Robert Beal (Bealer)

After upgrading to Subversion 1.5 I’ve recently had problems merging between our trunk and another branch.
Firstly, I found I couldn’t do so from the root of the trunk/branch.
So the following would fail:
http://rob.repo.com/trunk -> http://rob.repo.com/branch
I would receive - “Error - Malformed URL of repository”. This was using subversion (via command line) and TortoiseSVN.
However, for some insane [...]

At Huddle we’ve recently been adding to our JSON RESTful API.
For testing GET/POST requests, and their responses, we did originally use Fiddler2, but it doesn’t support SSL, and it’s awkward to use. We also tried Modify Headers, a Firefox extension, but it was problematic.
The solution we settled on was to use TinyGet (part of the [...]

A simple tip I came across when hosting multiple sites on a server.
It’s easy to assign a new ip address to the adapter, but creating a new ip address per website is a bit much.
I like to, where possible, use host-headers when hosting a website. Host headers across SSL are now supported by IIS6 (in [...]

We’ve recently been working on our API and came across the problem of writing documentation for the API.
Having looked at a number of solutions I came up with a simple solution using XML comments within C# and the XML generated by the project during compilation. Here are the steps:

For any exposed API methods you write, [...]

At Huddle I’ve recently been involved with looking at the build setup that we have in place (also see my article Defining a development tree). I’ve attached the build scripts and Cruise Control config to the blog, but will explain them below.
1. Setting up Cruise Control

Once installed setup the “working” and “artifact” directories where all [...]

Having a cleanly designed dev tree can be more important than many developers might at first think. Having looked at not only how I do things, but how Huddle structures their dev tree I decided to do some research into designing the perfect dev tree.
Here were my findings:

Namespaces should follow folder structure. Much like how [...]

Recently I’ve been working on improving the caching within the website to improve performance for the user. After reading around, I found the following rules to be valuable.

Cache your CSS and JavaScript forever (set a long, long expiry)
Handle updates by changing the URL of your CSS and JavaScript

When caching “forever” the main problem is if [...]