Git First Impressions

So far, so good :) Took me just under half a day to set up a git repository, import the existing project source and update our CI server. GitHub works well for creating your repositories and walks you through the process. It's very quick, especially when you comapare it to TFS - it's knocked 40% off our build time for a fairly hefty web app. It's not just the speed thats impressive though, having a complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access or a central server is something as a TFS slave user, I've been longing for. I still think there's lots to get my head round, which will make things interesting next week when I have some real work to do on this project; so watch this space.

Here are some useful resources if you are just getting to grips with Git:

• Git Homepage
• GitHub - repository managment
• Git for the lazy - nice and concise
• Handy help docs from GitHub - including generating SSH keys so you can upload to GitHub
• A useful Git cheat sheet

Git Bandwagon

I've being feeling the peer pressure of late to try out Git as source code repository for our the app team's projects. Today I'm going to give it a try with one of our bigger web apps. I'm hoping that it won't take me too long to get my head round the way Git works and that it results in the project build time dropping on our CI server. Well it had better - time is money!

Git is an extremely fast, efficient, distributed version control system ideal for the collaborative development of software.

Removing XmlDocument Whitespace C#

I've recently been working on matching certain API calls with XML data pulled from an XML file for testing purposes. I noticed there was a large amount of white space left in the XML when pulled from the resourced XML file; which is something I didn't want.

I thought setting the XmlDocument.PreserveWhitespace property to false would remove this for me, but it just seems to remove the preceding and trailing white space; making it similar to the string.Trim() method. I needed to use something akin to string.Replace() (this replaces a specific substring with another substring), but more powerful. Here comes the Regex.Replace function to the rescue, which is a bit like string.Replace() on steroids! Regex.Replace() allows replacement of text using regular expressions, something which can make make complex replacements a piece of cake.

Here is the code to replace white space in XML or any XML dialect (such as HTML - or XHTML):

// Remove inner Xml whitespace
Regex regex = new Regex(@">\s*<");
string cleanedXml = regex.Replace(dirtyXml, "><");

Team Foundation Server Admin for Dummies

Occasionally I'll need to administer my team's users and projects in TFS, which usually results in me having to annoy Jonathan our TFS guru at Esendex and beg him to help me. It's not just me that finds it difficult to administer TFS users and projects though; Microsoft don't make it easy for us developers at all.

Luckily, some nice people over at Attrice Corp have made it easy. Introducting Team Foundation Server Sidekicks, a GUI tool for TFS admin tasks.

You're welcome :)

Memory stream is not expandable

An upgrade to .Net 4 for an MVC app highlighted an issue with the MemoryStream class we were using in the framework. Seems that unless you use the default constructor, the stream cannot be expandable. If the stream expands you'll get a lovely System.NotSupportedException: Memory stream is not expandable error thrown at you like a ninja star.

var ninjaStarStream = new MemoryStream(buffer); // Potential error
var fluffyStream = new MemoryStream(); // Stream is expandable :)

Consider yourself warned!

Monodroid

Now this looks interesting... .Net development for Android using Monodroid

I signed up to be put in the queue to be part of testing (so I can get the download), but some how stumbled upon the hidden download when browsing the site! #win

P.S. Does anyone want to but me a Nexus S?

Firefox is King!

Internet Explorer loses its place as Europe's number one browser for the first time

...perhaps this will give Microsoft a kick up the arse!? Perhaps not.

IE's market share dropped to around 37.52 percent in December 2010 while Firefox's market share remained fairly consistent at 38.11 percent :)

Padding Oracle Crypto Attack (Update Released)

In case you missed it, you should by now all have updated your servers with the windows update to fix the Padding Oracle Crypto Attack:

• Update available via windows update
• Update manually

Points worth noting:

• You'll need to apply th fix to all your servers in the web farm as the encryption/decryption mechanism has changed.
• Your users will have to log in again - forms auth tickets issued by your app prior to the update will no longer be valid.

Catch-All MVC Route

A weird scenario may come up where you want all requests to an application routed to just one controller action in an ASP.Net MVC application, here's the catch-all route you'll need :)

public static void RegisterRoutes(RouteCollection routes)
{
   routes.MapRoute(
      "Default", // Route name
      "{*catchall}", // URL with parameters
      new { controller = "Home", action = "Index" } // Parameter defaults
   );
}