David Findley's Blog
My little home in the cloud.
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Problems with RewritePath and Search Engines.
We just recently launched the new version of LearnVisualStudio.NET. The implementation uses the RewritePath method to serve up dynamic pages based on templates. All of our pre deployment testing showed that this was all working without a hitch. Once we deployed to production however it became clear which test cases we had left out. We didn't test how the site responded when getting crawled by search engines.
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Made the switch to Vista
Well I took the plunge this weekend and installed the August CTP (build 5536) on my MacBook Pro. I know, I couldnt wait for RC1 to be posted to MSDN. So far everything has been running smoothly. Due to the nature of working on LearnVisualStudio.NET I have all of my dev tools in VMWare so changing out primary OSes is actually a breeze for me.
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New version of LearnVisualStudio.NET launched
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Source code formatter for Windows Live Writer
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Test post from Windows Live Writer
I just downloaded Windows Live Writer. So far it looks pretty easy to use.
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Remote workers and Agile/SCRUM/XP
Andrew raises the question: What is the impact of the remote worker on Agile approaches?
A couple of months ago I started working with Bob on LearnVisualstudio.NET. We are just about ready to launch a major redesign of the site. The development process for this redesign may not have been text book Agile but there were moments where we were definitely pair programming. Now what I havn't mentioned is that we were never in the same room. He is at his house and I am at mine. Both of us are in Dallas and the web design guy, Dustin is in Chicago! So how is this possible? Well, heres what we did:
I set up a VMware image with Win2k3 server + dev tools. This image was configured pretty much the same as the production server. Dev SSL certs and all. I installed Tight VNC so that we could easily share the desktop. I installed shortcuts in the VM that would allow each of us to connect to the others version of the web site as well as connect to thier desktop with VNC. Source control was preconfigured in the VM to connect to our Vault server. This setup has created a consistant dev enviroment for each of the team members.
We pretty much exclusively use google talk to do text and voice chatting. When we have to have a voice conference with Dustin we use Skype. Looking at my google chat logs I can see several occasions where one of us would say something like: "Hey can you come on over to my VM?". This usally initiates a little pair programming session or a design review etc.
This setup is working very well for our small team (2 devs, 1 web designer). To some degree this is working better than when I was in an office sitting right next to other devs. I can't really say how well it would work for larger teams or more complex projects. But I can say that is very easy to try out. All you have to do is install some software and give it a try.
Tools Link-o-rama:- VMWare / VPC / Parallels
- Tight VNC
- gtalk / skype
- Source Gear Vault
- backpackit.com (usefull for keeping track of shared documentation files etc)
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Great set of Mac Spoof Comercials.
Even though I'm primarily a PC guy I've thought that the recent set of Mac comercials were pretty clever. They're cutsie enough to warrent a good spoofing though and thats exactly what the guys over ant truenuff did:
http://tv.truenuff.com/mac/
You know the best comedy has a certain ring of truth to it. :) -
Can we get a generic Parse method on Enum in the next version of .NET?
I have one tiny pet peeve about Enum.Parse. It's so verbose with the typeing (both meanings of the word).
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Great little video about google checkout service.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4428105074432041548
I just love the little animations in this feature tour. Great marketing work. -
Rails Live CD
Just found this on digg.com:
http://www.brianketelsen.com/articles/2006/06/20/progress-isnt-just-for-breakfast-anymore
It's a Live CD with all the stuff you need to try out Ruby On Rails! This looks like it could be a pretty slick way to try out Rails. Maybe even better would be to create a VMWare Player image to try Rails with.