Troy Hunt

I love a good set of automatically generated code metrics. There’s something about just pointing a tool at the code base and saying “Over there – go and do your thing” which really appeals to the part of me that wants to quantify and measure. I think part of it is the objectiveness of automated code analysis. Manual code reviews are great, but other than the manual labour issue, there’s always that degree of subjectiveness the human bring with them. Of course code reviews are still important, b...

I’ve previously written about Rocking your SQL Source Control world with Red Gate [https://www.troyhunt.com/2010/07/rocking-your-sql-source-control-world.html] and was bullishly optimistic about the potential for finally providing the means for simple, effective version control of database objects. It turns out the post struck a chord with the folks at Red Gate and they asked me if I’d like to contribute to an article in Simple-Talk [http://www.simple-talk.com], a fantastic bi-monthly newsletter...

I GOT A LOT OF PROBLEMS WITH YOU PEOPLE! Now, you’re gonna hear about ‘em. Let’s begin the tradition of Festivus [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8g4Ztf7hIM] with the airing of grievances, in particular, corporate meeting etiquette gone bad. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, meetings are a part of everyday life for many of us. However, some people just seem hell-bent on making them miserable for everyone. To be fair, I suspect the full impact of seemingly innocuous behaviour isn’t always evident to the pe...

I’m a big fan of Red Gate’s SQL Source Control [http://www.red-gate.com/products/SQL_Source_Control/index.htm], I really am. I raved about it [https://www.troyhunt.com/2010/07/rocking-your-sql-source-control-world.html] earlier in the year and I still think it’s the best solution going for getting your databases under source control with Subversion. However, I’ve hit a glitch which unless I’m wrong, appears to be a bit of a design flaw; versioning changes in case. Let’s say I have a table, crea...

Earlier today I asked the question I know it's a bit of a religious debate, but control name prefixes (txt, lbl); useful practice or the devil's work? [http://twitter.com/#!/troyhunt/status/9051426315567104] and was a little surprised by the result. Actually, what surprised me was the unanimous “devil’s work” response when I expected some balanced arguments! What am I talking about? I’m talking about names that look like this: <asp:Label runat="server" ID="lblFirstName" /> <asp:TextBox runat="...

<< Part 4: Continuous builds with TeamCity [https://www.troyhunt.com/you-deploying-it-wrong-teamcity_25/] In the first four parts of this series we got config transforms playing nice, command line builds and packaging ticking along, Web Deploy happily receiving our application and TeamCity continuously building the entire solution on every commit. The last thing to do is to harmonise everything so that we can actually automate the deployment. Breaking down the build and deploy processes First...

<< Part 3: Publishing with Web Deploy [https://www.troyhunt.com/you-deploying-it-wrong-teamcity_24] Part 5: Web Deploy with TeamCity >> [https://www.troyhunt.com/you-deploying-it-wrong-teamcity_26/] Over the last three posts in this series, we got to the point where all the Microsoft bits are working really nicely together. Config transforms, packaging and Web Deploy are great stable mates in the world of web application deployment. The bit that’s missing though is automation. Actually there a...

<< Part 2: MSBuild and deployable packages [https://www.troyhunt.com/2010/11/you-deploying-it-wrong-teamcity_11.html] Part 4: Continuous builds with TeamCity >> [https://www.troyhunt.com/2010/11/you-deploying-it-wrong-teamcity_25.html] In the first two parts of this series we got config transforms working and the web app successfully bundled into a nice self-contained deployable package. Next up: get the thing to publish. For the most part, the vast majority of web app deployment has historica...

<< Part 1: Config transforms [https://www.troyhunt.com/2010/11/you-deploying-it-wrong-teamcity.html] Part 3: Publishing with Web Deploy >> [https://www.troyhunt.com/2010/11/you-deploying-it-wrong-teamcity_24.html] In the first part of the series we looked at config transforms and how we’ve moved on from the bad old days of manual Web.config configuration at release time. Now let’s take a look at how we can incorporate this into a nice clean deployable package with the rest of the application....

Part 2: MSBuild and deployable packages >> [https://www.troyhunt.com/2010/11/you-deploying-it-wrong-teamcity_11.html] If you publish a web application using CTRL-C and CTRL-V, you’re deploying it wrong. If you manually run an Xcopy command, you’re deploying it wrong. If you use an FTP client to move your files to a remote server, you’re deploying it wrong. If not everyone is following exactly the same release process, you’re deploying it wrong. If publishing involves any manual handling of...