The World According to Marc

The best QB in football might not have made it to the Pro Bowl, but he did get invited to the State of the Union.

I was poking around for a logging framework today. I wanted something very easy to use. Anything too difficult and people would just revert to Debug.WriteLine and MessageBox debugging pretty quickly. The idea here is to make it so painless that using the logging framework would be every easier than the normal methods.

I looked at log4net but my head began hurting within moments. It looked very flexible, but it was just too much work to implement and use. I’m not saying it was insurmountable, but it was more complex than I wanted.

What I ended up using is the .NET Logging Framework from TheObjectGuy. It was very simple to setup, even easier to use. I don’t think it is quite as flexible as log4net, but it does everything I needed (and more). Within minutes I had it logging my application to the Event Log, Email, and outputting a .log file.

The documentation on the other hand was a bit sparse. Nothing too bad, but it could/should be a lot better than it is. And there isn’t a single sample of how to use it (the only sample is a log reader, not something I really care about). It is simple enough however that these two issues don’t really impede very much.

Can we please put a stop to this Install on Demand madness? I know it is very cool that it will install some template only when I need it. I understand that this is very slick. I get it. But please stop it!

Every time I start Visio 2003 it asks me for the CD-ROM. I have no idea why, but it wants it. The problem isn’t that I lack the CD, it is that I have too many of them (MSDN, Action Pack, Retail…). And not one of them has the damn file this thing wants. The best part is that if I click “Cancel” it loads Visio anyway. If this file is so damn important than how does it run at all? It acts like my 2 year old, passionately demanding something that it has absolutely no need for. And sometimes, also like my 2 year old, it needs to be told “no” (or in this case, “cancel”) multiple times before it gets the point.

Hard drive space is cheep guys. This technology may be cool but you are 5 years late bringing it to the table. With the price of disk space these days, just let me install the whole damn thing and leave me be already!

I need to find a wall to bang my head against…

I tossed on my “Reckless Early Adopter” hat today and put up the beta release of Vault 2.0 into our live environment.

The biggest change from my perspective is the much improved Diff/Merge utility. Within an hour we had a merge issue that under the old version would have produced immense headaches. It had really reached a point around here that the term “Needs Merge” would strike terror though our collective hearts. But with 2.0 we were able to merge the files together in seconds. It was so easy in fact that it almost felt like I was cheating.

The other notable change is web based access to the repository. This isn’t much of an issue for us as we are still in development. But once we release we expect our top-tear support staff will really get a lot of use out of it. And it also gives non-developers access to design documents that we keep under source code control.

Overall, I’m extremely pleased with the new version. If you don’t have source code control, or are looking to change SCC providers, then you really should check out Vault. The only negative thing I can say about SourceGear is they are destroying my perfectly good and strongly held cynical view of development tool companies.

If you’re interested in trying out Vault 2.0, read this post on Vault’s support forum. One word of caution however; even though I have had no issues so far, it is still very much in beta. Use in production with extreme caution.