Bernhard came back from the holidays with a great idea for our next hole of .NET Golf on the code fairway (currently only German, but we do plan to offer the fairway to non-German communities). We have ironed out the details, and come up with a test implementation together with Mike (of #develop fame). Hopefully, we'll (Alex, that is) also be able to get the automated tester up and running for this hole. In closing: this time, we do have a grand prize for the winner!

So, if you are German speaking and an avid .NET programmer, come join us on the fairway!

Basically, this job is as easy as:

1. Dump the repository on the old server
2. Load the dump into a new repository on the new server

Dumping is explained here, and I won't go into detail because I wasn't the one doing it, Roman did it (I ain't touching a BSD box, more harm than good would result).

However, step two is in my ballpark, because the repository is moving to a Windows box. Two commands and you are up and running again (it can take quite some time, especially if your dump is like mine - a little over 528 MB!)

svnadmin create c:\repositories\fidalgo
svnadmin load c:\repositories\fidalgo < "e:\fidalgo.dump"

All that is left to do now is to restore the configuration and hooks (details in my last blog post on Subversion)

In closing, credit where credit is due: I gathered some inspiration from the following blog entry: A Rank Amateur Upgrades His Subversion Repository

Remember me complaining about InCD and how it gobbles up memory so you cannot use more than 1GB of physical memory with VirtualPC? Well, sometime in December I threw v4.3.0.5 off my machine to finally be able to use the full 2GB. Today I decided to risk a reboot or two to give v4.3.11.1 a shot - and Jehova! the new version works as expected. No more out of memory issues! Using InCD? Get the latest version here.

Today, I got my silicone jacket as well as the car to USB adapter for my SPV C500. Both live up to my expectations, especially the silicone jacket should help keep the dust out!

It feels good to be no longer grounded by the doctor, especially because this means that my Webcast next week is no longer in danger of being cancelled: ".NET development for free with #develop" (MSDN: .NET-Entwicklung zum Nulltarif mit SharpDevelop is the orginial title, because this Webcast is in German). I will be talking about what cool things you can do with #develop, how it was built, and what the future holds for this free (cost-wise et al) lightweight development environment. Join Uwe and me on Monday 17th @ 4pm (understanding German being a rather big bonus).

TrueCrypt is a free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 2000 thru 2003 (and this indeed includes XP). You can create virtual disks, which, as the application name implies, are encrypted: mount with the correct password - you magically see another volume. Don't have the right password? Enjoy looking at gibberish. A recommended application for laptop users, especially the British public (and secret) services should take note as they tend to loose quite a few laptops per year.

The second application is KeePass, which is nothing more or less than a nice password safe which keeps your secrets locked away (even from you, should you forget the master key). Cool features: it simply runs (no installation required), has a password generator, and does support importing.

A friend of mine asked me today "Do you know a software / service to (centrally) maintain bookmarks across browsers and machines?". No, I didn't, but I went straight to Sourceforge and did a search which turned up SiteBar (the marchitecture name is ":: SiteBar :: The Bookmark Server for Personal and Team Use", but you already know that from the title). Of course I took them up on the "test on public servers" offer, and here are screenshots for both Firefox and Internet Explorer:

SiteBar for Firefox is an extension, the IE screenshot only shows the "quick & dirty" solution, not the fully integrated one (hey, I don't use IE that much any more, so why bother?). So far, SiteBar looks very promising. Oh, and btw unless you already guessed it from the marchitecture name: you can set up your own SiteBar server in your company!

I simply couldn't resist: Yes, I am again|still MVP for Visual Developer - ASP/ASP.NET. Admittedly, this doesn't quite reflect on this blog for a couple of reasons, the main one being that my MVP-worthyness stems from the time I do (bad pun intended) on German mailing lists and Web sites (see "Deutsche Resourcen" in the left-hand navigation bar to get an idea). In other news, I of course don't do community because of the award - it is a really nice recognition of my work on part of MS, and there of course is one  benefit of the MVP award that stands out: getting access to other community people around the globe as well as MS product teams, which allows me to get better information to my communities.

