Mathieu Cartoixa

I love computers. I always have. And as a professional developer I always was a little bit jealous of my fellow systems administrators who were in charge of dozens of servers and desktops (and sometimes much more). Active Directory was a misterious world where seemed to lie an unreachable and absolute power. So of course, as soon a I could I set up a decent homelab for myself: DIY servers, NAS, 10Gb network, Hyper-V VMs, Active Directory… I also plunged into the wild world of domotics, starting with Domoticz and slowly migrating to Home Assistant.

A lot of work has been made in the last few years (almost 5 now) to revamp the whole .NET Platform and lead it confidently into this new decade. Going through .NET Core, .NET is now free, open-source and multiplatform. Sign of the times, the console addicts can now take advantage of the .NET CLI while everyone can enjoy the still evolving best parts of the eco-system: the C# language and MSBuild (amongst other things). So now is a good opportunity as ever to revisit my practices of Continuous Integration for the .NET Framework as well.

From what I understand Gradle or even Maven are the way to go for your build in Java. They seem to rely heavily on conventions, which is good. But if you need (or want) to add to these conventions (like I do with my practices) it seems that the only 2 ways are to either build your own plugins or to execute additional Apache Ant tasks and targets inside your build. So it seems to me that the good old Apache Ant is still alive and well.

I have had to deal with a few projects in Ruby recently and I have tried to adapt my practices to this new environment. On a personal level this means less cognitive load when I have to come back to these projects months later, even more so because Ruby is far from my area of expertise. As it happens I have had quite some trouble implementing Continuous Integration because of (seemingly) conflicting conventions. But I have tried anyway:

I realize writing this post that I have been practicing .NET development (C# in particular) since 2005 (15 years!). It is natural for my Continuous Integration practices to have been heavily influenced by this platform during all this time. The advent of .NET Core will be the occasion to revisit these, and also the subject of another blog post. This post shows what those years of maturation led to on the (soon legacy) .NET Framework platform.

Everybody does Continuous Integration (CI) nowadays, right? Right? Right…

Last time I showed you how to modify a node.js Windows installer so that you could install it on an Azure Cloud Service as part of a startup task.

One requirement on the project I am working on (.NET 2.0, Windows Forms) was to make the end-user able to load a background image to an InkPicture (which is just a special PictureBox control, with the ability to be drawn upon on a TabletPC). That did not seem very difficult at first: just create an OpenFileDialog and there you go.

In my previous post, I mentioned the fact that I added the Oracle Instant Client files as Content files in a Visual Studio project. I would like to write more about this here.

As I was delving into the Visual Studio DSL Tools to design my first DSL for Salamanca, I came across this new modeling platform by Microsoft: Oslo. In fact, it is so new that the first CTP has just been released.

I have had the opportunity to discover Sql Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS) lately. That was a double blow. At first, I found it highly usable, though rough on the edges: still only a very promising tool. And then I found it was the perfect example of a software factory created with the Visual Studio Domain-Specific Language Tools. It is great to see Microsoft eating its own dog food, and create a great tool with it.

I hate software that works. Deeply. From the bottom of my heart and soul. Let me try to explain why.

I know I am a bit late to join this debate, but: I was new at my job at the time. After a few years spent in a few french companies, I was obviously not quite used to the internet as it had become since I left college, and I must admit I was as close as could be to miss the web 2.0 buzz. This blog was a longshot then. July has only 3 full days left, and I realize it looks like my last oppurtunity to post something this month… After I had this casual conversation with our...

Remember this old song about Windows 95? Softwares on Windows have always been demanding on hard disks, and it seems that disk capacity will never be enough. As mine is quite fixed, I am doing my best to optimize disk usage.

As a new year resolution, I have freely decided to commit myself into blogging about software development. So let me start slowly and write about source code organization.