Wednesday 11 January 2012 at 10:30 am
I’m one of those managers who believe your team being involved in ‘the community’ is of excellent benefit not just to their own personal growth but also the quality of software they produce; I also believe lack of recognition of this only leads to demotivate or worse - high staff turnover.
We have several schemes in-house to reward or compensate for personal time spent including reimbursement of expenses to ‘events’ and in the case of all-day attendance a day-in-lieu. I now don’t think this is enough to /encourage/ participation and contribution back to the community.
With this in mind I’ve been playing with the idea of introducing some kind of credits scheme for my team and the comment made on twitter seemed to spark some interest:
@Cranialstrain: Wonder if some kind of team credits scheme for community participation and contribution might fly at work (e.g. blogging/StackOverflow) :=/
I thought it might be good to crowd-source this idea into a more concrete proposal, perhaps one you could take to your company too?
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Saturday 07 January 2012 at 7:00 pm
There is nothing worse when mixing business with pleasure or in this case - commercial priorities with open-source - than a battle between the heart and the mind; certainly that's the saddening feeling I have about Spark.
In the beginniing..
We started using #FubuMVC nearly six months ago and have never looked back; being somewhat senior I am fortunate to have the privilege (and confidence of my superiors) to make decisions about technical direction. I can say without hesitation that even if Razor support had existed we'd have pushed forward with Spark anyway and reviewed regularly to validate our decision.
I know this wouldn't hold true for many Software Houses but there is a significant amount of awesomeness at our company and this starts with not only a commitment to personal growth, exposure to technologies, but also a realization that we need to support the OSS community.
D-Day
Cutting a long story short the ultimate review day came for both FubuMVC and the other technologies we'd employed, sitting in the meeting room with the Technical Lead and CTO I wasn't nervous as I already knew where the problems lay and it wasn't with FubuMVC.
On the whole I'd loved every single day using Spark, it had been a breath of fresh air and a wonderful challenge to master a new engine and syntax, it even had me digging through the FubuMVC and Spark internals to understand it's behavior, it is in my humble opinion a winner in all regards but one. Intellisense.
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Wednesday 04 January 2012 at 12:30 pm
Always keen that our adopted environment shouldn't dictate tooling it was important that we could achieve a good level integration between with testing tools and Team Foundation Server; however as TFS 2010 moved to using web services and XAML build workflow it can look rather challenging.
Interesting note
The snippets below are based around NUnit testing tool but it could be employed just as easily for others that are able to output their results XML in the same format, xUnit being a fine example.
Looking at integration we identified two essential requirements;
- NUnit-Console test runner executes as part of the build workflow
- Test results are published back into TFS 2010 and statistics
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Sunday 01 January 2012 at 12:01 am
Despite my love for all things DVCS, DAG, and Git it's no secret that there is one area of TFS 2010 that I am quite fond of - Visual Studio Lab Management. Utilising Microsoft Hyper-V technology it allows us to manage and use virtual machines in building, testing, and deploying applications.
One post is not enough to cover this in detail (in fact I suspect a 3-day workshop might be more likely) but one element I was keen to share with you was our deployment script that enables our automated cradle-to-grave testing environment and which sits alongside our CI (Continuous Integration) and automated testing strategy.
Elevation & Execution
To achieve this we needed the workflow capability to deploy and configure an IIS 7 site on a completely fresh and clean deployed environment; importantly one with no prior manual configuration or deployments. As much of the IIS functionality would need elevated privileges this presented a couple of problems;
- How to bypass PS ExecutionPolicy that by Windows installation would default to "Restricted"
- How could we elevate the script once spawned without manual interaction
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