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I gotta say this is one of the coolest things I've heard in a while! http://www.svniis.org/ This is start, but it doesn't go far enough for me. The current setup still needs an Apache server running. The author is planning on hacking WebDAV directly, if there is enough interest. I would definitely love being able to get rid of Apache altogether. That's why I run my Subversion servers with svnserve.exe I installed ProcessMonitor from Systernals in my Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition SP2. The fist time I ran it, Windows gave me a Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD). The stop code was 0x0000007. I rebooted the VM, and was good to go. After a few hours of tweaking, I found the root problem. I have a solution, but I'm not happy with it. Windows 2003 is looking in C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727, but not in C:\WINDOWS\System32. Microsoft installs the MMC 3.0 libraries in C:\WINDOWS\System32. Unfortunately, the path-looking routines are ignoring the PATH environment variable completely. MMC 3.0 snapins are registered in the system by using the InstallUtil.exe utility in C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727. The brute force solution is to copy the needed assemblies to the PainlessSVN directory, or to C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727. I really don't like either one, because I hate messing with an user's system files, but that's my network administrator experience talking. The strange thing, is that I have a routine in the install package to do exactly this. It's not working on Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition SP2, but works fine on SP1. At least I'm making some headway with this ridiculous issue... A friend of mine is working on an admin tool for the Subversion server on the MacOS. Here's what he's got so far: 
I believe he's using the SVNManagerLib library that I created for this. I'll need to get more details from him. He's the same guy that create WinTivoDecode. I'm disappointed with Eziriz's tech support of late. I have been trying to contact them for about 3 weeks now. At first, I thought they were ignoring me. I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt when I read the thread called "Anybody home at Plimus?" on the Business Of Software forums at Joel On Software. Basically, the thread talks about Plimus' email support probably having their spam filters too aggressive and eating a LOT of their emails. Several posters mentioned that using the online forms works very well. I decided to use the online form at Eziriz's website, but that went into a black hole as well. What is frustrating about the whole thing is the total lack of non-communication. Nothing, zip, zilch, nada, not even an email saying that they got any of my emails. I don't think I've been a bad customer. I now know that MMC 3.0 snapins are a major pain to protect, because it constantly breaks .NET Reactor. Heck, even a "You are a customer that drains our support time, and unprofitable" is much better than this total silence. At least then, I would know where I stand and could take my business elsewhere. PainlessSVN has been delayed because of this. I have a significant issue with the protected assembly not working on Windows 2003 Server Standard Edition. I'm in a bind, because my budget for protection tools is gone. I'm stuck with .NET Reactor. I does work very well for non-MMC snapins, though. I haven't had any problems with any of the other utilities I protected with it. So Eziriz now falls in the disappointing category of very good product, with abysmal tech support. In case you have been living under a rock, Phil Haak and Scott Hanselman have both joined Microsoft. Here's Scott's blog post: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/bluebadge.aspx Here's Phil's blog post: http://haacked.com/archive/2007/09/17/why-is-microsoft-removing-my-mvp-status.aspx I actually did my stint with Microsoft as well, but I did not work in one of their product divisions. I worked for Avanade, which is a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture. I was hired to work for projects in the Salt Lake City area. Unfortunately, the projects dried up over here, and they wanted me to move to Seattle. I refused, as I have a large family, with teenagers. I refuse to move them, especially since I now have roots here. The moral of the story is that you MUST work in the Products division, or you will not experience the best of Microsoft. This leads me to Hector's Tech Employment Corollary: "The closer your chosen technology is to the money-making processes of the business, the better treatment you will get from the company." I'm currently employed by The Generations Network. My current position directly generates money for the company. This company has the best working environments I've had the pleasure to be in. I will create another post, with more details about my employer. My day job had a reorganization last week. A lot of developers were let go. Fortunately, I wasn't one of them. My group (was 4) lost 1 developer. We are scrambling to learn what the other developer did. Our group had already taken work from another developer that was let go earlier. I was reporting directly to the Director of IS, but now I report to the group's tech lead. In a way this is good, because I can actually find my boss. My previous boss was pretty hard to pin down for questions. All of the running around has taken a toll mentally, so by the end of the day I'm bushed. This is some very good motivation to get PainlessSVN going, and stop working for the man (WFTM). I had a very enthusiastic beta tester that has been tracking down problems for me today. I really hate to break when we are having such a good communication going, so I kept FinalBuilder open and been doing release beta builds on the fly. This has allowed me to make very fast turn arounds on bug fixes, so that I can get them to the beta testers when I have them engaged. I also noticed a very nice feature today as well. I was making a build just now, and had gone back to the forums to make a post when I noticed a MSN-like window popping up, letting me know that the build was successful. 
