RoundhousE

Database Migrations

Refresh Database–Speed up Your Development Cycles

Refresh database is an workflow that allows you to develop with a migrations framework, but deploy with SQL files. It’s more than that, it allows you to rapidly make changes to your environment and sync up with other teammates. When I am talking about environment, I mean your local development environment: your code base and the local database back end you are hitting. Refresh database comes in two flavors, one for NHibernate and one for Entity Framework. I’m going to show you an example of the one ......
Posted On Wednesday, December 12, 2012 5:08 PM | Comments (0)

DropkicK–Deploy Fluently

DropkicK (DK) has been in development for over two years and has been used for production deployments for over a year. Dru Sellers originally posted about DK back in 2009. While DK isn’t yet as super easy to grok as some of the other ChuckNorrisFramework tools and offers little in the idea of conventions, it is still a stellar framework to use for deployments. DK works well in environments where you know all of the environments you will deploy to ahead of time (although not required due to the ability ......
Posted On Sunday, October 23, 2011 1:32 PM | Comments (0)

Heartland Developer Conference 2010

Recently I was able to attend and speak at Heartland Developer Conference (HDC). This was my first time at the conference and it went smoothly for me. I was able to attend most of the sessions and had a great time! I had a session on Database Change Management w/RoundhousE! It went really well, I was very relaxed although I only had 45 minutes to talk. One item of feedback I got was that I didn’t seem interested in what I was talking about. It was just that I was very relaxed having practiced and ......
Posted On Tuesday, September 14, 2010 5:04 PM | Comments (0)

Iowa Code Camp Presentations

Last weekend I went up to Iowa Code Camp in Cedar Rapids and had the opportunity to do two presentations, one on NuGet and one known as the Automation Tools Roundup. ICC is one of my favorite conferences every year. It is twice a year and I try to make it to at least one of them. The people that attend this conference really make it worth the money you spend in travel expenses. Definitely recommended. Automation Tools Roundup This is my favorite session to give because it requires crowd participation ......
Posted On Friday, May 6, 2011 12:03 AM | Comments (0)

From Zero To Deployed Contest–Winner Announced PLUS Extension To Most Creative

Recently we had a contest to see who could beat my time to get from no code to deployed. Thanks to everyone that participated and everyone that thought about participating in the contest. Most Creative From Zero To Deployed Contest Extended! Unfortunately there were not enough entries to award the most creative video for ZtD. So what we are doing is extending the most creative until May 15, 2011 @ 11:59 PM CST. This gives you almost two months to get your videos in! If you entered before, you are ......
Posted On Monday, March 21, 2011 12:09 AM | Comments (0)

AppHarbor - Azure Done Right AKA Heroku for .NET

Easy and Instant deployments and instant scale for .NET? Awhile back a few of us were looking at Ruby Gems as the answer to package management for .NET. The gems platform supported the concept of DLLs as packages although some changes would have needed to happen to have long term use for the entire community. From that we formed a partnership with some folks at Microsoft to make v2 into something that would meet wider adoption across the community, which people now call NuGet. So now we have the ......
Posted On Friday, February 18, 2011 6:12 AM | Comments (0)

Herding Code Talks About Nu

Dru and I were recently featured on Herding Code Podcast. In the podcast we talk about everything from package management in general to Nubular (Nu) to other package management systems (OpenWrap, Bricks, and Horn, although horn was/is slightly different) to the possibility of Microsoft releasing a package management system. It was a good time and I enjoyed doing the podcast, but the herding code guys start recording at an insane 10:30 PM! I have no idea how I made it through the whole thing and was ......
Posted On Friday, August 27, 2010 1:29 AM | Comments (2)

How To - Gems And .NET

In my last post I showed gems being used for .NET. Now let’s talk about How. Most of this stuff I’ve learned over the past two days, so if I have a mistake here or you have a better idea, please don’t hesitate to offer a better solution. The GemSpec The Gem::Specification reference is your friend. In order to create a gem, you need to define a gem specification, commonly called a “gemspec”. A gemspec consists of several attributes. Some of these are required; most of them are optional. From here ......
Posted On Friday, July 16, 2010 2:27 AM | Comments (0)

Gems - Package Management For .NET

The Ruby community has enjoyed a great user experience with a package management system they use called Gems. A gem is a package (or a library), compressed with some additional metadata, and can be either source files or binaries. Let’s focus on binary gems. We have the same concept in .NET (DLLs/EXEs). You may have references to other DLLs. When you want to update a reference you are using on a project, you may also need to update its dependencies as well. And so on and so forth. A package management ......
Posted On Thursday, July 15, 2010 11:37 PM | Comments (3)

Kansas City Developers Conference (KCDC)

Yesterday I attended KCDC in Kansas City. It was a great time and I had the opportunity to spend time with people much smarter than me. Even with all of the people I already know, I met quite a few new people during the day long conference. I gave a talk on RoundhousE. If you attended that presentation, the slide deck is here: RoundhousE presentation (right click and save target as...and download or rename the extension to .PPTX). The presentation went really well despite starting off a little slow. ......
Posted On Sunday, June 20, 2010 10:24 PM | Comments (0)

