you need the database to support it.  So you type rails script/generate migration Add_House_Bathrooms.  This will generate a ruby code file in the /project/db/migrations/xxx_Add_House_Bathrooms.rb file.  (the xxx will be replaced with sequential ordering, so rails knows what order to execute the migrations) Inside this file are 2 methods:  up and down.  This is, how to I create the changes, and how do I remove the changes.  Inside these methods you can write code that adds and removes the column you want.

So then when you need to deploy, rails knows what version the database is on (by having a version table), and can apply the migrations since that version to bring the database up to speed with the code.  If something goes wrong, it can roll the changes back to the original version (by using the down methods).

You can even create migrations that load dummy test data, or default values for static lookup tables.

It usually only takes a little while for a cool idea to make its way into the .NET world, and migrations are no exception.  The Castle Project is a collection of many RoR-esque utilities packaged into one.  One of those utilities is called Migrator, which lives in the Generator project.

To generate a migration, you type:

generate migration Add_House_Bathrooms

With this, you can enable this style of migration in .NET.  You create migrations, these end up as C# code files in your db/migrations folder.  The same concept applies.

The migrator is fairly young, but it was extracted from CastleContrib into the main Castle trunk, so that is a good sign that it is here to stay and will have active support.

When I have more time to play with this, I’ll try and post a little demo.  For now, check out the castle project at http://www.castleproject.org

What does your team do to manage database changes and enable versioning?

InfoQ has published a small book on DDD called Domain Driven Design Quickly.  They're giving away the PDF for free!  The print version is only $22, so I'll probably buy it if I like the PDF version.

Check it out:
http://www.infoq.com/minibooks/domain-driven-design-quickly

I came across this site today, which boats 53 CSS Techniques you can't live without.

Normally I don't like to blog just links, but this one is definitely worth it.  It covers most of the major techniques, both simple and advanced for styling web pages.

My latest assignment at work was somewhat small, and the requirements were fairly straightforward so I got to work immediately.  My early requests to meet with my user were met with “let’s get a demo first.”  Given the availability of all parties involved, this took longer than I would have liked.

So here I am, 60 work-hours later, I have a fully functional, ready-to-deploy application, and I have yet to meet with my user.  Let’s sincerely hope he doesn’t decide that this isn’t what he wanted in the first place.

Then my office-mate recognized our new development process.  Ladies and gentlement, I give you Eliga! 

Eliga is the opposite of agile.  Here is our manifesto:

Forget users, they will only slow me down!  Don’t disturb me when I’m coding you peons!  I’ll hear your impressions when I’m finished!  I can’t be bothered with workflow changes!  They’re already coded and set in stone!

Well the internet sure is a tiny place. I was tagged by JP Boodhoo and Aaron Murrell.

Here it goes, 5 things that you probably didn't know about me before:

• I was born on a farm in Oregon.  I still remember my favorite cow (Jesse) from our farm.  One day he was gone.  Where did he go?
• I used to be insane on rollerblades.  My friends and I would jump pretty much anything.  It’s actually amazing that I didn’t break any bones jumping over staircases and stuff, especially since I am so accident prone.
• I got my first guitar when I was 7, however I didn’t really pick up playing until 12 or so.  I still play, but not as often as I would like to.
• I first got into computer programming watching my dad write a hangman game from scratch.  I picked up QBASIC when I was 13 or 14, and I would write little screen savers using the primitive graphics drawing routines it had.  My pinnacle QBASIC program was a hoax that my friend and I pulled on his younger brother.  We called it “DelBug” and it was supposed to remove bugs from programs, such as Doom 2, which just-so-happened to be causing him troubles.  It went through a series of fake menus and ended up pretending to format his hard drive.  It was great!  He almost wet himself when it started flashing and rebooting in a loop.
• And lastly, I just got married!  (Pictures coming soon).  Silvia and I had a beautiful ceremony and lots of close friends and family were present.

And I’ll tag:

• Venkat Subramaniam
• Shey Sewani
• Tim Gifford
• Ben Day
• and my sweetheart Silvia 

 

I received a black Zune for Christmas, despite it’s lackluster sales and reviews by some.

I resisted getting an iPod for the longest time, because I wouldn’t buy into the hype.

I compared a number of features to decide between a Zune and an 30gb iPod Video.

Screen Size – The Zune has a very large screen compared to the iPod.  For video you turn it sideways for a widescreen view, and it makes watching movies very do-able.

