After several years of maintaining this rather neglected blog at dotnetjunkies.com, I've decided to try and inject some new life into by upgrading to WordPress and moving it onto my own site: http://exortech.com/blog.

Coming back here and making this post reminds me of how much I dislike CommunityServer (or at least the version that is running on this site). There's no support for FireFox in the HTML editor, the navigation system is unintuitive, and there's relatively little support for plugins, images and code snippets. Moving is the right thing to do...

We recently converted CCNet to .NET 2.0, and I've been changing the code to start to take advantage of some of the changes in the .NET 2.0 release. One area of the framework that seems to have undergone a bit of a facelift is System.Xml as is evident by the number of obsolete classes and methods. The biggest apparent change is the recommendation to instantiate all XmlReaders via a factory method. I certainly support the intention behind this as the plethora of different XmlReaders all optimized for different tasks is something that should be encapsulated. However, I think that it is a bit of a shame that they decided to implement this through a factory method on XmlReader rather than more cleanly via separate factory class.

The biggest problem that I've found with this change is that not all of the different reader configurations are specifiable via the XmlReaderSettings. For CCNet, we allow users to set up DTD entities within the CCNet configuration files in order to minimize duplication. Under .NET 2, to instruct a reader to expand these entities, you need to set the EntityHandling property to EntityHandling.ExpandEntities (this required some digging to figure out as it just happened automatically in .NET 1.x). Unfortunately, this property is only delcared on XmlTextReader and not on the XmlReader base class. This means that you need to downcast the XmlReader that you get from XmlReader.Create() in order to set this property explicitly, which defeats the purpose of encapsulating the type of the reader behind the factory method. It seems to me to be an oversight to have neglected to include this property on the XmlReaderSettings class.

Often when working with Windows services, I've wanted to have the ability to log in as the LocalSystem user in order to try to diagnose problems.  For example, one recent problem that I was experiencing is on ccnetlive we run CruiseControl.NET as a Windows service under the LocalSystem account.  The problem was that when accessing a Subversion repository over SSL, you are required to accept the certificate from the remote host.  Accepting the certificate requires responding to a command-line prompt.  Once accepted, this certificate can then be cached permanently, so it is not necessary to re-accept the certificate -- at least until it expires.  Unfortunately, there is no way to log in directly as the LocalSystem user -- so the runas command will not work.  In trying to find a solution to this problem, I came across a very useful blog post that describes creating a Windows service that simply opens a new command shell.  As Windows services, by default, run under the LocalSystem account, this command shell window is open under the LocalSystem account.

CruiseControl.NET has been registered on OLOH, a repository of statistics and information on different popular open source projects.  If you are using CCNet and you feel so inclined,  please check out the site and give CCNet a review or a rating and stack it. 

According to the collected statistics, we've expended an estimated 22 person years on this project (based primarily on code changes), which at a (low) salary of $55000USD puts the cost of replacing the project at a cool $1.2M. *sigh*

Today, minority government leader Stephen Harper announced that he would be reshuffling his cabinet. One of the key ministers who will be moving is embattled Environment Minister Rona Ambrose. Stating that she found the environment ministry "too challenging", Ms. Ambrose will likely be moved off into another ministry such as Indian Affairs where she can spread her uninformed and narrow-minded views amongst Canada's aboriginal communities.

Despite her claims of finding the post to be too challenging, Ms. Ambrose has acheived a great deal during her tenure. For those unfamiliar with her accomplishments, think of Ambrose as Canada's equivalent to Christine Whitman, the neo-con appointee to head the EPA. Under her leadership Ambrose has skyrocketed the environment as the number one issue of concern to Canadians, ranking above even health care and Canada's ill-considered role in Afghanistan. Through her Clean Air Act, which attempted to befuddle the issues of global warming and air quality, to her displays of parochialism and aggression at the recent climate change meetings, Ambrose has done a tremendous amount to generate antipathy both at home and abroad. Through her actions, Ambrose has made a generous contribution to Stephane Dion's pro-environment Liberal leadership victory, paving the way for the Liberal party to return to government in the forthcoming election. In short, she has helped make the environment one of the galvanizing issues that could sink her government. Most environment ministers would consider these achievements to be a hallmark of success; though Ambrose seems too humble to stand up and accept the credit.

Not in recent memory has a politican done so much for raising public support for environmental issues, other than George W. Bush who, if not for the larger boondoogle in Iraq might have more of the American public paying attention to the environmental super-villains that they've become. Farewell Ms. Ambrose, we will miss you.

From Fast Company:

Media accounts often report that a typical Toyota assembly line in the United States makes thousands of operational changes in the course of a single year. That number is not just large, it's arresting, it's mind-boggling. How much have you changed your work routine in the past decade? Toyota's line employees change the way they work dozens of times a year.

Now that's something to aspire to within software teams.

On November 15th and 16th, Vancouver will be hosting its first conference on Agile Software Development.  The conference will be a great opportunity for local newbies and practitioners to meet up and learn from each other.  We have lined up a great array of local and imported speakers, including Linda Rising, Mary Poppendieck, Scott Ambler, and many others.  The conference will be held at the Plaza 500 (Cambie and 12th Ave), near Vancouver City Hall.  Visit the web site at www.AgileVancouver.ca for registration and further details.