This was a longer-planned upgrade to our Subversion server that happened today: moving from the 1.1 series to 1.2.1. It went smoothly, especially because I played it safe by doing a dump / load cycle (more details to be found in Migrating a Repository) with all repositories. Safety wasn't the only concern: as detailed in the release notes, I also wanted to move the repositories to a FSFS back end, and take advantage of xdelta compression. I was mostly after server-side features, I don't see many of our devs use the optional locking...

Want to test your Web site with that other browser? You know, the one that ships with the operating system? Here is how to do that. Start by right-clicking on the page you want to open:

In the Browse With dialog box, you can now choose which browser to use this time only, or by clicking Set as Default, use it for all your future Ctrl+F5 endeavours:

Sometimes, it might be handy to not have VS.NET pick a dynamic port each and every time it starts Visual Web Developer Web Server (aka ASP.NET Development Server or, as it was called back in the old days, Cassini). There is an easy way to get a fixed port when you press Ctrl+F5. First step is to select the Web project in Solution Explorer:

Next, go to the Properties window (DO NOT right-click and choose Property Pages - you will end up somewhere entirely different):

As you can see, I already switched "Use dynamic ports" to False, and in this case, I chose to stick with the default provided port number. When is this port-setting useful? When you automate tests, for example.

Just minutes ago, I finished my Webcast on Profiling with Visual Studio Team System, which is one in a series of Webcasts for MSDN Connection Service: Visual Studio 2005 Team Systems Beta Experience (MSDN Deutschland). As promised, here is a list of links that prove to be invaluable when navigating the "bits":

• The Profiling Team’s Greatest Hits: Volume One
• The Profiling Team’s Greatest Hits: A Few More Hits
• Make Your Apps Fly with the New Enterprise Performance Tool
• Rico Mariani's Articles and Recommendations
• Select team member blogs: IanWho, Angry Richard, SCarroll
• Enterprise Performance Tools Team Blog
• And last but not least the most important newssource for Team System in general - Rob Caron's Blog

That should get you started with profiling. Next week's topic is "The build system of Visual Studio Team System".

I finally got around to make a new version of SvnPostCommitHook. For one, it was about time to include Ben's changes, and secondly I wanted to roll a new version onto our Subversion box - it was still running on v1.3. So much for dogfooding...

With that, here is the change log. Note that the last public version was 1.5:

8/8/2005 - 1.7, Changes by Christoph Wille

• LookInfo getter logs when _lookinfo is null
• MailTextOnly & AppendDiffToMail properties added to .config file (text-only currently does not send diffs anyways)
• UU case added to svnlook parser
• Change SvnLookOutputParser.SkipBlanks method to return bool if StringCollection hasMoreLines

5/14/2005 - 1.6, Changes by Ben Lowery, ben AT blowery DOT org

• <pre> blocks for code#
• Updates CSS for new HTML
• Logic for finding CSS updated
• More logging

And here is the usual binary & source code archive:

With the weather being abysmally bad this weekend (snow on 1700m in early August is quite a nasty surprise), I at least got around to complete the book The Best Software Writing I, which consists of essays collected and introduced by Joel Spolsky. I have to admit that I would have never read most of those had I simply stumbled upon them on the Web. But the preselection with a focus on good writing made it appealing to me.

From a technical point of view (technical not necessarily meaning a developer-centric world), I really enjoyed reading (in order from the TOC) Strong Typing vs Strong Testing, C++ - The Forgotten Trojan Horse, What to Do When You're Screwed, Larry's rules of software engineering #2: Measuring testers by test metrics doesn't, Team Compensation (only in the book or Better Software Magazine) as well as all the stuff by Eric Sink (Hazards of Hiring being the favorite among his essays printed in the book).