When I first started using entity framework (one of the earlier versions) it was not ready yet (some serious performance issues). A few years later I hear good things about it from other developers. In order to try to get a feel for how the state of entity persistance is today I’ve ported an old nhibernate test project to a test project for entity framework. I initially had some trouble due to my choice of sql express to test the mappings. Once I managed to get EF to use sqlite the testing got much easi[...]

What do I mean when I say? - System level package / Global package: Package installed so that it is available for every program on the system - Local package: Package installed into sub folder of project and only available to that project Timeline dpkg 1994 cpan, uploaded packages from 1995 jar 1996 debian release with apt 1999 perl package manager goes back to 1999 rubygems 2004 ruby bundler 2010, git history from 2010, ruby gem from 2009 npm 2010 nuget 2010 This is just a sampling [...]

Sometimes when working with xml you have more information in the xml file than you know what to do with in your code. It could be new tags or attributes. A way to use the xml you have not anticipated in your code. A simple way to present that information to the user (so that they can inform you when you’re doing wrong) is to apply a general xml stylesheet. First part of the trick is to tell xml that you intend to output html: <xsl:output ... method="html" omit-xml-declaration="yes"/> Next step is to c[...]

This is a rewrite of an earlier talk about source control. What is source control? And why use it? In order to track changes of your code you use source control. In the simplest setup, source control answers what your source code looked like before you accidentally broke but it looked like it was working. In a similar sense you might want to store data about your customers in order to find it again. Who had a sale with customer A? Why use Sourcesafe (or CVS)? If you are a single dev. Why not? Technic[...]

So, for the N-th time I’m helping out by configuring a build server. This time it was a bit different since we where restoring an old build teamcity server and agent from a crashed server. There where some gothas as usual. In order to restore teamcity we had to do some digging to find the data directory . TeamCity data If you look in the “teamcity-server.log” you can find how the server was started last time. From that we could conclude the old TEAMCITY_DATA_PATH. We took that directory and zip:ed it. [...]