Tim Hibbard

Indicators

I realized how understanding my girlfriend is of my geeky ways tonight when our conversation went something like this:

Me (ranting about something): "...and I think it's going to break our build tonight"
Her (very sympathetic): "Aww...You broke the build?"
Me: "Yeah..."

posted @ Friday, June 08, 2007 7:32 PM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ .NET TFS ]

SuperNova

Kyle Archer talks about how Supernova makes it possible for one of our potential clients with a visually impaired dispatcher to use ParaPlan.

Creating software that adds business value to a company, eliminates process inefficiencies and has a quick ROI makes for a great whitepaper.  When a company writes software that adds quality of life to an individual, that is very cool.

posted @ Wednesday, June 06, 2007 8:45 AM | Feedback (0) |

Turn by turn directions added to Google Maps API

The Google Maps API blog talks about adding driving directions to their API.  This is something that I am excited about adding to Where's Tim.  I've had directions to me on my real time GPS site for a while (see the post here), but I've always just shelled out a url to maps.google.com.  Now I can retain the users of that feature on my site and not have to send them away (hoping that they will come back).

This is also big for the mashup "industry" as well.  Visually understanding where an object resides is only half the picture.  People care about how something impacts them and being able to offer people directions to your object is the other half of the picture.  As developers, we get to offer more functionality to our site, and offer this functionality as if we generated it ourselves.  I haven't dug in deep enough to know if we can add our own formatting to the directions div.  It would be nice to maintain the same look and feel that we already have to our site (even though I haven't added much formatting that deviates from maps.google.com).

If Google really wants to take a bite out of the big boys and their desktop mapping applications, they need to add reverse geocoding and an fast API call that will return driving distance and driving time between two points for route analysis/optimization applications.

posted @ Tuesday, June 05, 2007 8:18 AM | Feedback (1) | Filed Under [ GPS Mapping Where's Tim Social Geocoding ]

Oprah using Ignition Interlock

Matt Strausz talks about Oprah talking about Ignition Interlock (devices to prevent drinking and driving mandated for DUI offenders) from SmartStart.  He even suggests a good candidate for a celebrity sponsor.  Maybe next show, Oprah will give a device to everyone in the audience :)

posted @ Monday, June 04, 2007 2:10 PM | Feedback (0) |

Publishing a ClickOnce app with TeamBuild

After much frustration, I've finally configured our TeamBuild proj file to publish our ClickOnce app, and increase the version number (kinda an important step).  The Vertigo blog talks about using SolutionToPublish, but that doesn't work for all situations.  Specifically, when your solution contains projects that reference other projects. 

So I started playing with the MSBuild Community Tasks Project, and came up with the following Xml for my proj file:

This tells the .proj to use the community project:

<Import Project="$(MSBuildExtensionsPath)\MSBuildCommunityTasks\
   MSBuild.Community.Tasks.Targets"/>

This defines the version numbers:

<PropertyGroup>
    <Major>4</Major>
    <Minor>0</Minor>
    <Build>0</Build>
    <Revision>0</Revision>
</PropertyGroup>

This sets the Revision to the last Changeset in our TFS server, and sets the Build to a formatted date:

<Target Name="Version">
    <TfsVersion LocalPath="$(SolutionRoot)">
      <Output TaskParameter="Changeset" PropertyName="Revision"/>
    </TfsVersion>
    <Time Format="MMdd">
      <Output TaskParameter="FormattedTime" PropertyName="Build" />
    </Time>
</Target>

This tells TeamBuild to Publish this after the solution is compiled and after the Version code has been ran.  It publishes the ClickOnce project to the location PublishDir with the version set in ApplicationVersion:

<Target Name="AfterCompile" DependsOnTargets="Version">
    <MSBuild Projects="$(SolutionRoot)\dev\...\ParaPlan.csproj"
    Properties="PublishDir=\\server\drop\;ApplicationVersion=$(Major).$(Minor).$(Build).$(Revision)" 
    Targets="Publish" />
</Target>

The entire .proj file is here.

posted @ Friday, June 01, 2007 2:15 PM | Feedback (4) | Filed Under [ .NET Goldstar TFS ClickOnce ]