GuruStop.NET

Today I was supposed to deploy some changes on company static website made by web designer. The website source is hosted using SubVersion (SVN). I thought it’ll be great if I can export just the changes he did with their folder structure and without asking him to do anything extra, and deploy that.

Here are the steps using TortoiseSVN:

1. Right Click The working, choose TortoiseSVN => Show Log
   
2. Since he used multiple revisions, I selected the those revisions, right clicked, and chose “Compare revisions”
   
3. Selected all files, right click, and choose “Export selection to…”
   
4. Simply choose the destination folder from the folder selection dialog that comes up, and here we go.

That was very quick hint, but hopefully helpful to someone. I’m sure there must be other ways to do it also BTW, but this was the quickest to try with an empty head.

In VS 2010, extension manager is part of a nice new generation of VS plug-in system. One of the great features of it is how it can go online talk to Microsoft Visual Studio Gallery website to retrieve list of extensions there, automatically discovering updates for installed extensions, and allowing me to add new extensions directly from within Visual Studio.

The Problem:

However, in my company I could not take benefit of that for long time. Reason is, the company uses Blue Coat proxy, with some active directory based authentication. We cannot access the Internet unless we use that proxy, no direct connection allowed, most other proxies are also blocked (by blocking the common proxies port 8080 and many other common ports).

Although I have the proxy set in Internet Explorer, and I have the username/password stored in my Windows Credentials store  (Start–> Run–> Control PanelAll Control Panel ItemsCredential Manager) -since my primary work laptop and user account on it are not part of the company domain-, Visual Studio did not seem to be able to use that.

Anything that requires online communication not directly using the browser is not working. The main feature missed by this is Extensions Manager integration with the Visual Studio Gallery online.

Just a hour ago, I got an interesting question via the contacts page in this blog, about search engine optimization, and I wanted to share the answer with you…

The question is:

I’m a software engineer and SE Optimizer. I’m currently assigned a project that needs general information of the mini sites and blogs regarding their SEO strategy and daily revenue. I read your blog a lot in my .net related problems and thought of finding the details about your blog.
I found out that there are daily ~900 page views of your blog and your page rank is 3.

Mohamed what I wanna know is that whether you have employed any SEO strategy on your blog or this is just the good will traffic that comes to view your blog.

Also what is the daily ads revenue of your blog and what kinda ads you have deployed on your blog.

Although my Google Analytics statistics tell me slightly better results than mentioned in this message,, this is an interesting question I’d love an answer indeed. Scott Hanselman taught us though it’s better to reply to those in public and share the benefit with everyone, let’s see:…

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.

Some cool guys (all working in ITWorx I guess, one of the biggest Egyptian Software houses) have created a new website:

http://www.sharepoint4arabs.com

The website, as the name implies, is dedicated for ARABIC resources related to SharePoint.

It originally contained the technical blogs of the site founders (Founders’ Blogs) which are very useful for posts about SharePoint, then very recently they have also lunched Screencasts (Also in Arabic) that start from the very beginning until further advanced stuff.

I think you’ll enjoy them!

• SharePoint 4 Arab Homepage
• Founders’ Blogs
  • Ayman El-Hattab
  • Marwan Tarek
  • Mohamed Yehia
• Screencasts

I hope you like them,