S-W-E-E-T! When debugging MMC snapins, you have to add them to the MMC console manually. I found something quite amusing that I haven't noticed before. I was actually thinking that I needed a nap, when I noticed this: 
I thought that was pretty amusing, but that might be because I'm pretty tired.  I just squeezed in the hook script visualization feature to PainlessSVN. It currently only shows what hooks are in the repository, but I have plans for this in the future. This is one of those things that has always bugged me. Hook scripts are very powerful, but underused feature of Subversion. This feature has made it into version 1.0. Anyways, here's a screenshot: 
I have been using NAnt since around version 0.81. It is more powerful than batch files, but still as annoying. Unfortunately, NAnt has stagnated at version 0.85. It can't compile solutions, so you have to shell out to MSBuild in order to do that. Anything more complex than copying, zipping, and compiling turns into a morass of back referencing spaghetti. The one thing that could had kept NAnt shinning would have been a nice editor that was NAnt aware. The only thing I've found to edit NAnt scripts in a contextual fashion was Nantpad. Unfortunately, this is priced above the sweet spot price for mISV. I've found that this price is around $150 for most developer tools. Anymore than that, has to be justified in doing more than one thing. My personal feeling is that NAnt is going to go the way of NDoc. The reasoning behind that could be a whole post in itself, but I'm not going to that today. Enter Finalbuilder. I have been following this tool since the time it was a one man operation. Back then it was listed with AtoZed Software's website. The company has since grown and now host their own website. Back then I was a Delphi and VB6 programmer, doing system-type programming. I built tools for automating business processes, much like what FinalBuilder does now. The beauty of FinalBuilder, is that I had only had to look at the help once, in all the years I had used it for work. Not only is it fairly intuitive to use, but it is a joy to work with. It doesn't get in my way. I know that Joel Spolsky uses it to do regular system maintenance activity at FogCreek. You can read what he says here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/20020813.html FinalBuilder is out of the sweet pricing spot I mentioned before, but it can justify the price, because it does the automation well for many things, not just doing daily builds. Just as Joel's team, I'm going to be using it to automate several of my system maintenance tasks. I already been using it for building Beta 1. It has saved me about 45 minutes for the build time. The other big allure is that I now have a repeatable build process. This has also cut down on the manual typos that can creep in when doing NAnt scripts. I want to absolutely automate anything that I'm doing. I just don't have the time to be monkeying around, especially now that I'm much older (40 in a couple months). Monkey businesses is for younger people. I find that FinalBuilder is the most polished build system in this class of software produts. I have tried several others. Here are the competitors: I haven't used Automated Build Studio, but to be honest, I don't see how it could beat FinalBuilder. I think that the main reason for this, is that I, as a customer, have access to Vincent, the creator. That personal relationship/touch will trump any other emotional argument every time. I know a couple mISVs that use Automated Build Studio, and they tell me that they don't have that personal touch with that product. I always favor smaller companies, especially because of this personal touch. This touch is what is missing in today's business environment. I'm going to cut this short here. I was in the hospital earlier today, and I'm still under the weather. I'm surprised that I was able to be this coherent at all. Maybe I just write better when I'm on drugs, Promethazine at this moment. LOL. Anyways, I hear my bed calling to me. | |
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