Application virtualization with xenocode
July 14, 2008
Application is the future of virtualization. Xenocode allows you to package up an application and deploy it in a virtaul exe to run anywhere, (anywhere on windows). I came across it when I wanted to create a portable application using the ,net framework. Xenocode is amazing. It allowed me to package up a winform application written in C# to produce a stand alone exe that could run on any windows box even without the .net framework installed. I have not tried it under wine/linux but it is on my todo list.
While we have yet to use it in a project think how easy a deployment process will be when have xcopy deployment without any need for a framework to be installed on the destination machine.
So for all you .net coders out there start pumping out the usb portable apps with visual studio.
turn your dotnet exe into a portable usb app
Subversion
July 14, 2008
Subversion is our prefered tool for version control. With the latest version you have merge tracking and can compare history of word and excel documents, (when using the tortisesvn client). With this new functionality I can see it being our document management system as well. It is fast, easy to set up and transactional, (commits all your changes or none at all unlike pvcs). As a added bonus it is opensource and free to use.
There are many clients for subversion the two we prefer are
http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/
This is one of the core bits of software you want running on day one of a project. We had a architecture team try to force us to use pvcs which is non transactional and pay for the privilege. What a step backwards that would have been. It was only that we had it running in our build process from day one that stopped this happening. It was a bit of a lesson for me, if you want your key bits of technology supporting the development process have them running on day one. I wish we did the same with our bug tracking tool. Unfortunately we were forced to use trackrecord which I would not recommend to anyone, (especially when there are some many excellent open source bug tracking tools).
Beyond Compare
June 15, 2008
In any serious development project you generally have at least two branches, (production support and development), of the code being worked on at once. Branching and merging can become a real pain. We use subversion and tortoise svn as out version control software that handles a lot of cases. Sometimes the tortoise merge tool is not up to the task or developers just prefer the extra functionality in beyond compare.
Beyond compare make comparing files/folders a simple task and allows you to merge changes. It is a must have tool and is also just as good comparing code or data files.
http://www.scootersoftware.com/
Ghostzilla
June 13, 2008
Have you ever wanted to be looking at something on the web that you do not have anyone walking past to see what it is ? Or do you want a browser always integrated with the application you are running ?
Ghostzilla is a browser that integrates with the application window you are currently working on. As soon as you move the cursor away from the window the browser is hidden. Ghostzilla has heaps of hot keys for not displaying images, zoom in and out, making color black and white etc. IT is very hard for someone walking past to even tell it is a browser window and not an application like word or outlook.
I use Ghostzilla a lot in visual studio to switch back between the code window and a webpage I am using as a development resource.
Ghostzilla also runs from a usb key and leaves no trace on the host os.
Gnuwin32
June 13, 2008
Windows has always lacked all those nice little tools that unix people take for granted. I am always using commands like tail -f to display log files, grep to search for a string, ls for listing files and the list goes on. Download the following port of these legendary unix tools and add them to your path. It is inevitable that linux will become the dominant os over the coming years so you might as well get use to some of the command line tools now.
http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/
ApexScript
June 13, 2008
We have been a big fan of the apexsql family of tools for sql server. They are one of the core tools we get management to buy when we are doing a sql server project. ApexScript is a tool that can script a database schema and or data out to several formats. It has been very useful for us when we have the configuration of a vendor application that is configured through a ui and stored in a database. In general the vendors do not supply a practical way to move this configuration from one environment to another. With apexscript we have been able to create some sql scripts to apply changes a developer had made to their local instance of the vendor application. We were then able to put these scripts through our build process to promote through test, stage and production environments. Apex script can also be very useful to create sql scripts for test data.
It is available from the link below
http://www.apexsql.com/sql_tools_script.asp
Autohotkey
June 10, 2008
Want to automate a third party app that does not supply a command line interface or just create some keyboard shortcuts then you must try autohotkey. We originally came across this tool when creating a build and deployment process for microsoft crm. The problem we had was that there were a lot of gui wizards of different quality to run when you upgrade between environments or refreshing a developers box with the latest production databases. We were able to use autohotkey to take a day long manual intensive process down to about 30 minutes which only needed a single click to kick it off.
Another example was when the infrastructure manager asked me how he could apply some changes that required a lot of clicks, running scripts, editing the registry to 50 servers consistently. I gave him a quick tutorial on autohotkey and he was sold. He also loved how a autohotkey script could compile down to a single exe.
have a look at some of the great things people have achieved with autohotkey
you can download it from http://www.autohotkey.com/
there is also a fork of the code that has a lot more support for internet explorer at http://www.autoitscript.com/
Textpad
June 10, 2008
In the financial industry you deal with a lot of flat positional or delimited files. Not many places have been able to make the leap to xml and messaging. So there is not a day goes buy where I have the need for a good text editor. Some of the cool features I find in textpad are
- Portable - runs on a usb key
- Opens large files quickly and does not seam to suffer that much in performance as the files get larger
- Regular expression search and replace. I am always replacing a delimiter for a tab, (\t ), then pasting into excel.
- cut and paste columns is a must have. Just right click on a document and select block select mode then you can cut and paste columns of text between documents. Saves many hours building sample files or using it as a adhoc code gen utility whe you have to take a list of fields from a spec and turn it into some code.
- And for repetitive tasks there is a macro recorder which has saved me many hours of coding.
I have even converted the vi and emacs experts over to the power of textpad. I once worked at a fund manager here in Sydney back in 99 and was amazed that there was about 20 developers slugging it out writing cobol programs in vi on a telnet session. They did not even have xwindows running. So I downloaded textpad and added a button to the toolbar to sync the cobol source up with the unix server. I started to scream through the work and fairly soon 95% of the developers, (except a few die hard vi guys), were coding in textpad. Soon after that they stopped asking vi questions in the job interviews.
By the way the vi guys did eventually come around and make the swap.
TiddlyWiki
June 5, 2008
Wiki’s have been around for a while. We use screwturn wiki for our internal development team but having a personal wiki is also very handy. What about if you could have your own personal wiki on a USB key and take it with you. Tiddly wiki is really cool. It uses html, css and javascript to give you a personal wiki on a stick. You can also host your tiddlywiki at http://www.tiddlyspot.com
Also if you have trouble Getting things done check out MonkeyGTD which uses TiddlyWiki for its base.
http://monkeygtd.tiddlyspot.com/#MonkeyGTD
Psexec
June 5, 2008
What a great tool. As part of our deployment process we often want to run a processes on a remote server. An example might be running a batch file, iisreset, start and stop services etc. With psexec you can be in a command shell on computer A and run a command on computer B. Note you need administrator privileges, (which we think the person doing a deployment to an environment should always have), so some infrastructure departments may have a problem with it. Get it at sysinternals below.
