Git Kraken: new cool Git client for all platforms

Go get your beta invite here: http://www.gitkraken.com/. That's what I did and I was sent a download + access code by AxoSoft to check out their new GIT client.

It worked really well, just out of the box. Wat sets this client apart from the other ones is the sexy looking branch graph of the repository. This is very useful for me, since it allows me to see which developer is working on what on which branch. 

Git rebase --i = nice :)

I'm trying to contribute to the NuGet SkyScanner package - which is hosted on GitHub. I've forked the library and made my changes - and now I wanted to create a pull-request.

Great - works fine, however the pull request had all the small commits in that I made for myself, but it will not be very nice to have all of them in the original repository. Therefore, I wanted to get them all into one single commit and create a pull request for that.

Turns out to be a piece of cake:

Turns out, you need to squash your commits and force push it to the GitHub repository. It's going to require some command line wizardry ( even on Windows ), so prepare for some cmd and even some Vim, but it is definately doable.

Here's a how to: https://robots.thoughtbot.com/git-interactive-rebase-squash-amend-rewriting-history

But the result will be a very nice and clean git history:

I think this idea stems from Gary Bernhardt ( https://www.destroyallsoftware.com/ )  - someone told me about how he does this all the time and told me.

Visual Studio ALM Rangers: get your branching strategy right

We've moved source control over to TFS Online with GIT as the version control system. This is a good way to re-think our branching strategy. I was looking for some resources on the internet, because I think I want to move over to GitFlow but I need to read up on the pros and cons.

So if you don't know what GitFlow is - here's a great explanation: https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/forking-workflow.

Then I found this CodePlex site that offers several guide for Application LifeCycle Management (ALM) on TFS. Check it out here: http://vsarbranchingguide.codeplex.com/ - go to the downloads page and find the PDF guide.

Git tools for Windows

On one of the .NET Rocks! podcasts the other day, I heard about SourceTree which is the Atlassian client for managing Git repositories on your windows machine ( or mac ). I've been using GitHub for windows thusfar, but this indeed looks very nice and I'm a fan of most Atlassian stuff.

GitHub Windows is the one I've been using thusfar. I believe I heard about this tool on Hanselminutes. It looks very nice and works very easy, which also means that the actual Git stuff is abstracted from the user a bit more.

Also on the podcast, tortoisegit was mentioned. When I was using SVN, this was my go-to-tool for doing SVN. This seems to be doing the same thing, but for Git.

Did a presentation on SOLID

This week I did a presentation on the SOLID principles with my colleague Ivar. For all that don't know the SOLID principles: it's 5 basic principles for Object Oriented Programming that make code more maintainable. Every letter within SOLID stands for a principle, so we have:

S for Single Responsibility
O for the open-closed principle
L for the Liskov Substitution principle
I for the Interface Segregation principle
D for Dependency Inversion principle

Go read up on this if you haven't done so: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID_(object-oriented_design)

My idea of the demo was to take a piece of code - this piece of code - taken from CodeCrap.com and refactor it according to SOLID.

I wanted to do live coding on stage, but I was affraid that that might be a bit too ambitious since then I would have to talk, and code, and keep things interesting at the same time. So what I did was create a GitHub repo and separate branches for each of the stages of the refactoring.

Github for windows allows me to switch branches very quickly so what I did was do the whole refactoring, making sure everything worked at every step. Branched off whenever I had reached one of the principles and during my presentation, just switch between branches.

So I could DEMO live code, work with it a little, but then moving on without having to worry about weather the next step would build or not.

My lessons on the other hand for next time are: think even better about what you want to demo and come up with clearer and better examples.

Here's a link to the repo - and like I said, it's all in the branches: https://github.com/jochenvanwylick/201401_solid_demo

Chocolatey: Machine Package Manager, somewhat like apt-get, but built with Windows in mind.

OK, this is awesome. A colleague of mine pointed out this new thing called Chocolatey. It's a little like 'apt' actually - come to think of it (for Linux people). Because it lets you command line install open-source software, that is taken from an online repository (Git in this case).

You only need to run 1 shell script and from then on you can command line install applications. His idea was to use this in combination with the labs for TFS2012. Go have a look!

Plastic SCM - a distributed version control system with a focus on branching

On one of the .NET Rocks! shows I heard about Plastic SCM, a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) that wants to be different from things like GIT by focussing a lot on branching/merging. They offer a GUI for doing these things - see this screenshot from their website:

Here's a video explaining the process:

Looks really cool, although I'm sceptical whether our company will switch to this thing. Seems to be free for 'small' teams I've heard! Check it out.

Record your own coding demos with CodeMirror movies

I noticed that Zen Coding has changed name and is now called 'Emmet' and offers some extra functionality.
I was curious to see how they make the coding demo video you see if you hit 'Watch Demo'.

Apparently, it's a plugin for CodeMirror that allows you write video scripts. Check the project on GitHub: