I wrote this Quick Start Guide to Subversion a while ago and it's still pretty good.  However I've recently come across the Free Subversion (SVN) Book.  It's a pretty good online book available in HTML or PDF and it's totally free. 

Subversion is still one of the best Source Control systems I've used. 

I was thinking about setting up Subversion at work to replace a long defunct Visual SourceSafe versioning system.  A co-worker asked me about it and that reminded me that I wrote a very good and very simpe (if I do say so myself) walk-through for setting up a fresh Subversion repository.

This is the original Subversion step by step walk-through I set this up on my home pc for http://www.whatsyour20.com and it still seems valid. 

It appears that the FSFS format is still preferred over the Berkeley DB format. 

Dear C#,

It's taken many months to get the courage up to write this letter.  I have been unfaithful.  I have cheated on you several times.  I won't go into all the details now because I know you will be too fragile to read all of the sordid details but I must confess my first indiscretion.  Her name was Ruby on Rails.  She promised me so many things like an automagical data access layer and super fast site creation.  Only now I realize that she was a cheap whore, pimped by a slick smooth-talking metrosexual Dane with a knack for finding the weaknesses of enterprise developers and exploiting them.

I feel so dirty but I have to say this.  The cheating was only part of it.  I was also using pretty heavily.  I was using VIM several times a day.  That's when I suspected I had a problem.  I think I knew I hit rock bottom when I stooped to hitting the Exuberant Ctags for a fix.  It was Ruby that got me hooked on that crap.  I was so sold on her elegance and simplicity I ignored the hoops I was jumping through to get a decent editor.  The whole time this was happing Visual Studio 2003 just waited patiently for my return with a knowing look.  VS2003 knew she was better but she let me find out for myself.  Like a parent who knows the only way to teach a child a lesson is to let them learn it on his own, you knowingly looked on as I struggled in vain with a succession of seedier solutions for text editing.  There was the aforementioned VIM, SciTE, jEdit, and the abomination to end abominations radrails.  When you are reduced to an orgy of J2EE acronyms to stay agile you know you have a problem.  The Pimp himself has so shamelessly denigrated Java, yet many of his clientèle must turn to Java to make sleeping with Ruby a tolerable experience. 

I now know what it must be like to be a fan of Anna Nicole Smith and then to meet her in person and then to realize what a waste of chemical compounds she has turned into.  She's apparently beautiful but once you here her talk you realize there's nothing going on in there.  So I liken the experience I had meeting Ruby on Rails.  Seemingly beautiful on the outside but utterly deranged once you get passed the magical ActiveRecord song and dance show. 

I'm physically drained.  That's all I can stand to write for now.  I have more to confess like using Daedalus to keep Ruby up on running once she would go on her nightly benders and the inevitable crash afterwords (I guess she was really Like Ms. Smith!) but I will leave that for later. 

Here's one that I've used several times in the past.  Microsoft has a virtual CD Control Panel that let's you mount an ISO image as a drive letter.  This is really handy if you have an MSDN subscription and are constantly downloading ISO's from the MSDN site.  Instead of burning each ISO to a CD you can keep it on a local or network drive and simply mount it as needed.  This will save the cost of a CD and the clutter of having a bunch of CD's laying around.

I've tested this only under Windows XP.

Here's the link:
Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel

This one is destined for the Pragmatic SDK.

Visual Studio 2005 is pretty useable on its own.  MS has really done a good job and the studio is one of the reasons I stay on the MS platform.  I've used Java, Ruby etc and I ended up using eclipse for my IDE and while it does a decent job it also seems to have heavy system requirements and theres the feeling that everything is kind of duct taped together  But I digress, the reason for this post is to highlight tools that make Visual Studio even more useable.  So Here they are:

1. Cool Commands

Everything except (including?) the kitchen sink

Adds context menu commands like open project folder etc.  It just keeps getting bigger and better.  You have to try it to get the full effect.

Most Recent version of Cool Commands

2.   CopySourceAsHTML

Ultimate Blogger Tool

If you have a blog and who doesn't these days, you should look into this one.  It lets you copy souce out of Visual Studio and keep the code formatted as HTML which is very helpful if you are trying to post code to a blog.

CopySourceAsHtml

3.  Smart Paster

The easy way to embedded SQL, JavaScript, etc

This one gives you multiple Paste As... options in the context menu.  Helpful for pasting inline SQL (oh my), JavaScript, XSLT, etc.

