Gojko Adzic

I presented a 15 minute introduction to Subversion during the Alt.NET Community on Alternative .NET tools evening last week. The video should appear online soon at the Skills Matter site. Here is the talk in a more readable form meanwhile.

Subversion is my favourite version control system. I’ve been using it for about two years now (I first wrote about it first in april ’07) and so far I am very happy with it. It was built as a replacement for CVS, which was the standard version control system in the Unix/Linux world and more or less de facto standard for opensource projects at the time when Subversion was started (sometime in 2000). Subversion took the best ideas from CVS, added some very interesting concepts and solved most of the problems that people had with CVS (but not all of them). It is now the typical choice for any new Java projects and replaced CVS as the standard version control system in most of the opensource projects. Over the last few years, it is becoming more and more popular for Windows .NET projects as well. Continue Reading »

We are organising a gathering of Alt.Net enthusiasts on the 31st this month at Skills Matter offices. We’ll do seven talks in total with beer and pizza during the break, and then go out for beers and socialising. Here’s the programme for the talks:

NHibernate – Ian Cooper
PowerShell – Zi Makki
OpenRasta – Sebastian Lambla
Castle Windsor – Mike Hadlow
Rhino Mocks – Chris Roff
NServiceBus – David De Florinier
Subversion – Gojko Adzic

The event is free but the number of places is limited. Apparently about half of the places are already taken and Skills Matter have not yet started to advertise it seriously, so if you were planning to come to the event make sure to register soon. For more info and to register click here.

See you on 31st.

I like to periodically shake-up the version control, re-align it with the way the project is going and clean up any clutter. As it was time to split one big project into several more-less separate tracks, I ran into an article announcing the release of version 1.0 of AnkhSVN, a free subversion plugin for Visual Studio. AnkhSVN had proper solution browser integration, and a ‘working copy explorer’, very much like the Eclipse synchronise screen. It looked very promising, so we decided to try it out.

I read a lot about Subversion, but never really had a reason to move from CVS – there was no new killer feature. We were generally satisfied with CVS, with just one problem. Integration with Visual Studio was virtually non existent. In January, several readers suggested trying out Subversion instead of CVS, and shortly after I took their advice. It turns out that the killer application, that made us move to Subversion, was the Visual Studio Plugin. Continue Reading »

It’s been almost a year since I got involved in a big .Net enterprise project. My first choice would be to do it mostly in Java, but due to politics, or lack of better judgement, .Net was a given constraint. We pushed the technology to it’s limits and found out that some popular tools were just not cut out for that job. However, I’ve also learned that if you dig deep enough, there are some very promising tools for .Net on the Net.

Looking back, the .Net developement landscape is far from ideal – our choices left us with a working environment, and enabled us to get the job done, but with a lot of bumps on the road. From my perspective, .Net is still three or four years behind Java in terms of platform maturity and available tools for enterprise application development. The core development concepts are there, but .Net lacks the support which Java has with a vast number of independent enterprise frameworks, servers and libraries. A lot of popular Java libraries and tools have been ported to .Net, but are often much less stable, or complete, than the originals. But, even though they do not shine brightly yet, there are some rising stars. Continue Reading »