Scott Hanselman

It's so crazy it just might work. I've been talking on and off with the CodePlex team for at least a year. Many of them I consider friends, so I've always been very frank with them, saying things like:

"I'll never use any Open Source Hosting service without support for Subversion."

Of course, they are using Team Foundation Server, and there's a number of connectivity options if you're cool with them, including:

• The free CodePlexClient (CPC) that looks a LOT like command-line svn.exe.
• Teamprise Explorer, also free, from Teamprise.
• ...and now, the SvnBridge.

Still in very active development, this tool is a proxy between a Subversion client and Team Foundation Server. You can use it against any TFS system it seems.

The first version is local proxy - it runs in your tray - but plans are for a server-side version that will require no client installation.

Unfortunately, as of this writing, there's no binary release (or instructions) but here's how you get it working.

1. Go to the Recent Check-Ins section of the SvnBridge Project on CodePlex and click the Download icon next to the LATEST checkin. Note that it's really changing a lot, so it might be broken. If so, try another.
   
2. Unzip the ZIP file the system will give you, and either open the SvnBridge.sln or go to the command line and run "MSBuild SvnBridge.sln".
3. Run SvnBridge.exe and note the blue Q-bert-looking icon that appears in your tray. Right-click and choose Settings.
   
   Go to your CodePlex project in your browser and note the TFS Server URL of your project. It seems to usually be https://tfs03.codeplex.com. Enter that URL in the settings. The bridge port will usually be 8081, but you can change that. Note that this means http://localhost:8081 will be forwarded to https://tfs03.codeplex.com (443). The SvnBridge is just that, a port forwarder/translator/bridge.
   
4. Using your SVN tool of choice - mine is TortoiseSVN - browse to a local repository, using the format http://localhost:8081/<projectname> like http://localhost:8081/Subkismet. If everything works, you'll be checking code out and looking at logs just as if it's a Subversion repository. Madness. (I didn't expect it to work...it does.)
   
5. Here's a constantly updated list of what works and what doesn't in the SvnBridge.

I think that the CodePlex site is probably the most actively developed Open Source Hosting site out there. (I mean the site itself, not the activity within the projects hosted there). They are always adding new stuff and have some nice things like the Advanced View of the Issue Tracker and RSS feeds for literally everything.

I have to give them credit for putting this bridge together, and for Open Sourcing the bridge itself. I'm reading the code now, and it's pretty cool stuff. Hacky, in places, but that's to be expected given the problem domain, but there's some interesting things going on that make the code worth at least taking a look at. They've got a mini-Mocking system called MyMocks (curious) and a TCPTracing "Tivo" like program that appears to code generate tests. Also, if you're interested in WebDAV in C#, there's a playground of good ideas.

Either way, there's interesting stuff going on over there. I look forward to their 1.0 release.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I was chatting on IM to Jeff today and we were going back and forth and back and forth and it became ridiculous. Just pick up the phone.

IM is great, truly. I get to stay connected to all sorts of folks that I either wouldn't be able to call as often, or where a one-line "what's up" email would be a burden to them or a todo.

I find the little piece of "blue toast" that pops up to be very comforting in fact - "Ah, Carl's still out there. How nice."

However, I think it's important to Know When To Escalate the conversation to the Next Level, that might look like one of the following:

• IM to Phone
• Phone to Lunch (in Person)
• Email to In Person
• In the Cube to In a Meeting Room

How do you know when to take it to the Next Level?

• When an email thread goes by that is a "Reply to All Snowball," where folks not only continue to Reply to All, but they also CC: more and more people with each Reply to All...it's time to escalate the communication.
• When your hands start to hurt while typing an Instant Message...it's time to escalate the communication.
• When you actually get angry that you can't get your thoughts into an mail as fast as you can think...it's time to escalate the communication.
• When you can't say something nice in IM or email, escalate the communication and say it in person, or just let it go.
• If you use impersonal communication in an electronic format, it will almost always be a career limiting move. Check out Greg's Post on Communication Problem or Behavior Problem.
• When you've written an email so long that the scrollbar appears, it's time to escalate the communication. Seriously, no one is going to read that.

What kind of communications problems do you have?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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Omar pulled the trigger and we released DasBlog 1.9.7. Download it.

A few points to note about this release.

• This is the final release on an ASP.NET 1.1 codebase. No bugs will be fixed unless this release kills a kitten.
  • NOTE: To be clear, even though this is compiled under ASP.NET 1.1, it runs GREAT under .NET 2.0 as is. Just follow the comments in the web.config to change a few settings.
• The next release will literally be in a week or so, will will be called DasBlog 2.0 and will be compiled under .NET 2.0 and have changes to support Medium Trust environments.
  • This will allow folks downloading the source to compile DasBlog happily with VS 2005 or Orcas, or just MSBuild.
• We'll announce a one year roadmap with our plan to move towards .NET 3.5 as well as a new release every 60 days.
• We will very likely move to a location that is not SourceForge.
• We'll have a visual refresh of the main project page as well as some consolidation, but for now:
  • DasBlog.Info - For DasBlog information.
  • DasBlog.us - For "us," the DasBlog forums
  • DasBlog Mailing Lists - Subscribe to either the Developer's list, or the Checkin's List to see what's going on.

