One of the things I never took much time to consider was the legality off all this. My opinion has been (and hopefully always will be) that if I purchased something I should be able to do whatever I want with it. If I own DVD and want to use it as a decoration on my Christmas tree I feel I have that right. Again, I am not a lawyer and this is just a summation of my research on the topic so do your own research for your own area. DVD Backups The first debate is if you can backup or...

The next step in providing digital content is being able to share your existing media out to the home. There are several ways to do this. The first thing I want to talk about though is the codec issue. Video and audio can get quite large and there are many different ways to encode media to shrink its size down. In order to play a video you need the proper codec installed (a codec is a bit of code that properly decodes encoded video). The #1 issue with video playback has typically been that you don't have the right codec installed....

We have a lot of disparate sources of media around our home. DVDs, CDs, VHS, downloaded content, mp3s, etc. I find it to become more and more of a hastle running around finding the media I want, and then finding the device that can play that. Plus with 3 kids running around it is inevitable that their (and sometimes my) optical media gets scratched or damaged. To that end I have decided to try and go completely digital in our home and felt that documenting it may be of help to others. Infastructure: Wireless network (802.11g) 3 televisions 2 original xboxes 1 xbox 360 1 server (more...

On our current project we are using MSBuild to build our application. This is my first time using MSBuild other than just tinkering and I have found it.... challenging to say the least. A lot of my challenges are lack of knowledge but the other half is the language itself. The most recent challenge I wanted to write about was calling a target multiple times. Our scenario is this: We have to generate a batch file for each environment we are going to install in with environment specific settings. The issue I had was that for each environment we had that...

One common issue of team development is sharing configuration files. If a developer is testing something out and changes a value and then accidentally checks that file in it affects all developers. There are a few approaches to solving this issue: 1) Be very careful and disciplined. +Simple -SImple to forget 2) Have a web.config.template under source control that developers copy to web.config and not include in source control. +Prevents checkins of web.config files that affect other people -Developers need to manually update their config files if a new value is added/removed/or the default updated 3) Have a build script task to generate a config file...

One of the great things about continuous integration is that we can increment our assemblies version number with each build. For our project we also apply a label to our source code repository every time we build a deployment package. This allows us to get the version of source code from the exact point in time that the msi was built. One of the issues we ran into was that we have three build configurations: 1. "CI" This gets run on every checkin of code 2. "Deploy - ALPHA" This is run manually to deploy to our alpha test environment 3. "Deploy - ALPHA...

One of the things we have started doing as part of our process is having a build script that creates our deployment package in an automated fashion. We then tied that into our build server so that from one click anyone could create the package. The issue is that we have several test environments and copying the setup.msi file to multiple servers and installing it is a time consuming pain. To streamline our deployment we created a vbscript (yes, it was painful) to remotely uninstall previous versions and then install the new version of the msi. Here is the script...

I am finally finding some time and desire to write again. Life has been busy with my both my company and my family expanding. It feels like things are starting to get back to normal again so I should be writing more frequently. Some of the things I have been working with that I hope to write about: nHibernate / fluent nHibernate / Linq to nHibernate WPF Click once Silverlight A fluent .NET build langauage called fluent-build Being a lead on a project ...

Edmonton Code Camp is happening again this year and we are looking for speakers! Topics are wide open. That means ANY language, ANY technique, or ANY technology. When: September 19,2009 Where: Grant MacEwan Downtown Campus, Edmonton, Alberta Please submit talks to dave@solidhouse.com by August 15, 2009

I was asked to review the soon to be published Brownfield Application Development by Kyle Baley and Donald Belcham. For those who have not heard the term, a brownfield application is one that already has some code developed but is usually not complete. A lot of developers are brought into projects like this and therefore have had no say on the techniques and tools to start developing the application. This book covers how to make an existing application better, more testable, and easier to work with in a simple and accurate fashion. The book is split into two sections,...