Action Pants

I just recently worked on a project that required us to have some base code and then for each client that we setup with the app we needed to allow them to have customization.  Now the only thing that I had to factor in was that when we make changes to the base set of code we need to be able to also apply those changes to each of the customizations that we have setup. I am kind of new to this sort of thing and wasnt sure how to go about it, so with some advice from one of my developer buddies and a little research and testing I came up with this solution.

We use an SVN repository for version control and tortoise svn to communicate with that repository we kepe the normal

• trunk
• branches
• tags

folder structure and of course our main project was setup in trunk.

1. First we created a branch for each of the clients that we had form the trunk. We used the branch feature in tortoise svn to accomplish this.

2. Whenever we made any customizations just for the specific client we just switched our local copy to the branch of that client and worked from there and commited those changes back to the repository.

3. Whenever we made a change that needed to involve all the sites we switched to the trunk and made the needed changes. After the changes were commited we then switched to each branch for the clients and used tortoise svns merge feature to pull any new changes from the trunk to the branch.

If it involved anything that had a conflict you are allowed to work those but if it was just and add or a clean update then you wouldnt have to worry. After you are sure all the updates are working you would commit that update back to the repository.

So far this method seems to work out for me pretty well with keeping my code organized and also allowing version of any client changes from the initial base code.

Regular Expressions are a magical thing but they also but they also do a great job at driving you crazy when you're trying to understand them.

This is why I am going to actually start documenting when I do things with regex and i am going to do it here

A while ago I got a copy of Windows Home Server and I installed it on an extra machine that I had.  It was really awesome and I loved it but something happened where I needed to steal the hard drive for something else or I got busy with something so my HS box was out of commission.

Now about a year or so has gone by and I have been looking for an easy no thinking way of keeping my laptop backed up.  I am running Windows 7 and have a NAS so I have setup a Windows Backup to run once a week to it. It does the full image backup everytime so it takes a while so I am not always doing a backup every week depending on if I need to use my computer or not. And for some reason Gigbit isnt really working on my laptop/docking bay so it's running at 100 mbs which is also kind of painful.

I was talking to one my friends and he was raving about how much he loved his HS and that finally got me into a kick and I started making a list of what I need to get my HS up again. I managed to dig up a spare 250 Gig and found the installation CD's so I went ahead and did the install on that same box. After I got it up and running I installed the Connector software on my laptop and am running my first backup. I will be so excited when it's done cause from now on all my backups will take so much less time because of how HS handles doing a full image backup.

I have already installed the Disk Management Add-in and will probably get around to playing around with the rest of Add-ins eventually. For now I am just going to be happy to not have to thinking about backups anymore.

I use firefox and I have a use for FTP clients so I started playing around with FireFTP . It's free and it handles secure connections. Also allows you to import and export your connections so they can be backed up and moved to another machine or for formatting purposes. Seems like they make updates periodically as well, so that is a good sign to me.

http://fireftp.mozdev.org/

In my never ending search of not spending money on certain things I ran into a great FTP client that handles secure connections. More and more FTP servers are requiring that you use some sort of secure connection and not all clients will handle that but WinSCP does a great job. It's free and it's for windows so if that meets your criteria you're good to go. I use it in Windows 7 and Server 2008 without any hiccups.

http://winscp.net/eng/index.php