Bonski's Box

First Look:Development Stats using StatSvn

I am a big fan of The Daily Grind at Larkware, as they often give out great links for new tools for developers. Today I was curious about a Subversion metric report called StatSvn, and decided to try it out. I have recently turned to SubVersion for source control, previously it was zip, label the zipfile according to date/time modified, unzip for modification and the whole cycle starts allover again. Currently I'm the only one doing the version control, the others are still doing the same thing, however I will be giving them a presentation/demo about this cool source control as soon I get to configure our source server.

After downloading and following the usage in it's online manual, I decided to check how I was doing with my development on our in-house applications. I tried on a module that has often so many change-requests:Patient Billing.

I was both amazed and worried about the results:















From the Report:
1.) I'm more productive, or at least commits often, during Sunday and during 10am, which is understandable because they're the busiest time.
2.) I'm not doing anything during Monday? Probably because I finished almost everything during Sunday hehehe
3.) I've only commited 500 times? I guess not bad since became active with Subversion late Sept-early October this year.
4.) Wow, we're already doing 150K LOC for one module alone.
4.) I've also subVersioned temporary directories, it was sitting there for months. Time to delete that.
5.) Able to refactor down the code to several thousands( 10K) off the 150K loc; I haven't verified if I have refactored it this much, but if I did that should be a pat to myself already.

This is just the tip of the Iceberg, I'll get to learn more about how to better myself developing as statSvn will show me as I progress.

UI: Licensing the Ribbon

Microsoft revamped it's Office UI with the new Ribbon style, which is essentially a cool looking toolbar inside number of tabs. Microsoft announced that they're licensing the UI to almost everyone that isn't a direct competitor of it's office suite, that means MS Office clones like OpenOffice and the like aren't allowed to have the license. It even has a preview of the UI guidelines with lots of MUST and MUST NOT do in terms of cloning the UI, what was missing was any guideline should the ribbon be customisable(maybe in the final guideline it will be included).

While it's understandable that Microsoft invested millions in designing the new UI, and they might have felt ripped off when most if not all applications copying the pre-Office 2007 UI to the point of even the icons are the same, for the most part(except those coming from Mac) applications were easier or at least familiar to use because of the similarities with MSOffice. Less re-learning you know exactly that the diskette icon, although virtually obsolete now, is for saving; same with an open folder to open something. But hey, MSFT designed the Office UI from the start and they might have felt "should you want to emulate our UI, better do what we do and follow the guidelines." I think the end result being the overall application using the Office UI will have that same familiar look and feel as the actual Office and of course better UX(user experience.) Should the guidelines be finalised expect some of the popular apps/components, especially partners and ISVs to sport the new UI(with OfficeUI license of course)

Jensen Harris an Office UI architect some interesting post/comments about the new license

Castle Project Documentation

Eversince cruizer introduced Monorail, I have been intrigued by this ASP.NET MVC stack. It certainly is a paradigm shift, especially if you're used to the event-model of asp.net of which MR totally abandons. Coupled with that I'm playing/developing with Ruby on Rails, I'm starting to get a hang of it.

The documentation although superb, is online and have to be contented of copying and pasting it in MS Word for an offline reference, especially for the non-specific asp.net features like Microkernel and Facilities. Good thing roelof of Castle Team, pointed me on their svn site for the entire Castle Site itself. It's a hefy download (26MB) but it's worthwhile for offline reference.

Check out the entire site: svn co http://svn.castleproject.org/svn/castle/site/website/castle castle-docs