Subversion Conversion, concluded

Woo! More than a month without posting.

Now that that's out of the way, let's get down to business.

Previously, I covered Subversion and Apache. While this was working great, what I really wanted in the end was to get https (http + SSL) working as a transport for the repository, so that remote developers wouldn't have to connect over VPN to access it.

Well, I failed. I looked and looked, and there's a lot of great tutorials out there, but none seem to work. It may be an issue with our setup (we are getting "This method not supported by your operating system" or somesuch, I'll check it tomorrow at work). We're using Windows Server 2003 R2, which isn't much different from 2003 Original (at least, not that I'm aware of) and I think I'll have to break down and compile the httpd from source, with mod_ssl.so as well. Not something I'm looking forward to.

But, it's working great otherwise. A huge project takes no time at all to Update/Commit, or pull down for new developers. Everyone using it agrees - it's definitely helping us get our work done faster.

Speaking of new developers - we're hiring. Be sure to drop us a line - and tell 'em Nic sent ya.

Scott Guthrie came to Dallas

So, last night Anderson, Zach and I went to the North Dallas .NET Users Group meeting, with a very special guest: Scott Guthrie!

It was a great presentation. From the slides he was showing - looked like a presentation he'd already given at Tech-Ed this year. The information was great, and you can get the slides and source code he demoed last night here (not available yet, but he assured us it would be soon), so I won't go over everything, just what I was excited about.

First, CSS Adapters. Very cool, especially if you have, or you've got some people with the mad CSS skillz. His overview of speeding up build performance and the "new" Web Application project model for ASP.NET websites was good to see too. And of course, server-side comments. He talked about Atlas ASP.NET AJAX (that's a lot of acronym) too, but there's a lot to that and I won't go into it here.

LINQ was great - I see a lot of possibilities there. There were some concerns in the audience about LINQ was trying to "replace DataSets." Personally, I don't see it that way - it's just a new way to strongly-type your data layer. The thing I thoguht was cool was the possibility of doing joins across different data sources - a SQL database and an XML file, for example. That may be more of a "look what I can do" thing to try, but it's interesting to think about. Extending the LINQ provider model was also something that was exciting - apparently, there's already and Amazon LINQ provider out there that lets you search for books directly in C# code without having to wire up the Web Service.

Plus, I won a copy of Quicken 2007. Yay?

Edit: Updated link to Scott's blog post.

Take my money, please

I'm going to move away from software development a bit and talk about something that is also near and dear to my heart.

I'm a gamer. You can see my GamerCard on the side there. I bought a launch day Xbox 360 (which was actually my wife's idea) and camped out a full day with my brother and the Imes for the second shipment last year. I consider myself a part of the "hardcore" gamer crowd - except for that I'm not very good. But I do spend a lot of money on the stuff.

That's why things like this really get to me. EA as a games publisher is like the dirty uncle that when he says inappropriate things at the dinner table, everyone gets upset, but no one ever does anything about it because "oh, that's EA. He's just like that. Don't worry dear, he didn't really mean those things that he said about you and your cat."

Need For Speed: Carbon was released on October 31, 2006. Content for this game went up Xbox Live Marketplace on October 31, 2006. Let's count the dollar value of all those "additions." Wait, this is a blog and you've got NADD. I'll do it for you - I was a math major, after all.

49.25. Dollars. Of extras. For a 60 dollar game that doesn't sound super impressive to begin with. I know, some of these downloads would result in duplicates. One of the 10 dollar ones gets you 3 of the 5 dollar ones. I'm lazy, and don't feel like figuring it out.

And it's not as if these were done after the game has been out for a while - this is from Day 1. At least Bethesda has released content after the game had been out for a while. And, they charged the right amout, after a bad first try. (I know, that link is for the PC downloads. I own the 360 version - my PC can barely run Half-Life 2 at a paltry 800x600 resolution. The prices for the PC and 360 downloads are the same.) I've been very satisfied with my Oblivion expansion purchases.

Major Nelson's comment board for this content is flooded with angry comments demanding that Microsoft step up and stop this kind of behavior from EA. Some have suggested a petition, others have suggested a boycott of EA's games. While I wasn't going to buy this game (and certainly not now), I think that's a great idea.

We know EA has dropped the ball several times in the past. (I could come up with several more, but again. I'm lazy.)

Microsoft's Xbox team claims they listen to the community. I believe the community has spoken.

Let's hope they do listen. And more importantly, let's hope they do something about it.

Message Massagers

This post will not be about Subversion.

Something Anderson talked about recently was how the Provider Pattern wasn't just for ASP.NET. He offered up a good example, but I thought I would expand on it a bit.

Something I've had great experience with is an application that I like to call a "Message Massager" or a "Message Munger" (pronounced mun-jer). Basically, the program flow is:

1. Get input from some entity A
2. Munge/Massage the input
3. Give the input to entity B
4. Get response from B
5. Munge/Massage response
6. Give the respone to A.
7. Lather, rinse, repeat.

