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Showing posts from 2011

Windows 7 hint of the day: Alt+Up is the new Backspace

Although in general I like what MS has done with Windows 7 (it genuinely is the best Windows so far), there is one constant gripe I have with Windows Explorer, that is they've "unified" the keybinding for Backspace to work just like in IE. That is - instead of navigating up one level in the filesystem hierarchy, it goes back in the navigation history. It is highly confusing, because you might not notice it for a while, if you've navigated to your desired destination by drilling down folder by folder and then pressing Backspace to get back to the parent folder. Where it breaks down though is with the nice new addressbar acting like a double for a navigatable breadcrumbs (a pretty nice and useful feature in it's own right) and an address input widget, when you've navigated in any other direction than one level down the hierarchy, you start getting into the apparently weird navigation behavior. I can\t count how many times I've pressed Backspace multi

I've been playing around with a crazy idea ...

I've been playing around with a crazy idea of recreating Eclipse JDT tooling with XText. While it does sound a fair bit more than a little crazy, it appeals to me for few reasons: It would give me great opportunity to learn XText and test it in a non-trivial setting. It would give me great opportunity to learn more about Java the language. Having Java source code parsed into a well defined EMF structure opens up JDT to all the  goodness of EMF tooling that has been developed over these past years. It seems like an interesting idea. I wonder if I actually get around to giving it a try...

Comparing Jenkins vs TeamCity - Part 2

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This is a second installment in a series of posts that tries to compare two continuous integration and build automation server products. In my previous post I briefly introduced the contenders open source developed Jenkins and a commercial offering from JetBrains called TeamCity and compared their respective installation experience. This time I'll try to cover the post-installation configuration steps I need to make before I can start putting some builds into them. Configuration No server software is usually useful out of the box in and by itself. You almost always need to tweak and configure it before you can really reap the benefits. Continuous integration is just another type of server and it needs to be configured before it becomes really useful. TeamCity After you've installed your copy of TeamCity and opened up it's web interface for the first time, it greets you with a nice little license agreement, you need to agree to in order to be able to continue.

Comparing Jenkins vs TeamCity - Part 1

As some of my closest friends already know, I decided to bite the bullet and switched jobs recently. As the new company I now work for is really small compared to the one I left, it also means that as a developer I am also involved in more than just programming. One of the decisions I had to make and implement was selecting and setting up a CI server for continuous building and deployment of our next product. Having had extensive exposure to CruiseControl, I immediately discarded it as I've developed a particular dislike for this product. The next alternative I had had any exposure to was Hudson ( now renamed to Jenkins ) and JetBrains's TeamCity , which I had heard a lot of nice things about. Adding to the mix that first project to hit our CI server would be .NET project, I needed a solution that would run on Windows and build .NET projects using MSBuild. I settled on Jenkins and TeamCity as the two major contenders. I would like to point out that this post is ful