So I got a little bit inspired the other day after watching Scott Hanselman’s Web Deployment Made Awesome: If You're Using XCopy, You're Doing It Wrong [http://www.hanselman.com/blog/WebDeploymentMadeAwesomeIfYoureUsingXCopyYoureDoingItWrong.aspx] from MIX10. With a perfect candidate ASP.NET 3.5 web app and VS2010 RC I dived in and generated Web.Release.config and Web.Debug.config files then went to publish. Unfortunately it didn’t all go to plan and all I got was this particularly uninformati...

Another year, another MIX conference in Vegas and another three days of reading all the news from afar. Fortunately the Twitter age doesn’t leave those of us on the other side of the world completely isolated and there has been some really interesting news shared by those on the ground in the US. Here’s a summary of what I found interesting and what I see is significant for the technologies involved. It’s by no means a comprehensive review – one look at the sessions list [http://live.visitmix....

It’s a hot summer day in Perth over on the western seaboard of Australia and the local pub is packed with patrons downing cold beers. You’re in your shiny new Ferrari – red, of course – and come cruising past the pub in full view of the enthralled audience. As any red-blooded, testosterone fuelled Aussie bloke would do, you give the Italian thoroughbred a full redline launch to the delight of the crowd. Right up until you run into the street sign: Why did this happen? Well there’s the fact th...

As a new parent, I obsess about what the baby is doing. Is he awake, asleep, sucking his thumb or even still breathing? I mean I want to be quite, just not too quite. Do I try and sneak in commando style just to make sure he’s all good and risk waking a sleeping baby (this is never a good idea!), or do I sit in anticipation waking for the baby monitor to confirm signs of life? I’m sure new parent paranoia is not unique to me but I like to have a little more control over my environment than just...

A while back I wrote about Creating your own custom Subversion management layer [https://www.troyhunt.com/2009/10/creating-your-own-custom-subversion.html] which involved rolling your own UI in .NET to perform common management tasks in SVN such as provisioning a repository or managing permissions. This is a great way of quickly and easily giving users a self-service mechanism for managing their own repositories in a controlled, secure fashion. Continuing the theme of customising SVN to do yo...

Software development has come a long way over the last few decades. We’ve gone from extremely laborious, protracted exercises to create even basic functionality (punch cards anyone?), to the drag and drop, WYSIWYG environment of today. We’ve also gone from a very small number of enthusiast programmers to literally millions of individuals writing software worldwide (there were over 1.3 million software engineers [http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos303.htm] in the US alone in 2008). And we’re all looking...

I love a cold beer. Not just because it’s refreshing and makes me worry less about the world’s problems, but also because of beer’s fungibility. Let me explain; I can go down to the store and buy a beer and it’s pretty much the same as any other beer I might purchase elsewhere. Sure, there are different standards of beer and I’m going to pay a few dollars more for my favourite Little Creatures [http://www.google.com.au/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAcQFjAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.littlec...

I was a little confused this week as to why ReSharper was recommending using implicitly typed variable declarations in a VS2010 solution targeting .NET 2. Somewhere in my mind I had directly associated the “var” keyword with the release of .NET 3.5 so this looked a little odd to me: As it turns out, the var keyword is a feature of the compiler, not the .NET CLR. The same is true for automatic properties and object initialisers. The bottom line is that you can use these features in VS08 or...

Here’s another one of those Subversion idiosyncrasies which threw me the other day and I couldn’t readily find an answer for. When committing a changeset I kept getting the error “Can’t create directory” followed by the the path of the repository on the server then “The system cannot find the path specified”. The first thing to get clear is that this is a Subversion error, it’s not related to the local working directory nor is it related to Tortoise SVN. Looking at the path in the image abo...

It starts with that sinking feeling and all sorts of questions running through your head: > When did I last backup? Did I include everything? Does the backup actually work? When did I last try restoring it? How much unrecoverable data could I have lost? Losing data can be an absolute stomach churning experience. Those first moments when the penny drops and you realise you’ve got a big, big problem are absolutely nightmarish and without a robust backup strategy it’s just a matter of time...