At our yearly 1 week Zühlke web camp a couple of us took the opportunity to share experiences with branching and release techniques.
TL DR;
Many articles on the web, books and statistics tell us that “faster = better” and even more important: faster = more revenue.
For Google an increase in page load time from 0.4 second to 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20%.
For Amazon every 100 ms increase in load times decreased sales with 1%.
Also Google uses site speed in their web search ranking. So make sure to optimize your website for speed as per my other blog post.
Is Web Performance Optimization (WPO) something for you?
Figure: Not a garden yet, but everything starts small
On every project that I am part of, I setup an email alert that sends me an email for each check-in that happens.
This helps me to follow what's going on on the codebase and to watch the application grow. I say "grow" because we construct software by growing it like a garden, and *not* constructing it like a building.
"Architecture is a bad metaphor. We don't construct our software like a building, we grow it like a garden."
from Craig Larman, http://www.infoq.com/articles/large-scale-agile-design-and-architecture
*Updated* 14 November 2011: Video is not on vimeo anymore but on tv.ssw.com
The video video recording of my talk "Continuous Delivery with TFS, msbuild and msdeploy" is finally online.
Please say "Thanx" to Raj.
Thanks to Adam Cogan for introducing me so nicely, he almost got my last name right this time
The video is on tv.ssw.com -> which just launched BTW and is a great learning resource)
and embedded here
Have fun and send me some feedback
My related blog posts about Continuous Delivery
We had a great crowd last Wednesday night at the Sydney .NET UG. Thanks everyone!
For everyone who couldn't make it, ping Raj (our video guy) and tell him to get the recording up and running The video is online: Continuous Delivery with TFS, msbuild and msdeploy!
Agenda of the talk
Have you ever come across this?
"Only Bob knows how to deploy... And he is on holidays..."
Or maybe this…
You spent an hour on a bug fix,
but customers will not see it for months
We came across a weird issue with our TFS 2010 build server. We have an MVC3 web application where we added a new Silverlight application. Since we added that Silverlight application our build fails. We get error messages like these:
#1 
#2 
Figure: Spiderman and Batman to the rescue
Here is my journey to fix this problem
I tried different ways to run nunit on our build server.
From "NUnit for Team Build", to "executing nunit-console on cmd" and eventually customizing our project files…
None of those methods made me happy. 
Figure: Sad - Broken builds and mucking around with XML make dev's unhappy
I am a big fan of "measuring", because what you don't measure you can't improve.
Measuring over time allows us to establish a trend and the trend is often more interesting that the hard numbers.
Trends that might be interesting are:
Disclaimer
Before you start flaming me, I am aware that all business relevant code and IP stuff must be on the server side. Just funny how much bit**** you see in forums and stackoverflow if you search for "Silverlight obfuscation"
With tools like Reflector, ILSpy (which is a good Reflector replacement BTW, since Reflector is not free anymore) and Silverlight Spy, it is VERY easy to look into Silverlight XAP files and discover some interesting stuff. We cannot completely hide our source code, but we can at least make it harder to disassemble and see.
If you are a serious Silverlight developer, make sure to get a copy of Silverlight Spy. No, I am not related to them, working for them nor affiliated.
As you may know I am a big fan of automation. I try to automate as many things in my life as possible.
Major reason for automating, is:
I don't have to worry about those "things" anymore, and can focus on other nice "things".
"Things" to automate:
Let me know what you automate in your life!
