Wow, I got clobbered by the flu... again! This is the third time I got the flu this year. Actually, it's probably two bad head colds and this last time was actually the flu. In any case it was pretty bad. Had 100F fever for about a week and a half. No medicine was able to lower the fever. I'm in the last stages. So I'm down now to mild coughing to hacking off a lung.
I'm hoping that I'm done with getting sick this year. This spring has been the nastiest in my life by far. Anyways, hope not many of you got sick this spring.
Here's one of the reasons I like living in Utah:
This is just the view from the front of the building for my day job. My house is even closer to the mountains.
I think I have nailed down the different product version of PainlessSVN. This is not set in stone, but this will at least give you a sense of where I'm going with this.
PainlessSVN Product Map:
- Professional - Aimed at mISV
- Workgroup - Aimed at multiple programmer shops, use Windows ACL
- Enterprise - Same as Workgroup in addition of ActiveDirectory and possibly other LDAP sources
- DotNetNuke - For the DotNetNuke platform
I know there is a need for a product like PainlessSVN because the free (and very limited) server winform app that I bundle with the SVNManagerLib always gets a LOT more downloads than the library. This library is on SourceForge and I haven't advertised it much.
PainlessSVN is a small enough project that will allow me to get my feet wet as a micro ISV. I'm very risk averse at this point in life, especially since I have a family that depends on me. I already know that I won't get rich right away, but that is not the goal for now. Hopefully, I can quit working for somebody else in a few years and do this full time. Time will tell...
I found that being organized, to any degree, is a boon to productivity. Well, Duh you say. My little operation has enough moving parts now that things were starting to fall between the cracks. The repository configuration dialog is a big example of what I am talking about.
I've been hearing a lot about Getting Things Done (GTD). The biggest meme out of the whole GTD movement, is basically to know what needs to be done and quantify it. Once it becomes an entity on a medium, be it paper, or electrons, then it gets pulled from the metaverse into meatspace. This now makes it possible to wrestle with it. It is tangible. It has substance. It can be dealt with.
There are quite a few software systems that do GTD, some specificly geared with GTD in mind, other more like glorified todo lists. It's not really important what you choose, as the effectiveness of the system for YOU. I've tried several programs but none seem to do what I need. Part of the problem is that I'm very short in funds, and couldn't try some of the commercial ones. I ended up using different programs for different contexts. At my day job I use one of my whiteboards, and when the relationships between items get too complex and too many details to keep track I use ToDoList from AbastractSpoon Software. I use Axosoft OnTime for anything related to SystemWidgets. It is great that they have a free one person license. The only thing that really annoys me with OnTime is that it lacks integration with DotNetNuke. But, I can live with that. I will just have to make DNN modules myself.
I had lost access to my previous installation of OnTime when my workstation kick the bucket. I didn't realize how much of a difference it made on my planning and day to day code work. Not only that, but I saw that I still need to do several things related to ecommerce that I had forgotten about. These systems, no matter what you pick, is like having your own personal secretary.
I'm currently working on a dialog to deal with repository settings.
I had left this feature out of version one for some strange reason. Well, actually that was because I was disorganized. I found out that I needed this, when I was looking at my repository's layout. I wanted to make sure that nobody can access my repository but me. That's when it hit me that I didn't have a way to manage this graphically. D'OH!
I came across BittBox a few days ago. This site and blog have an amazing collection of web graphic freebies. I've already used some of them to spice up this website. I'm thinking of using the glowing spheres for the buy now and download buttons. Here's the URL:
I just downloaded all the latest bits for InnoSetup tonight. I want to have an install for Beta 1 as soon as possible, so that I can start getting feedback from people. This should be an interesting challange. I'm excited that I found a download dll that allows installs to download missing bits. This should make it easier to get the needed Microsoft Management Console (MMC) 3.0 stuff onto customer's computers.
I now have all of my VMs ready to go. My main concern is getting this install to work with Vista's UAC. I admit that I have been one of those programmers that didn't pay much attention to Microsoft's best practices when it came to non-admin functionality. I have mostly worked with internal apps, except for the time when I was part of the team that built the first version of Franklin Covey's Plan Plus. I still have the retail box that was signed by all the people in the team.
It feels good to be back working on PainlessSVN!