Author: Kevin Miller

Software Creator

About:

I am an Austin Texas based software developer flying his geek flag proudly. I work hard creating customer service and support software and web experiences. When I am not creating software or gushing about my toddler. I soak neck deep in Twitter, discover new music at Rdio, host "European" board game meet ups, and read nerdy stuff like Vernor Vinge.

Posts by Kevin Miller:

CodePlex subverts our desires

November 6, 2007 I am really behind the curve on this but I was very excited when I heard that CodePlex is now supporting Subversion for source code control. After reading more closely it appears that they are merely providing bridgeware that allows you to use TortoiseSVN as a front end to CodePlex's Team Foundation Server. The number one new feature request from users is for CodePlex to support Subversion. Specifically what users are telling us they want is the features and experience they get when using TortoiseSVN as a source control client. It is important to us on the CodePlex team to provide our users the features they want and need to have the best experience possible, and so we will soon be offering support for using TortoiseSVN with CodePlex. How did their users' desire to have CodePlex add support for Subversion…

Intellisense for editing NAnt build scripts

October 29, 2007 This post is inspired by a thread on the Alt.Net yahoo group complaining that authoring NAnt build scripts is a pain. I agree to a point but until a better build system is ready I want to help fellow NAnt disciples by sharing one of my favorite tricks for boosting NAnt scripting productivity. This is a quick guide on getting Intellisense working for NAnt under VS.Net 2005 and better yet some automation to do it for you. The basics Included with each NAnt release is a schema file that includes all the legal elements and attributes annotated with documentation on how to use them. After copying this file into your VS.Net XML schemas directory you get Intellisense when editing XML files with appropriate the NAnt namespace declared (the NAnt FAQ). Automate it While you could look for the schema file and…

MVC Code Crush

October 10, 2007 It feels a little warmer over here sitting around the Microsoft developer Alt.campfire. Microsoft just came on out and publicly embraced the MVC pattern for web development (think Rails). Nestled gently inside of Asp.Net they have planted a nucleus of testable, extensible, and separation of concern compliant goodness. I can’t wait to watch it grow and mature. While watching Scott Gu present their MVC on Asp.Net Framework (can we get a cooler codename please?) at the Alt.Net conference I felt very strange. I felt that suddenly Microsoft gets me. At the time it would have seemed pretty normal to have Scott Gu break into song with smiling woodland animals surrounding him nodding to the beat. I think they slipped stuff into the coffee. They pretty much nailed everything I love about Rails and MonoRail and .Net under one umbrella. Lets…

Being Alt.Net

The Alt.Net conference held right here in Austin last weekend was awe inspiring. The quality of the people who came and the sessions they convened was outstanding. This was my second Open Spaces conference and I don’t want to go back to the old way. Much that I wanted to discuss was talked about. I would have attended each and every session there if it was humanly possible. Torn between sessions like DDD-jujitsu and A Microsoft Futurespective I was often flitting between sessions. Sorry there was no Developing Zune plugins session going on. Not that there is anything wrong with that. I feel confident the tenants of this movement will continue to grow and dare I say become normal and everyday. I want to thank each and everyone that came from near and far to attend I learned a lot…

NVelocity-o-vision

July 3, 2007 Jonathon Rossi has released a preview of his Castle Visual Studio Integration (CSVI) which, at the moment, gives us lovely colorization of views when using NVelocity for your template engine in Monorail. Anything that makes makes MonoRail views easier to read and edit at a glance is a great achievement for the Castle community. Apparently Jonathon is also working on intellisense support. I took the preview release for a very light spin and had no problems. Unfortunately we are using the NVelocity alternative Brail on our MonoRail projects here at Dovetail. Seeing that Ayende is looking into learning how to build parsers how long until we see support for .brail files in CSVI?

Virtual Server oh how I hate your un-patched bugs

June 27, 2007 We are using Virtual Server 2005 R2 a lot in our database platform testing. We have automated tests that start up virtual machines to do database platform testing. Quite handy. Configuring Virtual Server on an new machine can be quite a pain. We run into a problem all the time where we are trying to create a virtual machine with a name that was once already used for that particular Virtual Server host. You get this dreaded message: The virtual machine could not be created. The virtual machine configuration could not be created. A configuration with this name already exists. What? No it doesn't. I had removed this virtual machine in the past. What is going on. Microsoft has this lovely KB which tells you how to half fix the problem which basically boils down to: C:Documents and Settings>del [virtual-machine-name]*.* /s…

Vista and Managed Performance Counters

While doing some work on RuleManager I was having trouble running integration tests on my development system which is 64bit "Business" Vista. I would invoke the test using TestDriven.Net and sometimes the test would run fine and sometimes it would just sit and spin. Additionally through out the day I was getting this dialog. My first attempts to Google it didn't return anything obvious so I kept going. Later during the day my entire network stack shutdown. I was worried that my Vista install was destabilizing and did a reboot and made sure all my drivers were up-to-date. Trying to finish up my task today I once again got the WMI Performance Reverse Adapter stopped message so googled it once again and this time came upon this post which pointed me at Managed Performance Counters as a possible culprit. The product I am…

DevTeach 2007 Begins

May 16, 2007 I am a lucky nerd. I work at a great company that believes in continual personal development and investing in their employees. Dovetail sent me to DevTeach and I am having a blast. The quality of the talks and general braininess quotient is very high. Excellent conversations in a lovely city. I got here Sunday night and Scott was kind enough to introduce me to little known Canadian traditions and playing tour guide around Old Montreal. This city is amazing and beautiful and vibrant and invokes wonder. Pre Conference I attended the Monday Pre-Conference workshop(s). I actually sat in on both Design and Optimization Best-Practices with SQL Server 2005 and Introduction to .NET 3.0 workshop both speakers were good and knowledgeable. In hind-sight it would have been better for me to have stuck with the SQL content. Nothing against Kevin McNeish's .Net chops, but I had been exposed to…

Asp.Net Controls vs. View Components

May 8, 2007 During my Monorail talk a lot of people were asking about whether or not you could use Asp.Net controls with Monorail. I think the question translates to I love my 3rd party web controls yet I hate ASP.Net enough to look into alternatives. I think we need a clean break here. Can you do it? The answer is... sort of. First, you need to be using the Asp WebForms view engine. After reading the documentation and seeing comments like: With WebForms you can use all your existing skills to develop MonoRail applications, however its integration with MonoRail can be quite tricky ... Let's take a look at an example of perfectly decent controller code and explain when it does not integrate with WebForms. ... So, many simple scenarios can get really hard with WebForms. You will likely back away slowly and start…

Monorail Introduced

May 7, 2007 The deed is done. My Code Camp talk is over. It was a great experience working on my public speaking and polishing my understanding of Monorail. My talk had 2 parts. An introduction, that needs a lot of polish, and a coding exercise where I go from an empty project to a working example complete with activerecord data model. A lot of great questions were asked. All in all it really jazzed me to have the opportunity to get the word out about the great work being done on this project and to see so many people get excited about possibilities that Monorail brings to web applications development on the .Net platform. Getting comfortable with Monorail As I promised during my talk here is a yummy collection of links to get you going. First off some introductory material to get you excited about Monorail: Colin Ramsay's has a…

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