I'm not a CS student nor trying to give advice to CS students, but Joel's article Advice for Computer Science College Students has some bits and pieces that are close to my heart. The section I am refering to here is Learn how to write before graduating. A quote is in order:

"The difference between a tolerable programmer and a great programmer is not how many programming languages they know, and it's not whether they prefer Python or Java. It's whether they can communicate their ideas. By persuading other people, they get leverage. By writing clear comments and technical specs, they let other programmers understand their code, which means other programmers can use and work with their code instead of rewriting it. Absent this, their code is worthless. By writing clear technical documentation for end users, they allow people to figure out what their code is supposed to do, which is the only way those users can see the value in their code. There's a lot of wonderful, useful code buried on sourceforge somewhere that nobody uses because it was created by programmers who don't write very well (or don't write at all), and so nobody knows what they've done and their brilliant code languishes."

I am inclined to say "Amen!"

Following is an installation recipe for Subversion (a free and very powerful source code control system) plus additional files for a post commit hook (so you know immediately when someone else checked something in; currently implemented as a batch file) and a backup script (so there are no excuses for not backing up your installation!). Assumptions for this recipe:

• We are creating a new repository named Corsavy
• c:\repositories is your repository root
• Backups will be located in d:\subversionbackups

Now for the recipe:

1) Install Subversion (WIN32 download). Modify the PATH environment variable so that it contains the path to your Subversion installation (usually c:\Program Files\Subversion\bin).

2) Create a repository

mkdir c:\repositories
svnadmin create c:\repositories\corsavy

Details can be found here.

3) Edit svnserve.conf (do not forget to uncomment [General]). Details see previous link, however, svnserve.conf does come with plenty of instructions itself.

4) Install Subversion as a service using the SVN Service Wrapper (Note: you have to place it in the bin directory where svnserve.exe is located)

SVNService -install -d -r c:\repositories

5) Optional: a commit hook, post-commit.bat

Put it into c:\repositories\corsavy\hooks, it will be picked up automatically

SET REPOS=%1
SET REV=%2

SET LOG_FILE=%TEMP%.\svnfileR-%REV%
SET LOG_FILE1=%TEMP%.\svnfileR1-%REV%
SET LOG_FILE2=%TEMP%.\svnfileR2-%REV%
SET AUT_FILE=%TEMP%.\svnfileA-%REV%

svnlook info -r %REV% %REPOS%>%LOG_FILE1%
svnlook changed -r %REV% %REPOS%>%LOG_FILE2%
copy %LOG_FILE1%+spacer.txt+%LOG_FILE2%+spacer.txt+%LOG_FILE%

svnlook author -r %REV% %REPOS%>%AUT_FILE%

REM SET THE AUTHOR FROM THE FILE.
FOR /F %%A IN (%AUT_FILE%) DO SET AUTHOR=%%A

blat "%LOG_FILE%" -to "toaddr" -f "fromaddr" -server localhost -s "[svn-corsavy] rev %REV%, %AUTHOR%"

DEL %LOG_FILE%
DEL %LOG_FILE1%
DEL %LOG_FILE2%
DEL %AUT_FILE%

Note that I did remove toaddr and fromaddr in this script (put in the ones you'd like to use instead), and you need a file named spacer.txt (mine simply contains four newlines). For mailing out the change log, blat is used (Note: the line with blat must not wrap). I placed blat into the bin folder of my Subversion installation, so it is automatically in the search path.

6) Optional: backup, a VBS script

Set objWsh = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")

strCmdLine = "cmd /c rmdir d:\subversionbackups\current /s /q"
nRetVal = objWsh.Run(strCmdLine, 1, True)

strCmdLine = "cmd /c mkdir d:\subversionbackups\current"
nRetVal = objWsh.Run(strCmdLine, 1, True)

strCmdLine = "svnadmin hotcopy c:\repositories\corsavy d:\subversionbackups\current --clean-logs"
WScript.Echo strCmdLine
nRetVal = objWsh.Run(strCmdLine, 1, True)

strFilename = """d:\subversionbackups\"
strFilename = strFilename &  Year(Date) & Month(Date) & Day(Date) & ".zip"""
strCmdLine = "zip -r " & strFilename & " ""d:\subversionbackups\current\*.*"""
WScript.Echo strCmdLine
nRetVal = objWsh.Run(strCmdLine, 1, True)

The Zip component in use is Info-ZIP, which is free. The VBS file is run from a scheduled task each night.

That concludes the recipe for installing Subversion - well, almost: the port used by svnserve is 3690 (TCP as well as UDP), so you might need to change the IPSec policy of your server to allow those incoming ports. Same thing client-side, but this time outgoing.