Month: June 2011

ten years

I’m scheduling this entry to auto-post on June 19, 2011 at 8pm. I started this blog on June 19,2001, so this will be my tenth anniversary of blogging. Here’s a link to the June 2001 archive page.

Looks like I was talking about PC Expo a bit. There’s a blast from the past. Are there any tech trade shows still happening in NYC? I can’t think of any, but then again I’m probably out of the loop on that kind of thing right now.

Let’s see, what else was going on…

  • Sept 11, 2001 was three months in the future.
  • Version 1.0 of the .NET Framework was about eight months away from release. [ref]
  • PowerBuilder version 8 had just been released. [ref]
  • Adventures of Barry Ween: Monkey Tales #3 was released [ref]
  • Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire had been released in 2000, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix would not be released until 2003. [ref]

Okay, that was a pretty random list.  I don’t suppose I have any point to make, other than marking the fact that I’ve been consistently blogging for 10 years.  I’ve never written anything really substantial here, but I’ve tried to write in complete sentences, usually, and I’ve tried to post stuff that other people might find useful or amusing, if they were to somehow stumble across this blog.

last photos

When my Dad passed away, he still had a roll of film in his old 35mm camera. I wanted to finish off the roll, get it developed, and see what his last few photos were, but I kept putting it off. Since I’m having an estate sale this weekend, I decided it was time to finally finish the roll and send it off, so I could include the camera in the estate sale. I sent the roll off to Snapfish for processing. (It’s been many years since I’ve had a roll of film developed. Snapfish has a mail-in service that’s pretty cheap, so I decided to try them.)

I just got an e-mail back from them with a link to the photos. (I guess I’ll get the negatives and prints back in the mail soon.) Sadly, his last few photos weren’t that interesting. It looks like he’d just taken a couple of snapshots from the front porch after a snowfall, probably in early 09. (The timestamp on the photos says Feb 06, but they can’t be that old. I don’t think he had the date set correctly on the camera.) I was hoping I’d have a couple of final photos of Mom and Dad on that roll, but alas, no.

All the photos came out looking a lot more purple than they should. I’m guessing that’s because the film was so old? Or maybe just a bad job of processing?

tree1

tree2

Moving a VSS database to Mercurial

Here’s a document I wrote up for work yesterday. I think it may be generally useful for anyone else out there who is considering moving from Visual SourceSafe to Mercurial. This write-up is specific to an organization working in a Windows environment, using Visual Studio 2008 & 2010, and using bitbucket.org as a back-end for Hg.  I also assume you’re using TortoiseHg and VisualHg.

  1. Insure all files are checked in to VSS.
  2. Get a new, full copy of the project from VSS.
  3. Make all files writable (uncheck read-only flag in Win Explorer).
  4. At both the solution and project levels, delete all *.SCC files.
  5. Edit the .SLN file to remove the “SourceCodeControl” section. It should begin with “GlobalSection(SourceCodeControl)” and end with “EndGlobalSection”.
  6. Edit each .CSPROJ file (one in each project folder) and remove all settings starting with “Scc”. There should be 4 — SccProjectName, SccLocalPath, SccAuxPath, and SccProvider.
  7. In the same folder as the solution file, in Windows Explorer, right-click, and select “Create Repository Here” from the TortoiseHg menu. Make sure “add special files” is checked.
  8. Edit the new “.hgignore” file and insert contents as per below. You may need to modify this file, depending on the project.
  9. Optional: create a README.TXT file in the solution folder, describing the project. This will automatically be displayed on the Bitbucket home screen for this repository.
  10. Right-click in Windows Explorer and select “Hg Commit” from the Tortoise menu.
  11. Review the list of files shown. If you see anything that shouldn’t be in source control, cancel out and modify the .hgignore file accordingly.
  12. Click the “All” button to select all files. Enter “Initial Hg Commit” as the comment. Click “Commit”.
  13. When that is done, exit from the commit dialog and review the project in Windows Explorer. Make sure that all files that should be in source control have a green check superimposed over their icon.
  14. Create a new repository in Bitbucket for the project:
    • https://bitbucket.org
    • Repositories, Create repository.
    • Enter an appropriate name.
    • Language should usually be set to C#.
    • Make a note of the repository address.
  15. Back in the main solution folder, right-click and select “Synchronize” from the Tortoise menu.
  16. Set the remote repository to the address you noted above. Hit the ‘save’ icon, and give this alias a name.
  17. Hit the “push” button.
  18. When that is done, check the project page in Bitbucket to make sure the source is all there.
  19. As a sanity check, create a new temp folder on your hard drive, and pull a new copy of the repository into it.
    • Select “clone” from the Tortoise menu.
    • Enter the full path to the Bitbucket repo as the source (“https://bitbucket.org/…”) and leave the destination as-is.
    • When the clone is done, open the project in Visual Studio.
    • Go to Tools, Options, Source Control, and switch your plug-in to VisualHg.
    • Take a quick look through the files in the solution, and see if any appear to be missing. (A missing file will have a yellow triangle icon overlay.)
    • Do a full build of the solution.
    • If possible, run a few tests to be sure it’s working. After the build, exit Visual Studio, and bring up the Hg Commit dialog at the root level. If you see any changed files to check in, they are probably temp files that should be excluded. If this is the case, please edit .hgignore accordingly.
    • When done, simply delete your temp folder.
  20. You have now migrated a VSS database to a Hg repository.

Note that I am not retaining version history here, just starting fresh in Hg.  If you want to move your version history over, please look at vss2hg.pl.  I tried this out on one of my VSS databases, and it did work, after some tweaking, though it didn’t quite manage to get 100% of the data over, and it was a bit confused about dates. I decided that it wasn’t worth bothering with it, in my case.

References:

  1. stackoverflow.com — how to remove VSS bindings.
  2. visualstudiohacks.com — small program to automatically remove bindings.
  3. stackoverflow.com — sample .hgignore files for VS 2008
  4. stackoverflow.com — sample .hgignore files for VS 2010.

Concrete

I just started reading Concrete: The Human Dilemma. I’ve had this mini-series sitting in my reading pile since it was published back in 2004/2005. I’m really enjoying it, and I wish I had more Concrete to read, but I just checked Wikipedia, and apparently there hasn’t been any Concrete published since then. Oh well.
Paul Chadwick does a great job of mixing large-scale social commentary with small-scale human moments. And his artwork is great too. He obviously puts a lot of thought into panel arrangement and “camera angle” within the panels, and sometimes uses little tricks (for lack of a better word) that could only work in comics. Bits that, in the wrong context, would be distracting, but work well for him.

EasyHttp

I haven’t had much reason, until recently, to start messing around with .NET 4 and C# 4. But I just had to do a bunch of stuff involving REST and JSON, and I found that the new dynamic type was very helpful there. Specifically, I used EasyHttp (available on GitHub), which makes it very easy to consume RESTful web services, and (via JsonFx) serialize and de-serialize JSON.

I know that there are other ways to do all this stuff, but I think EasyHttp and JsonFx work well and are easy to use. With dynamic objects, I don’t have to worry about mapping a JSON result to an explicit .NET class; I can just access those members I need to access and ignore the rest.