When I started, I hadn't really thought a lot about how I could make things easier on myself. I created all sorts of classes and schemas, and it never clicked that I was essentially doing the same thing over and over. After reading his post, I saw several ways I could have made my (and the developer who adopted my applications) life easier.

I won't go into the details of implementing a Provider pattern for this type of application - Anderson laid them out pretty well. Something else that I came across recently, though, might also be of interest. Eric Sink recently offered up an implementation of Map with multicore support in C#. Since most of the messages that I was munging (yes, that's the technical term) were independent of each other, this might have sped up performance quite a bit - several times my applications were dealing with 500-1000 messages per iteration. This is all just speculation, since I don't work on those applications anymore, but it's something I'll have to keep in mind for the next time someone hands me a stack of paper that defines an interface for communicating with some huge system.

Subversion and Apache

So, yesterday I came into the office with a pleasant surprise.

One of my coworkers turns around and says: "We have Apache up and running. Goto this URL and check this out."

And it's our Subversion repository over http, on Firefox, on a webpage!

When we started our process, we hadn't thought much about it. We initially went with the default svnserve option available in the 1.4 release - it worked out of the box with little to no configuration. The only problems there were the user authentication. By default Subversion authenticates against a file with a pretty simple scheme:

user1 = password1
user2 = password2

Not the most secure option, to be sure. We had talked about getting Apache up and running on the server we were hosting the repository on, but it was something that I thought we might tackle sometime this week. This guy spent his weekend installing and configuring Apache to work with our repository.

He used a couple of existing resources, and we only had to iron out a couple things to get it working right. I'll point these out here.

Here's our httpd.conf:

DAV svn
SVNPath x:/RepositoryPath/

# our user authentication policy
AuthName "SVN Server"
AuthType SSPI
SSPIAuth On
SSPIAuthoritative On
SSPIDomain DOMAIN
SSPIOfferBasic On
Require valid-user

AuthzSVNAccessFile "x:/PathToOtherConfFile/AccessFileName.conf"

A couple gotchas that we rant into: the SVNPath needs a trailing slash - we had some authentication problems without it. Also, make sure you have SSPIOfferBasic On set. Windows machines with logged in domain users shouldn't have to authenticate manually - it'll pass credentials along for you. Firefox can still browse the repository, it'll just need to authenticate manually. I believe TortoiseSVN users won't need this option, but it's good to have in case you ever need to authenticate using any other client (such as the command-line version).

AuthzSVNAccessFile looks something similar to this

[groups]
developers=DOMAIN\user1, DOMAIN\user2
managers=DOMAIN\bossman

[/]
developers=rw
managers=r

Basically, you have groups of users that you can define, then their repository permissions. The example above gives the developers group read/write permissions to the entire repository ("/") while managers can only read.

You could do some more complicated things, like secure certain projects in the repository. The important thing to remeber is to have the usernames with the domain in all caps, followed by the username it it's correct case. The username passed into the DAV module will be checked against here first, then passed on to the domain controller, and it's case sensitive here.

Also, when you install Apache, it'll give you two options - install as service (Everyone) monitoring port 80, or not as a service, run from the command line (Just Me) and monitoring at port 8080. If you're using IIS, then you'll want to choose the second option. You can reconfigure the port, of course - it's in the httpd.conf file. Just find the part that has

Listen 8080

and change it to whichever you want.

When you finally get it configured correctly, you'll probably want to install Apache as a service. It's simple - just type

apache -k install -n "MyServiceName"

in the console. (Change "MyServiceName" to something else, unless that's what you really want it to show up as. It'll install itself in the Apache service monitor and the Windows Services menu.

One final caveat - you have to use Apache 2.0, not 2.2. The Subversion modules don't load.
Also, install Apache before you install Subversion if you can - it'll make your life much easier. The Subversion installer will detect Apache and copy all the required modules over where they need to go. If you didn't (like us) then you'll have to do it manually.

You'll need mod_authz_svn.so and mod_dav_svn.so, which should be found in your Subversion\httpd directory. Copy them to the Apache\modules directory. Then, get libdb42.bin from Subversion\bin and copy to Apache\bin. I think this is everything - if I've gotten something wrong I'll update this as necessary.

My project today is to get https working on Apache - I'll post later on how that goes.

Subversion and the Big Apple

Say you're working in a company with a top-notch creative department. They're excited about your new push for not using SourceSafe. Only one problem.

They're using Macs.

So, what do you do? You could tell them to use the command-line version and leave you alone. You could tell them to use Parallels and use the Windows pretty clients. Or, you could look for other options.

I'm not a Mac guy. Don't get me wrong, I think they make some great machines. The move to Intel processors has sorely tempted to get one for my home computer. My wife loves the Mini. But in a .NET world, Windows is the way to go. So, naturally, that's where I started looking for clients.

