since my last post. And I just wanted to take the opportunity to send a quick “I’m still alive” and give an overview of what is going to happen in the next time.

In the last two posts (VCS - Part 1, VCS - Part 2) I wrote about Version\Revision Control Systems in general and how they could be of use, even for scripting or administrative purposes (yes, one article is still waiting to be published ;-) ). As not being a professional developer those typical developer tools are sometimes still new to me. Not in the form of not knowing about, more about isn’t it to much effort to use them and do I really need them? Due to the simplicity of the installation and daily usage of those systems, I’ve started implementing them on almost all my different projects. This includes public projects like the Deployment Webservice (btw. Big thank you to MrCompTech writing the first review of the web services), the MDT Web FrontEnd, all scripts, Wizard etc. that has been published so far and also almost any project I’m working on the get my bills paid. Even if it sounds overdone I use these Systems now to keep track on different implementations of MDT/OSD for a more granular backup option, enabling others to work on the same items at the same time without two-way impact of such changes. And always having the possibility to visualize what has been changed and redo those changes. It also helped a lot getting changes through the different stages of the Development area into the Testing Area and then finally into the production system.

Anyway getting all those projects into VCS, establishing standards how to work (myself and with others) took definitely more time than expected but I still think it’s worth it. It allows me to easily keep track on different releases of the same base script/task sequence, implement updates/enhancements into several releases. It basically allowed me to be able to keep on working on this growing number of different projects without loosing myself.

The second thing that helped me a lot on the coordination was an application I got known to a few weeks ago. It’s called OnTime from AxoSoft. It’s a Software Development Project management app and incredibly powerful. No, I’m not getting paid by them for saying this ;-) but a single user license is free for everyone and I’m now able to simply take all these requests, bug reports, questions, ideas, actions, whatever just throw it into the system, evaluate the effort and personal priority on those items and use them to plan the next release cycles. As managing most of these projects in my spare time, reducing the time for administration/managing and so being able to spend more time on the implementation is very helpful.  Again, expect an article in the near future about this with some more information. It might sound funny to use a Project management tool to just schedule myself but those of you who know me personally will agree that it’s not to bad getting some structure into the chaos ;-)

Third, I was finally able to find and started implementing a both, powerful and easy to use logging framework called NLog. I found it as simple to implement as the MDT logging (which I think is one of the neatest implementations around. It’s quite some effort to add (or change) the logging framework in ongoing projects but for me it was worth the effort as I was never really satisfied with the current solution(s). Yes, there might be better solutions out there but this one fit exactly into what I was looking for since quite some time now. Again, an article with some more detailed information is half-way written. (Update: See the article about the initial setup here: Add Logging to your applications, NLog for beginners)

Fourth, I found and implemented an incredibly easy and powerful way to handle exceptions. While logging is for everything you would like to know or things you expect, you always have those “unexpected” things happening due to the different environments, different usage, moon-phases, ebb and flow, … ;-) Those kind of situations are pretty nasty from the point of a developer (yes, it’s also nasty for the user) as you most often don’t have in-depth access to the systems these unexpected situations happened. The tool of choice (at least for ASP.Net applications) is called ELMAH. Scott Hanselman said in ELMAH: Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.NET (and MVC too!) “ELMAH is one of those largely unknown and deeply awesome .NET Open Source projects that should be part of ASP.NET proper.” So Microsoft, it’s up to you! ;-)

Fifth, the Deployment webservice has been extended with the mentioned logging framework, got a couple new functions and will go out to a couple beta testers hopefully during the next week. Depending on the feedback I expect it to be publicly available end of this month. If you would like to participate in such Beta testing just sent an email to Maik DOT Koster ATTTTT gmx DOT de or use the contact form here on MyITForum or any of the codeplex projects I’m participating. So far only the Active Directory and SMS/SCCM part has been changed. The MDT part of the Deployment webservice is still waiting to be upgraded to use the same model and repository as the MDT Web FrontEnd does. All the recent changes moved this change just a bit more into the future.

Sixth, the MDT Web Front End has a couple enhancements in the pipeline like nested Role support, sortable and pageable lists, versioning support, etc. As MDT 2010 Update 1 is expected to be published end of this month I will ensure that the Web FrontEnd is compatible with this new version. The current Beta doesn’t implement any changes to the database so I expect it to be compatible without any changes to the FrontEnd itself but as soon as it is available I’m going to verify this.

So expect a couple things happening in the near future. If you have any suggestion or feedback don’t hesitate to contact me. I will try to answer all emails even if it might take some time for the response. If I don’t answer your email has probably been eaten by a rather strict spam engine I have more or less not influence on.  And no, I’m not checking the spam folders ;-)

OK, already more then 30 C° out there and the quarter final between Germany and Argentina at the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa is about to be played this afternoon. Time to relax  ;-)

Update: "Don't cry for me Argentina!" ;-) What a great game. Thanks for being such a good and fair combatant.