Entries for November 2008

I've been a little bit peeved at the so called discounts that retailers have been hawking. They have been complaining about bad sales, but have not really done much to get the shoppers' attention. Their Black Friday sales are pathetic, at least to me.

In order to let out some of my frustration, I thought I give everybody a 50% off deal for the rest of the month. Enter "black_friday_2008", without quotes, at checkout to get half-off on PainlessSVN Professional. That's right, it will be $24.98 until November 30.

I'm currently working on 1.1, which will be a free update to anybody who purchases PainlessSVN now.

UPDATE
This offer has been extended until December 6. Enjoy!

The integration that I had with my ecommerce DNN module (ActivePurchase) broke when I moved the site to PowerDNN. I have been fighting with this for a couple weeks now.

Here's what happened:
The part that sends the serial number did not work anymore, because the SMTP server was not on the same network. Changing the settings did not work at first. I went googling for sending emails from DNN. I got some good hits for sending email from inside DNN modules.

The API for this is fairly simple (relatively). You first make a reference to DotNetNuke.Services.Mail. Then you make a call to the Mail.SendMail() method, with the appropriate parameters. There are 5 overloads. The call from a module would look like this:

DotNetNuke.Services.Mail.Mail.SendMail(FromAddress, SendTo, "", Subject, Body, "", "", "", "", "", "")

Well, that didn't work. So now I was scratching my head.

I am using a special type of integration called a custom step, which is just an assembly in the bin directory for the DotNetNuke install. I had to go and dig into the event log that DNN keeps. There were several exceptions there. The message was that the SMTP connection needed to be authenticated. WTF??

Custom DNN modules use the SMTP settings that the administrator has setup. However, the custom step does not get treated as a module. So I had to do this:

DotNetNuke.Services.Mail.Mail.SendMail(FromAddress, SendTo, "", Subject, Body, "", "", "", "", UserName, Password)

Once I did that, the custom step started sending emails like before. YES!

Now that this is fixed, I can get my undivided attention back to PainlessSVN and SVN Backup Widget stuff.

My grandma died at 4:30 AM this morning. It wasn't unexpected, but it is still leaves me feeling sad. I got a call from my father this morning letting me know that it happened. I talked with my mom afterwards, and she seemed quite upbeat.

Grandma Petra had a stroke a while back, and my mom has been taken care of her (Petra is my mom's mother). My mom was really sad that her mom was in such condition. I think we all feel a sense of relief that she's not suffering anymore.

I did get to talk to Abuelita last week on the phone. That was the first time since her stroke that she sounded lucid. I knew that was going to be the last time I would be talking to her.

I did not want to hold this in, and talking about it here gives me a sense of closure. I hope that Abuelita finds Braulio, her husband, soon on the other side.

One good thing that I got as her legacy is a warm feeling towards blonds. She was naturally blond, so that's where I get that. ;) It took me a long time to figure that out. Thanks Abulelita!

I spent last night working on SVNManagerLib. I was adding support for the new global configuration command-line switch that came with Subversion 1.5. I got the bulk of it done, but I still need to make sure the ancilliary code works correctly. I found that the user code was not working correctly. It was time for bed when I got to this point.

I'm wishing that I had integration tests done already, for exactly this sort of situation. I ordered Working Effectively with Legacy Code to help me with unit and integration testing. I haven't had the chance to do unit testing in the workplace, so I have to take this into my own hands.

Anyways, this feature will be pushed out with PainlessSVN 1.1. I still have a couple more features that I need to get completely done, before I get 1.1 out the door.

I got a view attached to the server leaf in PainlessSVN. This will give you at a glance info on what version of svnserve you are running, and whether or not it is running as a service. Here's a screenie:

Since Murphy is not messing with me anymore, I have been able to get a flurry of stuff moving forward. I'm also working on finishing up the load dump file feature. Here's a screenie of this:

I'm adding support for the new command-line switch for svnserve that lets you specify a config file that will be use for all your repositories. This is only available if you are using Subversion 1.5 and newer. Here's a screenie of that:

After much work reinstalling Vista and Visual Studio 2008, I found out that I still can't debug 32bit MMC 3.0 snapins in Vista 64. You still need to attach the debugger manually to the running process. Unfortunately, this means that you won't be able to debug stuff while your code is loading.

I really was not ready to go back to 32 bit, so I compromised by creating a VMWare image that contains Windows XP SP3, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, and all the other necessary dev tools.

I now have a rig that I know always lets me debug. TortoiseSVN makes it simple to keep my VM and desktop synched.

Score that a WIN!

SAPIEN Technologies recently released a free tool to create GUIs for your PowerShell cmdlets. Here's a blog post with a screenshot. It's called PrimalForm.

It can be downloaded from here. (quick registration needed)