Interface – Call me crazy, but I’m not too fond of the iPod interface.  When I used the iPod Video at the Apple Store, I was immediately annoyed that it asked me every time if I wanted TV on or TV off when I clicked on a video.  The TV wasn’t even connected!  For a company so anal about usability, making the users make a redundant and unnecessary choice before showing videos is a no-no.  The interface for the Zune is easy to use and the buttons make sense.  The iPod isn’t bad, I just don’t care for it very much.

Wireless – I originally thought this was one of the coolest features of the Zune.  It uses standard WiFi to transfer data between 2 Zunes, however it doesn’t connect to my wireless network at home, which is a disappointment.  I don’t know anybody that has a Zune, so I haven’t yet tried out the Social aspect of it.  There are hacks that allow you to transfer a file unlimited times between Zunes wirelessly, but it involves registry hacks on the host computer, and renaming the file as an image.  That makes it pretty much useless because I have a usb thumb drive in my pocket that can do the same thing easier.

Podcasts – I’ve become addicted to a number of podcasts, some with video, so I wanted good podcast support.  I was disappointed to find that the Zune has almost NO notion of podcasts.  Sure I can point the Zune software (which sucks, more on that later) to a folder where I download podcasts, but they don’t live in a separate section on the Zune.  I hope Microsoft fixes this in a future firmware update.  iPod / iTunes wins on this hands-down.  I’m currently using uTorrent for BT feeds, and Doppler for video/audio feeds.  These go into my podcasts folder which gets picked up by the Zune software.  The video has to be re-encoded to the Zune format, which is annoying.  I would think that WMV would be playable out of the box.

Video – I originally dismissed Video as excessive in a portable player, but now it’s my favorite feature.  I have a lot of downloaded tv shows, and I plan on putting them on the Zune to watch while I work out.  I ride an exercise bike to strengthen my leg and I can easily watch a TV show in that time.  The problem I see now, however, is that my shows are in Divx or Xvid format, which I have to re-encode using Any Video Converter to AVI or MPEG, then it has to be encoded again in the Zune format.  I’m hoping this process gets easier, or that the Zune will support Divx in the future.  One thing that would be nice is if I could encode video before I’m ready to sync.  I find it annoying that I have to surrender my Zune for at least 30 minutes if I need to transfer a couple diggnation episodes.

Music – This is a no-brainer for most MP3 players.  Both the iPod and Zune have excellent usage in terms of usability.  I like the large album art that is displayed during playback on the Zune, though I hear the new iPods do this as well.

Size – The iPod wins in this category.  The Zune is about 1/2” thick, which is quite large.  The iPod is about 1/4” thick, so it’s twice as thin.  I decided that the other features were worth the trade-off in Size.

PC Software – The Zune software sucks.  Big time.  It reminds me a lot of iTunes, but it doesn’t really deliver.  I ignore the Marketplace, so for me it’s just a mechanism to transfer files over.  I’d like to use MediaMonkey, but it’s not supported yet.  I found a few mistagged files while listening to music on the Zune, so I flagged them.  They showed up in my Zune “inbox” the next time I sync’ed.  From there it shows me the file, but it doesn’t let me edit the tags!  How stupid is that?  The only option I have is to delete the file and look at Properties, which is useless to me. 

The Zune software also has zero support for subscribing to podcasts, let along distinguishing my podcasts between regular music aside from Genre.

Audiobooks – I haven’t yet tried listening to an Audiobook, however I plan on it.  I listed to the Da Vinci code about 8 months ago and I loved it.  I’m hoping that it will be easy to listen to Audiobooks.

All in all, you can’t go wrong with an iPod or a Zune.  Both are fantastic devices, and I am very happy with my Zune.  I hope for a few improvements via firmware soon, but it’s a new device and I think Microsoft will catch on soon.

Now, the question is… do I attempt the 80gb mod?

Silvia’s family is in town, and it is a lot of fun to have so many kids in the house.  They (9 people) drove down from upstate New York.  It took them about 23 hours driving time and they were very tired when they arrived.

On Christmas Eve, we all spent about 4 hours wrapping gifts and talking over coffee.  It was fun, but we were all exhausted.

We had presents for all of the children, and it was quite a sight!  We probably had 80 presents under the tree.  The morning arrived and the kids went crazy!  There was wrapping paper everywhere, but I think everyone enjoyed their gifts.

I received a Zune from Silvia, which I will write about next.

Silvia’s family will stay for our wedding, which happens this Saturday.