Getting back in the saddle

I haven’t been blogging, obviously, in quite a while.  It’s time to take this up again.

So first, just a quick rundown of what I’m working on and the current issues of the day.

At home, I have been successful getting Mercurial up and running with IIS 7, though there are still some drawbacks in my current implementation that prevent me from taking what I’ve learned through this experience back to the workplace.  I am just using the built-in hgweb.cgi on IIS 7.5 currently, and that implementation does not include some functionality that I think developers would expect, such as being able to create a repository on the server, or even upload an existing repository.  I’ll need to address that before I can recommend this for corporate use.

I am also working on setting up an internal NuGet feed and gallery, which is coming along nicely.  I finally found a server at work where I can host the gallery and we already have plenty of space reserved for package uploads.

Additionally, I am close to perfecting a build process that will compile, strong name, unit / integration test (while also instrumenting referenced projects for code coverage collection), source index, publish symbols, create NuGet package and publish that, produce documentation via Sandcastle and create installers via WiX projects.

What would really be nice, on top of these capabilities, is a CodePlex/BitBucket/GitHub-like site to serve as a VCS/DVCS-agnostic project community site with Wiki’s, integrated task and defect tracking, activity reports and charts, etc.  I have heard about RhodeCode but I’m not sure if it can provide the functionality I need.

Technorati Tags: Mercurial,Hg,RhodeCode,BitBucket,GitHub,CodePlex,MSBuild,Automated Build,Best Practice

Things I want to do in the near future

Pop toast – I know it’s been overused by a number of different products, but it is still one of the most convenient and unobtrusive notification mechanisms available, especially if the mechanism is explicitly subscribed to and you have the ability to review the toasts that you may have missed or temporarily suppressed.

Drag-n-drop Plugins – I need to beef up on my AppDomain skillz so that I can support drag-n-drop plug-ins and additional functionality a la ASP.NET.

Consistent server-side error trapping mechanisms – All too often WebService and WCF service errors are either shown directly to the end user (bad, bad, bad), but since these aren’t trapped by Application_Error, they’re often not present in the server’s error logs.  Need a better and more consistent way to handle these and get the error information to the developers and teams that can actually do something about them.

Technorati Tags: Toast,AppDomains,Error Handling