Tag: Software

A quick linkdump of some VSTS project methodology templates: RUP - http://www.osellus.com/solutions/microsoft/rup-vsts_solutions.html Scrum - http://www.scrumforteamsystem.com Macroscope - http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/consulting/method/macroscope/index_p2.html

Here’s the thing: for my private development work (a.k.a. PHPExcel 8-)), I’ve been using Subversion as my source-control server (and client). As the PHPExcel is hosted on CodePlex, one would suspect I would be using the Team Foundation hosted service which is provided for free. Not really… Here’s the thing: CodePlex provides a web interface to work items, which me and my project members use a lot. But since one needs Visual Studio to use the TFS code repository in a comfortable way, without having to use any command-line tools, I decided to use Subversion as the source repository.

For everyone who has read my article on NHibernate, here’s a story for you… When building an application, everyone comes to a point where one needs to batch-update records in a database table, based on one or more criteria. Let’s say, for example, there’s a table “User” containing an activation date. And you want to remove all users that have activated in 1999. In a regular database environment, or when using ADO coding, one would write a DbCommand “DELETE FROM User WHERE activationdate < ‘2000-01-01’”.

A lot of news around OpenXML these days, so I decided to bundle some things into one big blog post. In .NET 3.0, there’s the System.IO.Packaging API, which allows programmatic access to OpenXML packages (amongst them Office2007 files). Since this API is quite low-level, the Microsoft people introduced a new SDK built on top of System.IO.Packaging, which allows you to use strongly typed classes for document parts. Checkout a code sample on Wouter’s blog and see for yourself: this SDK provides access to an OpenXML package in a much easier way than System.IO.Packaging. Download the SDK here.

Some new TFS links I found: Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Guide http://www.codeplex.com/TFSGuide Work Item Creator http://www.codeplex.com/wicreator/

Currently, I’m playing around with TFS (Team Foundation Server), and here’s just a quick linkdump of some TFS tools, mainly on CodePlex. http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa718351.aspx#cipp http://www.codeplex.com/TFSAdmin http://www.codeplex.com/automation http://www.codeplex.com/TFSCodeReviewFlow http://www.codeplex.com/tfsconsole http://www.codeplex.com/TfsPowerPack

Yesterday, I decided to install an Apache web server on my development machine, next to IIS. Unfortunately, both use port 80, and I did not want to set one of the 2 servers to another port. Luckily, I remembered that IIS can be configured to only listen on one IP, and Apache on another. Easy: 2 IP addresses for my PC, and another server on each one.

In my article on NHibernate, I mentioned MyGeneration, a tool which creates database classes / ORM classes from your database tables. Since MyGeneration uses templates to generate classes, and PHP is underrepresented, I decided to create a PHP Zend_Db_Table template, which creates the necessary Zend_Db_Table overloads for every table in your application built using the Zend Framework. Downloads and updates can be found on the MyGeneration template library: http://www.mygenerationsoftware.com/TemplateLibrary/Template/?id=be41c1ec-07e2-489c-ab6e-13f42f07adda

Something really interesting has just been released on CodePlex: PHP for Microsoft AJAX Library. The code you have to use in your scripts is clean and easy, providing a full-featured PHP backend to the Microsoft AJAX Library.

Today, I discovered a nice PHP thing: Munin. This is a PHP version of Apache mod_security, allowing it to be run on IIS too. Munin performs rule based checks on HTTP headers, get and post data, … The standard rule set disallows some things like path traversal and possible fopen() attacks. In addition to these rulesets, one should add some more for filtering out SQL injection attacks, cross-site script loading, … These things should already be covered in your code, but an extra filter at the front door is always nice.