My team works mostly w/ Flex-based applications. That being said, there are nearly no conventions at all (even getting them to refactor is a miracle in itself) and the like.
Coming from a .NET + CruiseControl.NET background, I've been aching to getting everyone to use some decent tracking software (we're using a todo list coded in PHP now) and CI; I figured trac+BuildBot would be a nice option.
How would you convince upper management that this is the way to go, as well as some of the rules mentioned in this post? One of my main issues is that everyone codes without thinking (You'd be amazed at the type of "logic" this spawns...)
Thanks
Is there anything you could do now that wouldn't require permission from anyone else? Could you start by just using trac/buildbot/etc for just your own work, then add in others as they are interested?
In my experience you can get quite far by doing w/out asking.
Tell the management that they'll be better able to keep their eye on progress with such a tool.
Are there specific benefits to the route that you're suggesting that you could show them without them having to buy in?
I had an experience with getting my team to accept a maven + cruisecontrol CI setup. Basically I tried to get them to go along with it for a few days and they kept balking because it was unfamiliar. Then I just did it on my own and had all broken builds emailed to the mailing list. That night the project lead made a check in that broke the build (he just forgot a file) and, of course, everybody was emailed with his screw up.
The next day he came over to me and said, "I get it now."
It required no effort from him to get involved and got to see the benefits for free.
Related
I submitted a Wordpress Plugin over a week ago and still haven't gotten back a response, is there any way to figure out what the status is? It's been really frustrating.
A delayed response may suggest you had an incomplete submission - I got mine back within 18 hours.
If you want a rapid response, make it as easy as possible for the reviewer to assess whether your plugin is a reasonable attempt at something useful:
include a great readme, and use the readme test tool to verify it
avoid the most common plugin coding mistakes that make everyone's life miserable
include a good, short, simple description of the plugin and what it does in the readme and plugin header
include a link to download the source so they can test it - surprisingly, I suspect this often gets left out!
ensure you include a link to the site where the plugin is described, instructions given, and a download link provided
If you do all these, you should get a fairly rapid response. If you do only a few, you'll make the reviewers work harder and they may skip approving yours and focus on other plugins that are easier to assess as they have provided all the above.
Frankly, doing the above things actually makes your plugin more useful to the public, so it's worth spending the extra time - even if your plugin is a sensational idea, if it's not well described nobody will understand how useful it is and it just won't get used!
I'm planning to create a site for learning technologies, such as codeproject or codeplex. Can you please suggest to me the different ways to manage huge articles?
Look at a content management system, such as SiteFinity: http://www.sitefinity.com/. There are others, some free. You can find some on codeplex.com.
HTH.
Check out DotNetNuke CMS too >> http://www.dotnetnuke.com/
And here's a very hot list available of ASP.NET CMS systems:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_content_management_systems#Microsoft_ASP.NET_2
Different ways to manage articles while building the entire system yourself. Hmm, ok, let me give it a try... here's the short version.
There are several ways you can "store" your articles (content, data, whatever), and the best way to do so is to use a Database. (SQL Server, MySQL, SQLCE, SQLite, Oracle, the list goes on).
If you're not sold on the idea of a database, you can use any other type of persistent storage that you like. IE: XML, or even flat "TXT" files.
Since you're using ASP.NET you now need to either write your code behind, or some other complied code to access your stored data. You pull it out of the storage and display it on the page/view.
Last but not least, I'd like to give you a suggestion (even though it's not part of your original question). As the other answerers have stated, you should look at a pre-built CMS. If nothing else, to see how it's done (not necessarily to use it as is). My philosophy is quite simple, if you want to be productive in your development, don't bother reinventing the wheel just for the sake of it. If someone else has already build and given away exactly what you need, you should at very least give it a look and use what you can. It will save you piles of time and heartache.
Your question is not vague enough to be closed, but is vague enough that answering all of the nuances could take several thousand lines.
I can see where to get an rss feed for the BUG LIST, however I would like to get rss updates for modifications to current bugs if possible.
This is quite high up when searching via Google for it, so I'm adding a bit of advertisement here:
As Bugzilla still doesn't support this I wrote a small web service supporting exactly this. You can find its source code here and a running instance here.
What you're asking for is the subject of this enhancement bug:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=256718
but no one seems to be working on it.