But your pretty pictures and shiny stylesheets (mmm... alliteration) don't have to come from a Windows machine. And if they don't, you still need a way to get them from your creative types to your developers.

We're evaluating both options right now. svnX is free, ZigVersion isn't. I'll let you know what our design team thinks.

One more thing. There's a lot of Java Swing based clients out there. We didn't like them for the same reason some people don't like Swing applications - it just doesn't feel right. It's not quite Windows, not quite OS X. That's just a personal preference.

The Subversion Conversion

If you've ever looked for a blog on software development, you've undoubtedly stopped off at Joel Spolsky's little corner of the inter-web. And if you have, then you've probably read The Joel Test. That first item on it - "Do you use source control?" is something I'd like to talk about over the next few weeks.

If you use Visual Studio, you've at least heard of SourceSafe. Heck, you've probably used it, or are using it right now. Would everyone reading please raise their hand if they really, really like SourceSafe? Do you feel warm and fuzzy inside knowing your code is "protected" inside of SourceSafe? Anyone?

No? Me either.

So, what do you do? You can either live with it (not a good idea) or you can change it. Now, in an ideal world, you'd be able to either convince your boss/CFO/purchasing department to whip out the credit card and buy everyone Team System. Try it. If they react the same way most would (and to be fair, it is approximately 1 hojillion dollars per developer) then you've got to find something cheaper. Or, dare we hope, free.

Enter Subversion. It's open-source and free-as-in-speech, and best of all, some of the CVS developers that got tired of it work on Subversion. So you know they've got some background on the subject.

"But Nic", I hear you say, "isn't getting this running for a group of developers who are familiar with SourceSafe and doing things Their Way going to be a pain?"

Yes, probably. But, instead of dealing with quirks and worrying about database corruption and that offsite developer whining about how slow it is, my company decided to take a more pro-active approach. I'm a firm believer in Getting Things Done. And if I have to "deal" with my source control system, I'm not Getting Things Done.

So, go ahead and download the latest copy for your environment from here. And if you're using Windows, and if someone tells you that you must have Apache installed before you can use Subversion, they are either a LIAR, or simply confused. You only need Apache if you're going to be doing http/https-based access or want to do some fancy authentication (like Windows Domain). For testing on your local machine, you don't need it.

If you're a Windows user, definitely get TortoiseSVN. It's a Explorer Shell Extension that encapsulates just about everything you'd do with the command-line version into that pretty GUI that we Windows users need. If you're using Visual Studio, then you should also pick up AnkhSVN. It's a plug-in that will enable SVN commits/updates from within Visual Studio, and it knows not to check in your compiled DLL's, or the SUO files.

From my testing, I've found it best if you have all of the projects within a solution in the same working directory. This will probably not be the way that Visual Studio is doing things for you - it defaults to putting ASP.NET websites in one directory, and everything else in another. For both Subversion's sake, and your own, keep everything in the same directory. Cassini can run a website wherever you put it. If you're still building .NET 1.1 websites, you can also setup IIS to have a website wherever your working directory is, and the applications should get created automatically when you pull them down, or when you create new ones. I'm still experimenting with this, so please leave me some feedback if you have any insight on this.

If you're serious about taking this plunge, then I highly recommend you first go pick up Pragmatic Version Control: Using Subversion. It's short, and has a great overview of what someone who likes to Get Things Done should be doing with their source control system. It says version 1.3 on the cover, and 1.4 is the latest version as of this post. Nothing significant from a user's perspective has really changed, it's a lot of internal improvements, API changes, and some administrative enhancements.

Now, as far as a company-wide conversion, we haven't taken that plunge yet. But, we will. We need to figure out some best practices, repository structure/locations, and the general process first. So, stay tuned. We're in this together.

Obligatory Introductory Posting-y

Here's my first blog post. I'm supposed to use this to space to introduce myself and why I'm blogging, and why you should care.

I have a beautiful wife named Veronica. We've been married for about 10 months now, and we have two great dogs named Punkin and Dany. I imagine you'll all be able to see pictures and hear all about them. Those three ladies are what I come home to every day - they're very important to me.

I have a degree in Mathematics from the University of North Texas that I obtained after 6.5 years of grueling, diligent studies (at least, that's how I like to think about it.)

I recently got a new job working at Ariamedia in Addison, Texas. I'm their newest developer there. I'll probably spend a lot of time talking about some of my experiences there.

I have a lot of great friends, some that even have blogs of their own.

My name is Nic (no 'k') Webb. My middle name starts with 'C' and depending on whether you ask the Texas Department of Transportation or the Social Security office, the rest of it is either "ameron" or "ahill." It's an interesting story, which I'll elaborate on in a future posting.

I believe that a person's life is a series of experiences, and I like to savor each one. Too often I've found myself waiting for "the big payoff" in life, and I've come to discover that the payoff is the journey.

I hope you'll enjoy these snapshots of my journey.