Getting Started with Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration is a development practice that can help improve your company’s ability to deliver quality software. It can reduce the time to market and the deployment cycle from functional complete products to having the solutions deployed on desktop or servers.
Continuous Integration, or CI, can start with a lone developer desktop and mature closer towards production. The ultimate goal is to have a CI environment that can take you from checked-in code to production ready installation packages.
The instructions in this article will help you get started with CI even if you’re a single developer or a small team.
This is a process that takes time, but don’t be afraid of the road ahead, I will walk you through the first baby-steps towards a well-tuned machine. CI-practice is one of many important elements for the software development industry to mature to levels of other types of manufacturing.
Tamir Khason on Vista Battery Saver
Our CodePlex Project of the Month for January 2009 is Vista Battery Saver.
"This tiny program will save up to 70% of your battery by disabling those nice, but greedy Vista features."
When you switch from running on AC power to running on battery, Vista Battery Saver will disable the Windows Sidebar and Aero features and switch to a more conservative power plan (e.g., from High Performance to Power Saver). When you reconnect to AC power, Vista Battery Saver switches everything back to the full Vista experience.
The Vista Battery Saver project was started by Tamir Khason. Listen to our interview with Tamir using the embedded audio player or download the MP3.
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CodePlex is Microsoft’s open source project hosting web site. Start a new project, join an existing one, or download software created by the community. Learn More
Tamir Khason on Vista Battery Saver [8:22m]: Donald Belcham on Brownfield Development
In this audio interview, Donald Belcham discusses brownfield development, technical debt, and some useful tools for developers.
Be sure to read Donald’s article “Working with Brownfield Code“.
Accelerate Your Coding with Code Snippets
by Brian Noyes
One of the most underutilized productivity features in Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008 is Code Snippets. Even though most developers have heard about them, I find when working with consulting customers that there are few developers who use them on a regular basis. Even if they do use them, they vastly underutilize them by only using a couple of them and never create their own. In this article, I give you a quick intro into what code snippets are, how they work, what is available out of the box, and how to go beyond that by quickly creating your own code snippets.
Code Snippets Overview
Code snippets were introduced in Visual Studio 2005 and allow you to emit a chunk of code into your editor by typing a few keystrokes (a shortcut mnemonic). I’m going to use C# for the examples in this article, but just realize that code snippets work in Visual Basic and other .NET languages as well. That chunk of code can just be a static chunk of code, but what really makes code snippets powerful is that they can have placeholders that you can quickly overtype when you invoke the code snippet.
Practical Programming: Sending Email
Sending email from a .NET application is incredibly simple:
…
SmtpClient _smtp = new SmtpClient("smtp.test.com");
_smtp.Send("",
"",
"Subject",
"Body");
With just these few lines of code, you are sending an email from to . Pretty easy stuff.
But what if you need something a little more complicated? The example above assumes the standard SMTP port for email with no authentication and an unencrypted connection. Fortunately these “complications” are quite easy to deal with in .NET.
Working with Brownfield Code
During our careers as developers we sit in training courses, conference sessions and vendor demos in which we hear about how easy and great technology XYZ is for creating applications. And almost every one of them assumes that we’re working on new development. I’m not sure about you, but I find that new (or greenfield) application development has been fairly rare in my career.
More often than not, we developers are working in companies that already have a suite of custom software. If you’re brought in to work on a specific project, it’s rare that the project hasn’t had something already started on it. As a result, most developers spend a large part of their careers working with or on someone else’s code. I don’t think this is a bad thing. Instead I think that it is something that we should embrace with good practices, strong tooling and a strong desire to succeed.