My first guess is that the way to do it is to add a template somewhere like template/en/default/bug/show.atom.tmpl with whatever you need. Put it in custom or an extension as needed.
If you're interested in working on it or helping someone with it, visit channel #mozwebtools on irc.mozilla.org.
Not a perfect solution, but with the resolution of bug #255606, Bugzilla now allows listing all bugs, by running a search with no criteria, and you can then get the results of the search in Atom format using the link in the bottom of the list.
From the release notes for 4.2:
Configuration: A new parameter search_allow_no_criteria has been added (default: on) which allows admins to forbid queries with no criteria. This is particularly useful for large installations with several tens of thousands bugs where returning all bugs doesn't make sense and would have a performance impact on the database.
Currently, we're using a wiki at work to share insights, tips and information. But somehow, people aren't sharing snippets that way. It's probably too inconvenient to write and too difficult to find snippets there.
So, is there a multi-user/collaborative snippets manager around? Something like Snippely. (Has anyone tried Snippely in multi-user mode?)
Since we're all on the same site, it would probably be best if it used mapped network drives or ODBC instead of its own server process.
Oh, and it has to support Unicode and let us choose any truetype font. We're using the hideous APL language, which uses special characters.
It would be nice if it didn't cost money, so I wouldn't have to convince management to pay for it as well as the other developers to use it.
Pastebin is a common solution to this. Just install somewhere on your network, then paste snippets. http://pastebin.com/
Works well when trying to debug a piece of code, or stack trace also.
There's Snip-it pro ( http://www.snipitpro.com ), I looked at it a while back, and the interface seemed to be pretty horrible. It's 40 bucks / seat, which is not too bad. Last time I was looking for a tool like that I found nothing at all, and I found that it's very hard to get my co-workers to start using snippet libraries - everybody is happy to google it or search their old codebases. These days I use Evernote for all of my own snippeting needs.
I'm thinking of starting a wiki, probably on a low cost LAMP hosting account. I'd like the option of exporting my content later in case I want to run it on IIS/ASP.NET down the line. I know in the weblog world, there's an open standard called BlogML which will let you export your blog content to an XML based format on one site and import it into another. Is there something similar with wikis?
The correct answer is ... "it depends".
It depends on which wiki you're using or planning to use. I've used various over the years MoinMoin was ok, used files rather than database, Ubuntu seem to like it. MediaWiki, everyone knows about and JAMWiki is a java clone(ish) of MediaWiki with the aim to be markup compatible with MediaWiki, both use databases and you can generally connect whichever database you want, JAMWiki is pre-configured to use an internal HSQLDB instance.
I recently converted about 80 pages from a MoinMoin wiki into JAMWiki pages and this was probably 90% handled by a tiny perl script I found somewhere (I'll provide a link if I can find it again). The other 10% was unfortunately a by-hand experience (they were of the utmost importance with them being recipies for the missus) ;-)
I also recently setup a Mediawiki instance for work and that took all of about 8 minutes to do. So that'd be my choice.
To answer your question I don't believe that there's such a standard as WikiML as Till called it.
As strange as it sounds, I've investigated screen scraping a wiki for a co-worker to help him port it to another wiki engine. It turned out that screen scraping would have been easier, quicker and more efficient to write to move this particular file based wiki to another one or a CMS.
Given the context that you wrote the question in I would bite the bullet now and pay the little extra for a windows hosted account and put Screwturn wiki on it. You're got the option of using file based or SQL Server based back end for it but because one of your requirements is low cost I'm guessing that you would use file based now for a cheaper hosted account and then you can always upscale the back end to SQL Server.
I haven't heard of WikiML.
I think your biggest obstacle is gonna be converting one wiki markup to another. For example, some wikis use markdown (which is what Stack Overflow uses), others use another markup syntax (e.g. BBCode, ...), etc.. The bottom line is - assuming the contents are databased it's not impossible to export and parse it to make it "fit" in another system. It might just be a pain in the ass.
And if the contents are not databased, it's gonna be a royal pain in the ass. :D
Another solution would be to stay with the same system. I am not sure what the reason is for changing the technology later on. It's not like a growing project requires IIS/ASP.NET all of the sudden. (It might just be the other way around.) But for example, if you could stick with PHP for a while, you could also run that on IIS.