I was asked to learn how to use ViewletBuilder so that I can create in-house tutorials for some of the web applications we're working on.

Meanwhile, I was also asked to find a way for one of the teams to be able to versionize and manage their web files. These teams do not consist of developers, just graphic artists, editors, and multimedia specialists.

This is why I went down the wiki path, but wiki's in turn introduce a number of support and maintenance issues, not to mention web design limitations, that made me realize it was not the best path. I asked these folks to consider just using Subversion, and since they weren't familiar with Subversion I created my first ViewletBuilder viewlet as a way of hitting two birds with one stone--explain Subversion while discovering how to use ViewletBuilder.

Subversion for normal people, imagine that. ;) Once I shared it, I realized it's kind of a nice little thing to share with the world. Maybe you might find this useful.

Intro to Subversion - TortoiseSVN Basic Workflow

http://www.viewletcentral.com/vc/viewlet/464812468/

After posting my blog article, "Lists of Microsoft's Fame and Shame - 2008", I knew going in that there were some things I was going to miss, on both sides (fame and shame).

There's one thing that I'm a little disgusted with myself for forgetting, and that is:

Shame:

• SVN (Subversion)
  • Nothing makes it seem to the software community more so than SVN that Microsoft "knows" software from only the confines of their own innovations and culture. On this technology alone, it sometimes seems like they live in a box and engineer in a cave.
  • Visual Source Safe is not version control. It's change control. The difference is as much cultural as it is functional; think a bunch of productive engineers in an agile group ("update", "OK, merged"), versus a bunch of wedgie-suffering tightwads in a red tape overwhelmed corporation ("can you please check that in so I can edit some of the code?")
  • I tried and failed to install Team Foundation Server three times and never got it right. The list of steps is a full page long, and each step takes several minutes of installing stuff -- set up Windows, figuring out whether or not to set up Active Directory, set up SQL Server Std. (not any version but Standard!), set up Windows SharePoint (don't confuse it with Office SharePoint! Don't confuse the version number!), optionally configure SharePonit for Active Directory, etc., etc. In the end, I always had something up and running, but when I would go load the SharePoint intance up in a web browser it would give me some stupid IIS error. Was I not supposed to hit it with a web browser? I don't know; the Help file didn't say.
  • I don't consider mysef a genius, and I don't consider myself a moron either. I consider myself having slightly-better-than-average intelligence. I think my I.Q. was measured 115 when I was a kid, whoopty doo. But I can set up SVN server and SVN client (w/ TortoiseSVN) without a lot of effort, as well as a few free issue tracking web sites like Gemini. I don't have Visual Studio integration (but you can use Ankh or Visual SVN), but I do have version control and a tracking system.
  • This blog post is very telling of the whole cultural situation over there in Washington.