Ride to Code Camp Oz!

Chuck is talking about riding his motorbike down to Wagga Wagga to attend Code Camp Oz 2006. It sounds like a flippin’ awesome idea to me. If I had a bike I would ride up to Brisbane and ride back down. Unfortunately my wife won’t let me have a motorbike. I think the words that came out of her mouth were something along the lines of “not until you learn how to walk without falling over”. That has never happened – I swear!

TFVC: Why use branching?

One of the things that I am hoping to talk about at Code Camp Oz this year is the branching capabilities of Team Foundation Version Control.

When I mention branching to team leaders and project managers you can typically count on that deer in the headlights look when they realise that their project has suddenly gotten to the point where it needs branching in the source code repository. What usually follows is a discussion on how we could use some combination of tagging, copies of the repository and custom syncrhonisation tools to get around the need for branching.

The truth is that branching is nothing to be afraid of if you understand the way your version control tool works. In this next series of posts I am going to look at how branching is supported in Team Foundation Version Control and the reasons you use it, including:

• Support concurrent development of product releases.
• Reduce contention on individual source files and work offline.
• Lower the risk of code-base contamination.

While I will be focusing on TFVC alot of the techniques will be applicable to other version control systems such as Visual SourceSafe, CVS, and Subversion.

Suspended Animation

Slashdot has reported some facinating advances in medical science where Doctors are claiming that they can noinduce hypothermia in trauma patients to effectively suspend their body functions for up to three hours.

Obviously this has caused a massive thread on slashdot with lots of religious arguments. I’m going to avoid all that discussion and just comment that this may actually help in the battle field. Imagine a scenario where a soldier has sustained a would-be fatal injury and has lost a lot of blood.

If they could compress the equipment required into a battle field deployable pack a medic could get to the soldier suspend their body functions until they could be airlifted for life saving treatment.

Of course, the question is, depending on the nature of your injuries, life might not be worth living if you are saved.

What? Open source software has security flaws?

Rocky is talking about a the DHS funding an open source security push and links to a primary source on eWeek. To me, the interesting thing about this isn’t that the effort is going to take place but the acknowledgement that open source software has problems and that its going to cost money to fix them.

Also – while I am on the subject, while is the DHS providing this funding? It seems that they are using the dollars of tax payers in the United States to subsidise the technology choices of organisations that are currently using OSS. Surely organisations that use OSS should realise the true cost of OSS and not rely on a DHS safety net.

Having said that – $1.24 million dollars is not that much, and probably not a scratch on what Microsoft spends on securing their software (Microsoft probably spends that in a week).

Paul’s new blog.

Paul is one of those guys that is made of equal parts technologist and entrepreneur. Because I aspire to come up with that one idea that changes the world I’m always interested in what he has to say. He recently re-launched his blog and it looks like he is going to spend a fair bit of time talking about the things that make him tick.

Sometimes I feel like I have so many good ideas that I could burst. Some of them I want to implement myself but can’t find the time, and others I want some others to build so that I can actually use them. Anyway – keep an eye on Paul’s blog, it is sure to be an interesting read.

Changes to TFS since B3R

Etienne Tremblay has posted up a pointer to changes to TFS since the BETA 3 Refresh. One of the things he highlights is the fact that TFS will do longer install on a domain cotnroller. Hooray!

I’ve recently been working on a non-TFS related project for a customer and in their HA configuration they chose to install Active Directory on the same box as their application servers. While in theory this shouldn’t be a problem, from a best practice point of view it is fowned upon. Firstly, it creates a common dependency between two software services by placing them on the same hardware.

Team Foundation Server is essentially a piece of development infrastructure, and if your business relies of the stable operation of its software development environment then you owe it to yourself not to skimp on the provisioning of hardware – that includes trying to co-locate critical network services such as Active Directory on the same box.

Personally I am really happy that they have now effectively disallowed this configuration, I think it will lead to a more reliable installation process. The problem is – what about those people that have already installed TFS on a DC?