Alex Feldstein blogs “Andy Kramek, a well-known software developer writes a very insightful article on why .NET could be a big problem and a failure for Microsoft. He contends, that aside from ASP.NET (which is what ASP should have been from the beginning), there is no compelling reason for developers to jump to .NET… I tend to agree.”
Archive | July 11, 2005
SourceSafe History Redux: using VFP to generate VSS History Files
In the original post, I showed a simple Visual FoxPro program to generate a week’s worth of activity history from Visual SourceSafe. Andrew MacNeill observed that it would not work for him, as he was supporting more than one database. Here’s one solution: change the original program from shelling out with a single command. Instead, generate a batch file, and then execute it. Here’s a sample:
SET TEXTMERGE TO VSSHIST.BAT
SET TEXTMERGE ON NOSHOW
\ SET SSDIR=C:\MY DOCUMENTS\SOURCESAFE
\ SET VSSEXEDIR=C:\PROGRAM FILES\VSS\WIN32
\ %VSSEXEDIR%\ss history $/ -R -vd <<DTOC(DATE())>>~<<DTOC(DATE()-7)>> -B -O@History.txt
SET TEXTMERGE OFF
SET TEXTMERGE TO
!VSSHIST.BAT
SET SSDIR=
SET VSSExeDir=
[UPDATED]: My blogging software made mincemeat out of the slashes, greater-than and less-than signs. Copy with care, and proof your result.
The SSDIR environment variable is recognized the the SS.EXE SourceSafe command-line executable: if set, it points to the SRCSAFE.INI file and the location of the data files SourceSafe is to operate on. The second environment variable, VSSExeDir is one I use to simplify the batch file, but putting the absolute path to the SourceSafe executables in one place, you can refer to it within the file, and only need to change it in one place should you change paths. Think #DEFINE in other languages.
Partners: Crunchy and good with ketchup
Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley notes Feeding the Voracious Microsoft Beast. “Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may love Microsoft’s partners. But that doesn’t mean he has any trepidation about continuing to chip away at their markets.”
Microsoft has always loved their partners: they’re crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
It’s pretty well-known that announcing a “strategic partnership” with Microsoft means, if you’re lucky, the company will get swallowed whole and you might walk away with cash or, if you’re less lucky, Microsoft will suck the blood, sweat and tears out of the company and leave a cold dead husk. With maybe a shot at an intellectual property infringement suit and a billion-dollar out of court settlement. And maybe not.
Writing Linux Firewall Rules With IPTables
OSNews points to a great TipMonkies piece on Writing Linux Firewall Rules With IPTables. “If you use Linux a good deal, you should know how to set up a firewall to help protect your system and your network. This tutorial will guide you through the steps you should take in order to makes IPTables work for you.”
Follow-up: weekly SourceSafe history reports
Andrew follows up on my 30 June post on Ted Roche – Building SourceSafe Activity Reports using VFP. “Ted hasn’t updated this yet but his code for generating weekly activity reports from Visual SourceSafe is going to help me out plenty… We had to make some adjustments for databases that are not stored in the root directory (mine are stored in another folder).”
Well, actually, the problem is that the code as written in the original post assumed that the SourceSafe client on the machine running the report was set up to point to the repository of SourceSafe data by default – an obscure registry setting. If not, use the trick in Andrew’s post to set the SSDIR environment variable to point to the SourceSafe repository of interest. Also, it’s a very good idea to run this on the local machine with the SourceSafe repository, as network traffic can slow the performance by orders of magnitude. Andrew goes on to note:
“By the way, Ted’s work is licensed with Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License,… If you use it, great. If you fix it, pass the fixes along using the same license. A great approach for offering code. ” My thoughts exactly.