Smart Paster

 

 

Additional resource for Visual Studio 2005 Add-Ins

A new contender for the Pragmatic Toolkit is PDFCreator, a SourceForge project which allows you to print to a pdf file much like you would a normal printer.  This is useful if you want to need to capture output to a platform inpependant format.  For example, you have a web page that shows a reciept from an online purchase.  Use PDFCreator to print it to a PDF so you have a nice record of the purchase.  This also works for screen prints or any other capture operations where you have an applications that can print (basically any editor program like Word, StarOffice, PaintShop Pro, Photo Shop, etc). 

I use it to screen capture protected web pages (on sites where you need to sign in) and send it to someone who doesn't have access to the site, like my wife.  It's useful if you are going for a paperless office as you could scan your paper items and then print them to PDF (if your scanning software doesn't support it natively).  You can also create product documentation by creating the document in Word and then printing it to PDF to create a manual for distribution to customers.

Here is the link:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

I do a lot of web development.  Unfortunetely at work all the folks out on the floor have Internet Exploder oops I mean Explorer.  So I do most of my testing in IE6.  The problem comes in as we start to do more DHMTL (AJAX) on our sites.  Ofter you need to view source to see what is rendered.  Well of course IE just gives you little old notepad and calls it good.  Firefox does a better job by at least highlighting syntax.  Well, I've found a good solution for IE.

Notepad++.  Two big bonuses here.  Excellant syntax highlighting and code folding.  Code folding is the ability to expand and contract sections of code so it's out of your way when you don't want to look at it.  The syntax hightlighting is great plus Notepad++ is one great editor in general.  I use it for heavy duty JavaScript development because of the code folding and the lings that line up the beginning and ending tags and code blocks. 

Give it a try.  http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

I believe it promts you on the install to act as the view source client for IE.

I blogged before about a great text editor named pspad.  This editor is great for heavy lifting and it's full of features.  Those features come at a price and that price is start up time.  When I just want a quick no frills editor notepad is king.  However, I've come across metapad and it seems to be a great notepad replacement.

It's number one feature?  Hyperlinking in plain text files.  I have been using Outlook notes as a catchall note storage for sites, user names etc b/c of the hyperlinking that built into the Outlook notes.  Now I can put my links in a plain text file and enjoy hyperlinked freedom.  It also compares favorably to the popular Notepad2 but the hyperlinking feature makes metapad the king.

Don't forget to get the registry files so you can make it the default editor for html, reg, txt and the text viewer for Internet Explorer's view source command.

I came across this while searching for a CD recorder for Windows XP.  I haven't burned a CD in a long time and I realized that I hadn't copied one since I re-imaged my system back in May of 2005.  I used to use Nero but I was too lazy to find the software so I downloaded this:

http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm

It seems to be a bit faster then the built in Windows XP facility for copying data disks via drag and drop.  It also lets you burn ISO's which is a plus.  I'm not sure it's ready for the toolkit yet as it hasn't proven its mettle in combat yet.

---Updated 06/02/2006---

I've used this a few times now and it did the job.  One problem I ran into is that you can't record the ISO's off network drives or drives that are aliased with the subst command.  So just keep that in mind if you are having any problems burning an ISO.

PSPad is still the winner.   There are some odd things I don't like but for the most part I think it's pretty good.  It still loads fairly fast.  It has GREAT HTML, CSS and JavaScript support along with the color picking ability.  It integrates with TopStyle (and the free Lite) version but with the included intellisense and color support I don't think you necessarily need TopStyle. 

PSPad has made it only 3 of my 4 machines and the fourth I don't use often for development so it's not a big deal. 

All in all I will say that PSPad is the king of development oriented text editor.  For Now...

PSPad Site

I was under the weather this weekend so I spent some time looking for a new text editor.  I had a few requirements:

• File explorer
• ability to view differences between 2 files
• syntax support for Ruby
• pretty print features

I tried out CPad and it was very promising.  However there is a little bug with CPad where the program will not close without killing it in taskmgr.  I posted the bug on the CPad form and we will see if it gets fixed.

So I tried quite a few others but none had the features I listed above.

Then I came upon PSPad.  It has the features I need plus the kitchen sink.  This thing has everything from a color picker to an ASCII table to the ability to handle ruby embedded in HTML.  Something only sophisticated IDE's are usually able to handle. 

I'm still playing with the PSPad but I think it may replace my current favorite Crimson Editor and earn a place in the Pragmatic SDK.

Update:

Yes it does do Ruby fairly well.  I must admit however that since ASP.NET 2.0 came out I haven't used Ruby or Ruby on Rails much.  I'm exploring the new features of ASP.NET and C# and enjoying the new IDE.

See the comment below for enabling Ruby syntax support.