I have been playing with the Beyond Compare 3.0 Beta, 3-way merge in particular, and it works so fine with Subversion. I’m sold, now I just have to wait so I can buy it….
I think this falls inside the terms of the “Non-Disclosure”
I’m back to getting the Installer ready for our pending release. In fact I’m the critical path at the moment. Yet I’m having convulsions with how the Install process works.
For so long I’ve wanted to use WiX to build MSI installers, and thus have been spending vast time reading how to do the more trickier tasks (more than xcopy) and yet I find not all is perfect in MSI land either. Surprise!
As far as my product goes, WiX/MSI will solve my problems. I love the declarative nature, thus giving you powerful roll-back functionality, but from the correct management of prerequisite it seems woefully shortcoming.
Where-as my InstallShield install-script installer, feels dirty as it’s so procedural, and thus I have to hand roll all the un-install, minor/major upgrade paths by hand, but can do what I like when I please.
But the real issues with InstallShield is that is crashes my machine when I’m not even using it! via it’s stupid agent.exe program, that goes 100% CPU (dual core machine so not a complete killer) and makes explorer run like a dog. And this service they are trying to sell as a value add-on, yet it ruins my development machine, hmm no thanks.
Or maybe it’s the licensing. I have both IS 12 and the newer IS 2008, but have chosen to stick with 12 as 2008 has a Vista like phone home silliness. I want to have it installed on our build machine, so all production builds are done in a clean location, and can be run by anybody from the dev team, but once a year have it on my machine also, while I’m tweaking the project. Yet that’s not going to work with the newer version.
So I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place.
FeedDemon 2.6 has been released from beta, and it’s now free. This is a happy day. It’s a fantastic feed reader. I love the synchronisation via NewsGator.
Now I can get friends and family using it.
I’m not sad that I’ve paid for it, and it is now free, because it really didn’t cost that much, but it really is that good.
So go download FeedDemon now!
I have finished now, but I have to say there was something creepy about the two male photos used. One looked too happy and the other too smooth. What made it worse was that it kept changing and my attention would be pulled to smug guy or happy guy.
I’m not looking forward to having to do a repair, luckily I did a full install, so there are no extra features that I will have to install later……
Windows Live Write leaves Beta and moves into the bundle-ware stage. This was announced two days ago on the Windows Live Writer blog, but like previous releases, the http://writer.live.com/ URL just redirected you to some crap http://get.live.com/wl/coming_soon page. Luckily the Windows Live Writer blog has a Send Feedback link, so I did just that to tell how crap they are! and promptly gave up on the update.
Today I read that the installer in has a “new” workflow, so tried it out and the URLs all work just fine now. I agree with Kevin that the new installer is pants. In fact it’s like Microsoft wants to reinvent the control panel and have made their own just for Live ™ software.
So I’m not using version 12 of Windows Live Writer, and I’ll see how it goes, but on the whole I’m not impressed with the change to the installation model..
Eric Sink has announced the SourceGear release of DiffMerge 3.1. Killer feature for me is the correct TortoiseSVN merge command is now documented in the help, copied here for your pleasure:
/m /r=%merged /t1=%yname /t2=%bname /t3=%tname /c=%mname %mine %base %theirs
Fantastic. I’d still love to see all four views at once (theirs,base,mine,merged), but this help makes the product very useable now for conflict mergers.
I’m writing my bug report here, as I couldn’t find where to report this bug. Any insight to where/how to report Media Player bugs would be good to know.
I have just been blessed with knowledge from 11 times MVP Chris Crowe. I was down in IS Land, complaining about how Visual Studio became unstable when debugging many instances of the same solution. And Chris drops the bombshell that you can launch and debug from the same instance.
Low and behold it’s true, and now I’m even considering moving more projects into the same solution, just to simplify the debug launch process…
So the steps are:
For more information here is the MSDN link
I was first introduced to PC-Lint at my old company, after complaining about code style and the state of the software after having warnings turned off for years to a co-worker. I then spent a few months evaluating the software and removing bugs from our system before getting the sign off to purchase licenses for the team.
The best part was finding odd-case errors, fixing them, and later reviewing customer crashes and observing, Oh I’ve fixed that already. Nothing better to say to the management types who love to rush products out the door.
Anyway in our current C++ code base I have been removing large numbers of warnings (and solved some corner case bugs), and now have team buy-in. It’s the most beautiful thing to see the warning count drop, and read check-in comments about warning removal.
On Friday I pulled out the trusty PC-Lint again, but was not sure how best to run this beast of a tool against a Visual Studio project/solution. Enter Visual Lint, a fantastic integration piece of software.
I can see a few more purchase orders in the near future.
A few nights ago I had a few hours to go on a bit-torrent download, and didn’t really want to leave it uncapped over night. But at the same time didn’t want to rate limit the uploading while still downloading (there were only a few people get the file and the only seed was really slow).
In my moment of need, I found µTorrent already had the feature I wanted, but had never seen prior Alternate upload rate when not downloading. I set it to a lousy 2kb which helped me sleep better that night.