GuruStop.NET

A friend I know has been developing desktop applications with .NET for quite long time. He wanted to improve himself even more by going out of his comfort zone learning more stuff he’s not familiar with. So, he spent some time learning client side web technologies and wanted to add some “non” .NET server technologies to the mix. He emailed me asking for recommendations on what to learn,: “Ruby, Python, or PHP ?”.

After sending the answer, as with other previous emails, I thought maybe I’d share it with you here.

Python

Let’s start with Python, since it’s the language I know least about (take that as a disclaimer against everything I claim about it next). Note that Python also has similar options to Ruby (maybe even earlier than Ruby had for some of them) even the MVC application frameworks (like django), but they aren’t booming as much as, say, Ruby..

Python’s real power is that it’s one of the old languages with great standard library doing networking and several pieces of functionality, in a way closer to C++ than it is to .NET or Java. I think also it’s runtime is historically has better performance and wider platform support than, Ruby.

This morning I got a nice little email from a dear Egyptian friend, Ebeid Soliman (@ebeid_soliman) asking the following:

I know this may be something answered by google, but I trust your opinion.

What is the best free automated UI testing framework/tool you used ? or know ?

I actually already have a long draft on the subject showing the framework I use, and how to get basic stuff working on it, since this one is not yet complete, let me for now share my reply to him with you, as raw as possible …

(I have added some titles to make the long reply more readable)

The Reply

Choosing a framework

Look, I haven’t tried many. Only Watin and Selenium, and even Watin didn’t dig it enough.

The people around me all seem to be using Selenium. This is not only the story though…

MvcConf

Assuming some of you have attended live or watched the recordings for the past MVCConf conference. It’s a virtual conference concerned (as the name tells) about everything related to Web MVC Frameworks in .NET (ASP.NET MVC, FubuMVC, Spark, …).

Videos from the previous MvcConf event can be found at:

http://www.viddler.com/explore/mvcconf/videos/ and http://tekpub.com/conferences/mvcconf

MvcConf 2

They plan to have a second event after the great success of the first one. And they started a call-for speakers. See:

http://www.mvcconf.com/

Quoting Details

When:

Tuesday Feb 1st 8AM – 5PM CST

Where:

Virtual

Register:

Check back 1/17

Call For Speakers

If you would like to speak at this years conference. Fill out the Speaker Proposal form.

An Awesome Conference

MvcConf is a virtual conference focused on one thing: writing awesome applications on top of the ASP.Net MVC framework. Your brain will explode from taking in so much hard core technical sessions. Sounds fun eh?

This is a community event and we want the best and brightest sharing what they know.

We intend to record each session and make them available online for viewing. We intend to make the videos available free of charge, depending on conference sponsorships.

Another internal company email I sent today and found useful enough to share in the wild (after few modifications)…

Hey all,

There is an online conference (streamed over the Internet, you don’t have to go to physical place) tomorrow called MVCConf; in addition to the MVC in the name it’s related to so many .NET and SQL and jQuery related stuff.

 

You may want to attend as many sessions as you can.

http://mvcconf.com

 

The conference is going to be TOMORROW  July 22 from 8 AM to 5 PM CDT (that means UTC – 5 time, considering Abu Dhabi is UTC + 4, the mentioned time is 9 hours late than Abu Dhabi, so, 8 AM CDT  = 5 PM  for us, 5 PM CDT = 2 AM for us).

 

Of course you do not have to attend all the sessions. Actually you cannot, because they have 3 parallel tracks. (3 sessions at a time).

The conference is streamed over Microsoft Live Meeting.

 

Register from:

http://mvcconf.com/attend

 

See you online :)

Let me add here that the conference agenda can be found at:

The SVN News

Today I was hanging around GitHub when realized a relatively old news, dated to April 1, 2010, saying they do support SVN.

Announcing SVN Support

Yes, it’s April Fools day. Very funny date to announce anything serious as they admit themselves in an update to the news post, but it DOES work.

Use the same Git clone HTTP URL, just add “svn.” between “http://” and “github.com”:

http://svn.github.com/[user]/[repository]

It even allows you to write changes back to the repository, as announced in the more recent news post, dated May 4, 2010, check it out for the “cavets” (known issues):

Subversion Write Support

That uses the same URL but with HTTPS:

https://svn.github.com/[user]/[repository]

This should work best when you want to get some project for read-only access or very few commits from your side, when this project has a very long history you are not really interested in. Of course you wouldn’t want to use that if you are leading (or a main committer to) a project hosted at GitHub.