RoundhousE now supports Oracle, SQL2000

RoundhousE, the database migration software that is based on sql scripts has added support for Oracle and SQL 2000. There have also been numerous other little things, including better logging and a script run errors table. The script errors table captures what went wrong when/if your scripts are not quite up to par or there is some other issue. A special thanks goes out to http://twitter.com/PascalMe... and http://twitter.com/jochenjonc. They worked hard on this and all I did was provide guidance ......
Posted On Friday, June 11, 2010 1:32 PM | Comments (0)

Chicago Alt.NET Presentation Aftermath

Right now I’m on the train on my way back from Chicago. It’s interesting to be drinking a Corona and hanging out in the lounge while I’m watching the miles go by. Chicago was a nice time. I had never been so we decided to vacation in Chicago and see the sites – posts coming at the other blog. My presentation was on UppercuT. It was a small group that came to the presentation which makes for an more engaging audience. Overall it was a pretty good presentation and I enjoyed it. We got a little comfortable ......
Posted On Saturday, May 15, 2010 4:29 PM | Comments (1)

Chuck Norris Be Thy Name

Chuck Norris doesn’t program with a keyboard. He stares the computer down until it does what he wants. All things need a name. We’ve tossed around a bunch of names for the framework of tools we’ve been working on, but one we kept coming back to was Chuck Norris. Why did we choose Chuck Norris? Well Chuck Norris sort of chose us. Everything we talked about, the name kept drawing us closer to it. We couldn’t escape Chuck Norris, no matter how hard we tried. So we gave in. Chuck Norris can divide by ......
Posted On Saturday, April 17, 2010 9:52 AM | Comments (2)

RoundhousE – ADO.NET over SMO

One thing most database change management tools use is SQL Server Managment Objects (SMO). Most do that because ADO.NET doesn’t allow the batch statement separator keyword GO in sql statements. So most people write off the ability to use a database change tool for sql server without actually having the sql server installed on the machine that is running the tool. This is not a reality in some organizations, especially when licenses for SQL server are limited. Split the GO Recently, a few guys have ......
Posted On Tuesday, February 23, 2010 9:49 PM | Comments (1)

Two Major Milestones for RoundhousE and UppercuT

This last year I had a focus to get more involved in Open Source (OSS). The year before I had been involved a little by submitting a patch here and there, but 2009 was a big year for me in OSS. I now manage 4 open source projects that have solved a need for me and others. Coming up on the end of the year it was important for me to get some final touches into at least two projects to finish out the year. UppercuT UppercuT (UC), for those of you who have never heard of it, is an automated build tool ......
Posted On Friday, January 1, 2010 2:55 PM | Comments (0)

Command Line Parsing on Windows with Mono.Options

When you have command line arguments to parse (whether on Windows or Linux), the place to look is Mono.Options. To date, I have not found anything better to get the job done. It is a single C# file if you do not want to download the entire Mono Library to use it. I was first introduced in Mono 2.2. The equivalent product is NDesk.Options by Jonathan Pryor. His single Options.cs file has been implemented as Mono.Options. To demonstrate how easy command line parsing can be, I’m going to show you is ......
Posted On Sunday, November 22, 2009 12:49 PM | Comments (1)

RoundhousE: Version Your Database

Versioning your database is as important as versioning your code. How much time do we waste currently before we are even productive when we have to fix or enhance something in a database? RoundhousE versions your database how you want. The recommended way is to version based on source control, but that may not be your solution. But for a moment let’s pretend it is. Why would versioning your database based on source control be a big help? What happens if you get a prod fix (or work order) to fix a ......
Posted On Thursday, November 19, 2009 1:26 AM | Comments (1)

RoundhousE: Configuration

This week I introduced RoundhousE and it’s getting quite a stir. Let’s take a look at the configuration. We are going to focus on the MSBuild/NAnt task configuration for now because the console isn’t yet complete. The console will actually have at least this much if not more (we’ve talked about how to use it to create the migration scripts and not just run them). Because we like to be able to infer things, we have determined that there are only two required items. Thus – the minimal configuration: ......
Posted On Sunday, November 15, 2009 4:06 AM | Comments (9)

RoundhousE DB Migration: Action Shots

I just started the appetites with my last post on RoundhousE. RoundhousE itself has a migration sample to help you get familiar with how it works. You can get to that by using a subversion client to download the source. When you download the RoundhousE source from SVN and run build.bat, you get a code_drop folder. Go in there and look at the deployment folder for a sample run. Prerequisites: Locally installed (and running) SQL Server 2008 Run That Bad Boy When you get into the code_drop folder, take ......
Posted On Friday, November 13, 2009 1:17 AM | Comments (2)

Enter The Dragon: RoundhousE DB Migrations

One of the coolest projects I have been working on is how to solve issues with database versioning and migration. A project dubbed RoundhousE. RoundhousE is an open source automated database deployment (change management) system that allows you to use your current idioms and gain much more. Currently it only supports Microsoft SQL Server, but there are future plans for other databases. It seeks to solve both maintenance concerns and ease of deployment. We follow some of the same idioms as other database ......
Posted On Wednesday, November 11, 2009 4:51 PM | Comments (9)