P2P online backup

Very rarely you see an online ad that is interesting.. Today I noticed one for CrashPlan.

They offer both a free and paid online backup solution. The interesting thing about the free version is that you back up your data on your friends’ or family’s computers (rather than a central remote server). Quite a novel approach. About the only downside is that the free version apparently is ad-supported. Not sure how annoying they would be.

I think all the computers would need to be online at the same time for backups to work properly. Presumably the same would apply if you needed to do a restore too. Something to take into consideration.

There is also a paid offering too (for orphans or people without any friends?)

Updating assembly versions in Visual Studio project files

Sometimes you need to update all the references to a particular assembly so that they use a newer version than the original one that was added to the project.

One option is to manually edit the references for each project, removing and re-adding the assembly.

Option two, which is a bit nicer, is to use something like this PowerShell script:

Get-ChildItem -recurse -filter "*.*proj" | Foreach-Object { (Get-Content $_.FullName) | Foreach-Object { $_ -replace "1.0.3.0", "1.1.0.0" } | Set-Content $_.FullName }

In this example, we are replacing instances of “1.0.3.0” with “1.1.0.0” – handy if you just happened to be upgrading to the latest version of Castle.

Note the use of the parentheses () around the Get-Content - without those you’ll end up with an Access Denied error as it will be trying to write to the same file it is reading from.

CodeCampSA 2009 – Day 2

Presentation notes

Nigel Spencer – WPF in 2010

• Easing functions – affect animation velocity
• Behaviours
• Demo of customising Visual Studio home page – XAML-based
• Model View ViewModel – templates

Greg Low – Spatial SQL

• sys.spatial_reference_systems

Dave Glover – Windows 7 APIs

• Windows 7 Training Kit

Omar Besiso

• Sync Framework (seemed strangely familiar!)

Jason Stangroome – PowerShell and build automation

• Join-Path
• Use pipeline if possible
  • % { } (same as foreach)
• Example of using netstat to confirm that build service is listening on specified port
• Recommend reading - Release It!: Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software (Pragmatic Programmers) by Michael Nygard.

Jason Schluter – Silverlighter

• XHTML to Silverlight converter

James Chapman-Smith – Model View ViewModel and Unit Testing

• ViewModel handles
  • UI logic
  • input validation
• Thought while observing Jame’s code – could you have INotifyPropertyChanged take a lamba expression instead of a string? – Apparently yes!

Peter Cornish – AdWords