I just booted my PC after 4 hours of drive through heavy rain and thunderstorms back from Vienna where I attended Barcamp. I have to say it was just fantastic! All Barcamps I attended before had a very diverse crowd, but usually lacking developers thus the social media enthusiasts usually dominated the attendees.

Barcamp Vienna was different, maybe it was the awesome location at Microsoft Austria headquarters or just the fact that it was in Vienna.. But I met more coders there in 2 days than in the last 2 yeas in Klagenfurt.

Coolest thing, I even met a Subsonic developer: Saintedlama! That was really awesome and funny when we met during breakfast randomly chatting about our stuff and I noted that I’ll be presenting dotless when he said: “Wow that’s you? I wanted to contact you for some time now about dotless. I’m working on Subsonic btw.. " (Imagine my jaw dropping right there.. ). He showed me some really cool demos of the simple repository they introduced in SubSonic 3 and it’s uses with MVC.. and I have to tell you: wow.. Using a ORM was really never so easy..

Anyway, I really had a great time either chatting up really interesting people or doing my two presentations.
On Saturday I talked about dotless while on Sunday I talked about Git. Both talks went great in my opinion, but if anyone was there and has additional feedback on my presentations I’d be glad to hear them. I uploaded both slide decks to http://www.docs.com and you can find them here:

dotless – CSS done right

Git

At any rate: Thanks to Max and Rolf for organizing this awesome event and to Microsoft for so generously hosting it!

During my presentation at Barcamp Vienna today I got asked what GUI to use with Git. My plain and simple answer was: “Use the command line, its just better that way.. “. Well, after the talk Andreas approached me and raised a very good point: Mainstream adoption of tools (like Git) often depends on GUIs to help people during the transition phase.

Besides the obvious Guis like TortoiseGit or GitGui there is now one more tool aimed at .NET developers to make the transition easier: Git Source Control Provider for Visual Studio 2010. It looks like Microsoft got VS2010 extensibility right this time, and someone managed to implement Git integration right into the VS2010 solution explorer:

The Plugin is available through Visual Studio Gallery and seems to be Ms-Pl licensed and free, although I couldn’t find the code anywhere, it’s still worth checking out: Git Source Control Provider.

Next weekend (29-30th of May) I’ll be attending Barcamp Vienna and plan on having a talk about dotless and it’s advantages over regular CSS. Since my last dotless presentation at Barcamp Klagenfurt was a pretty huge success I guess I’ll keep to the basic structure of the talk and also go into some detail around the organizational stuff that’s involved when managing an OSS project.

Since I expect the crowd in Vienna to be more technical than the usual web2.0 enthusiasts/blogger mix we see in Klagenfurt I also plan on maybe delivering a talk on the best SCM there is: Git.

Since the whole thing is hosted by Microsoft I expect a lot more .NET developers to show up, so it should be a fun and interesting weekend.

See you there!

When I started out with git I didn’t start using the commandline right away. I fiddled around with TortoiseGit and GitGui quite a bit before I found out that it’s just so much faster to do all those things from the commandline. As we all know, the windows commandline is not the most powerful thing on the planet, but I also loathe the unix commandline that comes installed with git (gitbash). Obviously, the only alternative is Powershell so I went with that and am very happy with it.

One thing though: I envied Linux users who could extend their bash prompt to display git specific information directly on the shell. Well, after a bit of digging and through some Stackoverflow articles, I managed to find this:

Powershell is quite extensible, and by placing a file called Microsoft.PowerSehll_profile.ps1 in your Documents\WindowsPowerShell folder you can define a function called prompt that allows you to modify your prompt text.

I’ve been using this now for quite some time, so I can’t recall where I found the script before I modified it, but here it is anyway (credit goes to whoever created it in the first place): Microsoft.PowerShell_profile.ps1.

I spent almost 2 hours of debugging Java code yesterday due to one assumption that proved fatally wrong: I assumed a Stack, by definition a LIFO data structure would iterate over it’s elements from the top of the stack to the bottom.

So inserting 1, 2, 3 the resulting order when iterating through the stack should be 3, 2, 1.

Well, at least that’s what .NET does. Java is different. Look at the following Java code:

Stack<Integer> stack = new Stack<Integer>();
stack.push(1);
stack.push(2);
stack.push(3);


for(Integer i : stack) {
	System.out.println(i);
}

And this C#:

var stack = new Stack<int>();
stack.Push(1);
stack.Push(2);
stack.Push(3);


foreach (var i in stack)
{
    Console.WriteLine(i);
}

Well, they look exactly the same, but Java will return 1,2,3 while C# will honor the Stack’s special semantics and return 3,2,1. Great stuff isn’t it?

The workaround was quite simple, yet it had cost me 2 hours of my life trying to hunt a bug in my code, never thinking the bug could lie in a simple foreach iteration through the stack..

Lesson learned: Never assume you know anything about data structure semantics unless you have checked that your assumptions are indeed true. Implementations differ and sometimes this will bite you.

Oh and did I mention that the way Java does it is simply wrong?