Loren Halvorson's Blog

It's all over the blogs and news lately, so you'd have to be living in a cave to not have noticed that Rob Mensching has recently released his long-promised MSI toolkit called Windows Installer Xml or WiX on SourceForge. All of the buzz is centered around Microsoft's apparent about-face on open source software, but I'm truly excited about the toolkit itself.

A while ago I wrote that one of our developers was going to get an Ambient Orb and use it to signal the status of our continuous integration builds.  I'm just following up to say that we have it working. The orb is sitting up above the cubes on a shelf where you can see it from anywhere on the floor. It glows green when the build is successful, and slowly pulses red when the build is broken.

A while ago, I needed to do some profiling of a complex wizard-type ASP.NET application. I needed a script to drive a reproducible path through the application so I could compare the effect of code changes from run to run. Filling in each form was tedious and error prone. ACT would have probably done the trick, but the application utilized lots of hidden fields, viewstate, and Server.Transfers that made writing an ACT test difficult. I was in search of a quick and dirty, low-tech solution.

Scott Hanselman recently wrote about cargo-cult programming which reminded me of Joel Spolsky's piece on Leaky Abstractions (which I think about often when working with ASP.NET).

When Microsoft released Enterprise Instrumentation Framework last year I investigated it to replace the Paul Bunyan logger we are currently using under our ASP.NET application. I liked EIF a lot, but we weren't able to incorporate it at the time for a variety of reasons. One of them was lack of a decent viewing tool. There is a simple little "Trace Viewer" sample app that comes with EIF, but when you hold it up against the Paul Bunyan Message Viewer that our operations people use today, it's just a toy. The Paul Bunyan viewer is able to view messages across many machines, with very powerful filtering (although the filtering interface is horrible, I've watched as people familiar with it make it work).

We are in the process of developing a common role based authorization layer for several of our applications and stumbled across the Microsoft's Authorization Manager. I had originally passed over it because I thought it was tied to Windows Server 2003, but it turns out that it runs on Windows 2000 which we are using in production, and Windows XP which developers use. On XP, just install the Windows Server 2003 Administration Tools Pack and you'll get it.

We finally have a first cut at continuous integration builds going for a large ASP.NET application. We are using CruiseControl.NET and NAnt with great success. I wanted to comment on an unexpected psychological effect I experienced. Continuous integration builds are addicting. OK, I'm not even currently on the development team for this project, just helping them out with their builds, but I still feel the need to check the status of the builds throughout the day. I feel stressed when the build is broken, and relaxed when it is fixed.

I saw an essay on Rewrites Considered Harmful referenced recently on Slashdot. It reminded me of an article I read a long time ago from Joel Spolsky called Things You Should Never Do, Part I. Both have similar points and both cite the rewrite of Navigator/Mozilla as an example. (Note: I noticed in revisiting the Rewrites Considered Harmful article that he also has added a reference to Joel's original article). This is something I struggle with because 1) it can be so hard to read other people's code, and 2) I can always do it better ( :-) )