Well almost!

I am constantly surprised how many different technologies, languages, frameworks a web developer needs to know, and know well, to be considered a decent developer.  Keeping track of all of them, plus anything new, is almost a full time job in itself.

I took these past summer holidays as an opportunity to look at something new. Not something completely foreign, but something that I thought would make my development a little easier. I chose LESS (http://lesscss.org/), the dynamic stylesheet language.

I have created a new repository on GITHUB.com for a tiny little application that I wrote to demonstrate custom C# events.

https://github.com/dgrinberg/TextFileSplitter 

TextFileSplitter is a small utility windows application, written in C#, that will split a text file based on a character.

It was used as the basis for a previous blog post written on custom C# event handling

Just attempted an installation of Joomla, onto a site hosted by Ilisys.com.au, and received the following error on the first of the web setup pages):

HL7Snoop is a tiny little Windows application that simply parses HL7 files and presents the data in a much more human readable format. It displays the data in a tree format, preserving the data heirachy of the message. It also displays the field name, as per the HL7 standards.

It uses the NHapi library to parse the message and the field names are retrieved from the NHapi model definitions.

The beauty of HL7 is that each minor release of the standard is supposed to be backward compatible, at least within the V2.x series. When a new version of the standard is released it does not remove fields or segments from the standard, it just adds new fields. Fields may be deprecated, but their position still remains within the message. This means that an interface written to accept V2.5 messages should understand messages built using the V2.3 standard.

The majority of my career I have created software for the health industry. A lot of my time has been spent integrating disparate health systems, using the health industry interoperability standard HL7. Very basically HL7, as an interoperability standard, defines everything from protocol through to message structure. However this article is not meant to be an intro into HL7, so if you are after more info visit http://www.hl7.org/.

Recently I had the pleasure of upgrading a clients application server. A reasonably simple exercise or so I thought!

The client was moving from a physical server, to a VM, and upgrading the O/S to Windows Server 2008 R2 64bit. I did not think that there would be any issues, after all we had a number of other clients running on 2008 64bit. But I did not take into account a couple of things:

To enable a more collaborative development experience, I have decided to move most of my code from this site into GITHUB. That will allow others to fork the code and share their changes more readily.

This is different to my current methods. Up until now, I have been managing my own internal SVN repository and just releasing the final code. This makes it a little more difficult for others to contribute, and I need to remember to keep packaging and uploading releases.

This may be a little obsolete for most, but for those of us who work in environments where we have just finished upgrading all machines to XP it can come in handy.

Because of the slow pace, of the large company environment, I am still involved with the deployment of a number of VB6 desktop applications. They are client server applications which require MDAC (Microsoft Data Access Components) to communicate to the database.

I was setting up a brand new Hudson CI server for a new project but every time it tried to retrieve the code out of the SVN repository I kept getting the error

Unable to find repository location for 'svn://xxx/proj/trunk' in revision '28'

The thing that kept throwing me was... that it was correct, the folder didn't exist at revision!! I didn't standardise the folder structure until revision 29. However, all I wanted was the HEAD.