code & chips

I have had NO end of problems with developing on Windows 7 64 Bit….It seems Microsoft never created a 64 bit version, which means it buggers about with the OS like a 5 year old girl dressed in her Mums clothes….but every now and again that little girl trips in her high heels.

I managed to find something that so far, has been helping:

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v2.XXXX\LDR64.exe setwow

It does some jiggery-pokery under the hood and will enforce the CLR to run in 32 bit mode..which is fine by me – especially when running as normal on 64 bit adds nothing to me but headaches….

(Make sure you run the command prompt as Administrator else you’ll get problems trying to execute)

I realise – after the event – that I will not remember these commands so I am logging them here for me in the future.

This will be revised as I discover and remember all the commands.

1. Open a ‘Terminal’ window
2. Navigate to source folder
3. git init
4. git add .
5. git commit -m “log message”
6. git push origin master

Now I need to remember how I set up my Mac to be configured to connect to the correct repository in GitHub.

When I read the help posts on how to configure this, it seemed easy. But it practice, not everything was as simple as it was explained. I had to visit various sources before I understood what the problem was.

The steps documented on the web are:

• Open ‘Komodo’
• Open ‘Preferences’
• Select ‘Languages’
• Select ‘Python’
• In Additional Python Import Libraries, add the folder ‘/usr/local/google_appengine’. (This is generally the installation folder for Google App Engine)

But I can’t select ‘/usr/local/google_appengine’!! Where is it? Why can’t I find it?

The problem was, that on a Mac the folder you need to use is hidden and unhiding this folder is not that simple. For a start, it takes hours to download the appropriate piece of software. namely, the Mac Developer Kit from Apple.

Once this is installed you will have the commands necessary to unhide the folder by opening up a ‘Terminal’ window and typing:

sudo /Developer/Tools/SetFile -a v usr

Now you may follow the steps above to add the Google App Engine folder to the Python Import Libraries of Komodo.

The full set of configuration tweaks to set Komodo as a Google App Engine IDE can be found here.

Update:
You may also find an error in your logs similar to the following:

WARNING 2010-04-17 14:20:27,961 dev_appserver.py:3589] Could not initialize images API; you are likely missing the Python “PIL” module. ImportError: No module named _imaging
INFO 2010-04-17 14:20:27,966 dev_appserver_main.py:399] Running application kam-proxy on port 8080: http://localhost:8080
INFO 2010-04-17 14:20:31,768 dev_appserver_main.py:404] Server interrupted by user, terminating

You *may* be able to remedy it by running this command from a ‘Terminal’ window:

sudo easy_install –find-links http://www.pythonware.com/products/pil/ Imaging

I use TeamCity as the continuous integration to our projects.  It requires less setup and has nice GUIs for you to play with.

QAs with any new application, I installed all the plug ins, one of which is for Visual Studio. 

I didn’t really pay much attention to it, I was just happy to have three new icons in my toolbar and soft satisfaction that TeamCity was a click away from Visual Studio.

I read a post today that informed me of the “Personal Builds”.  This is the idea that – if I’m reading it right – you can test your changes against the server BEFORE committing. Obviously, there are conditions you can set to auto commit on success, but the main idea is to test your local changes do not break the build.

You can probably tell from the tone of my post that I am not all that convinced.  The reason is because all I get is this:

Everytime I try to set the SVN path, I am presented with the message:

“Unable to use selected svn.exe" from xxxxxxx”

I am hoping this is because we are running two builds behind on TeamCity.  I’ll update it on Monday and see if anything changes.

I’m not completely sold on the idea unless it can highlight this scenario:

Developer uses references to assemblies that are not included on the server or in the project, but only on his local machine.  If you were to upload the changes, the build would break.  But would this “Personal Build” notice this?  If not, then what is the point?

I’ll see on Monday….

Another one I always forget, putting in post build events in Visual Studio to handle developer customised configurations:

For Example:

The whole development team uses the same solution to work from.  This solution is stored in SVN or similar.  But each one of us uses a different connection string to connect to our local databases.  How can we safeguard against a configuration file melee?

In the post build event of the project properties, enter a customised version of this line:

if %COMPUTERNAME% EQU KAMS-MACHINE copy $(ProjectDir)web.kam.config $(ProjectDir)web.config