Pushing the Octopus South...

On Thursday last (18th Sept), I was privileged to take my OctopusDeploy talk on the road again at Developer South Coast in Southampton.

I'd been having trouble the previous evening with the VMs I used at ChesterDevs, and had not been able to access them, so I took a gamble and instead of demonstrating Octopus on a prepared rig, started from scratch installing the server and tentacle onto new VMs.

Even that wasn't enough difficulty for the Demo Gods, clearly, as both my Macbook and the WindowsVM on it rebooted during the talk, and my Mifi dropped its signal out to the point that I had to borrow connectivity from a kind member of the audience at the break.

But in spite of all these problems, I managed to get through the demo and show that you can actually get Octopus up and deploying from scratch within about an hour.

All the resources for the talk, including the slide-deck, sample solution, etc can be found here:

https://github.com/Rammesses/ddd-octopus

I've got to thank John McLoughlin for inviting me to talk - my company Landmark Information Group (http://www.landmark.co.uk, @LandmarkUK) for supporting me as I share our experiences, and to the @devsouthcoast audience for their patience and enthusiasm.

Monday Quickie - Using IIS Application Initialization for keeping ASP.Net Apps alive.

This came about from trying (and failing) to remember that one liner for registering components with IIS for correct teardown.

HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(launcher);

I finally came across the article by Rick Strahl that I'd been looking for, which covers everything:

Use IIS Application Initialization 

for keeping ASP.NET Apps alive

Seemples.

Thursday Quickie - Which of my packages does my code use?

I had the problem today of wanting to see what versions of my private packages were being used by a specific branch of my codebase.

The solution is a very small powershell script that parses packages.config files and finds the unique dependency packages who's name matches 'MyNamespace'.

Get-ChildItem -recurse -include "packages.config" |  

select-string -pattern "MyNamespace" |

%{ $data = $_ -match 'id="([\w\d.]*)" version="([\d.])*"';    write-output $matches[0] } | 

sort | select -uniq

Quick and simple.