UPDATE: Alexander Groß has the definitive guide on How To Secure Your dasBlog Installation.

In this release we've fixed some and added some:

• Fixed a metric buttload of bugs
• Taken in more patches from the public than any other release (Thanks public!)
• Category and Home Page Paging Macros
• LiveComment Preview (thanks SubText!)
• Emailed Daily Activity Reports
• Windows Live Writer Custom Integration
• Support for Akismet Comment Spam Support
  • Go get a WordPress account, without a blog, and use the API key they'll send you.
• Optionally show comments on the Permalink Page
• Even more performance gains (4x+) in the Macro engine
• New Internationalized Languages, including Swedish (Thanks Per Salmi!)
  • This brings our total supported language count up to 15! Although we can ALWAYS use more, and we really need double-checkers and updaters to put in localized strings for some of the new features!
• Support for Blogging directly from Word 2007
• Many fixes in our Blogger API and MetaWebLog API support
• Better detection of referrals from Search Engines
• CSS fixes and additions like highlighting of the Blog Author's comments
  • Make the comment email address match the email address in sitesecurity.config for this feature.
• DHTML Timeline of Posts from the MIT Simile project
• Support for SMTP Servers like Gmail for notifications
• New themes
• Support for THREE Rich Editors - FreeTextBox, FCKEditor and TinyMCE (in DasBlog Contrib, see the source)

Thanks to the DasBlog team and the active folks on the Developer List (in no particular order)....

Omar Shahine, Clemens Vasters, Tom Watts, Ken Hughes, Paul Van Brenk, John Forsythe, Nick Schweitzer, Kenneth Lefebvre, Ben Scheirman, Tim Sherrill, Alexander Gross, James Snape, Raymond Llewellyn, Tony Bunce, Josh Flanagan, Aaron Fischer, Anthony Bouch, Ayende Rahien, Ben Taylor, George V. Reilly, Greg Hughes, Mike Schinkel, Marc Mercuri, Rajiv Popat, Tim Sherrill

...and the many patch contributors!

When selecting a Blog based on ASP.NET, I encourage you to check out DasBlog but also these other .NET based blog engines:

• BlogEngine.NET
• SubText
• Community Server (not Open Source)

Enjoy.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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It's unclear who said:

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers"

but it might have been Thomas Watson in 1943, president of IBM, but it might be a myth.

The thinking was that a number of large mainframey computers would be built and used by the world. That of course, didn't happen, as my watch has more memory than ENIAC did, and there's computers everywhere, but as the web continues to mature, I believe that things will conflate in the next 10-15 years and as more and more companies begin to

• outsource storage to services like S3
• move servers into Virtual Machines
• move all email and apps to Google Apps

All this is building a collective trust with large entities like Amazon, and as prices fall with uptimes rising, more companies will say, "who am I to build a datacenter? I'll just host in one of The Five."

Here's a list of services (by no means exhaustive) from Wikipedia's Utility Computing article, as of today:

• Amazon S3 - Bulk storage and bandwidth for static content
• Amazon EC2 - Pay by the hour CPU
• NearlyFreeSpeech - Pay as you go web hosting for web pages, dynamic content, domains, DNS, etc
• Sun Microsystems Sun Grid - Pay by the CPU hour
• Strikeiron Web Services Marketplace - Pay per Web API call.
• USi an AT&T company - USiPinnacle - Pay-as-you-go enterprise applications
• Zimki - J avascript based utility computing system. Pay by bandwidth, storage, and javascript operations.
• ElasticLive Utility web hosting service based on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud
• InsynQ utility computing services
• CPAASP online accounting solutions for on-demand enterprises
• Distributed Potential Pay-Per-Use Grid Computing Capacity
• Dell Inc. have a specific Cloud Computing Solution through their Datacenter Solutions Division

I believe this list will likely turn into The Five Computers:

1. Google (Apps)
2. Amazon (EC2)
3. Microsoft (Live)
4. Sun (Grid)
5. A network of installed bots on every small computer, possibly built into the OS, to use idle CPU cycles for the collective.

This "5th computer" will be the "remainder" after the first four, but might ultimately become the largest. Perhaps it's a larger number, but surely Amazon will buy Bay at some point, and Google will buy Salesforce.com, so they don't count.

Computing will be moved into the Cloud. It's already happening, we're 20% there. The idea has been around since the beginning, and it will, in my opinion, continue come up until it actually happens and we build Skynet. One of these compute clouds will no doubt end up in orbit.

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

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I'm considering moving my whole family over to Google Apps.

Have any of you done this and how did it go?

About Scott

Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.

About   Newsletter

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