Fantail IO

This is my second tutorial on feature toggling.  You can read the first here . There are many languages and frameworks to choose from when it comes to back ends - I wanted to make a REST service to deliver all of the Time Entries to my Angular application, and almost every language available has REST server capabilities.  I chose to use .Net Core (C#) and Java for my example app.  My background is in Java, and I was really interested to see how .Net Core works.  If you don't know, .Net Core is Microsoft's cross platform offering - it has the Windows-specific parts taken out and runs on Docker. Linux, MacOSX, and of course Windows too.  It can also be compiled on other platforms too, which is very handy. Today I'll be setting up LaunchDarkly using the .Net libraries - I'll do the Java version later on.  LaunchDarkly provides some samples  to help you get started, but I wanted to change a few things.  Just like I did in the Angular front end, I ...

I had a chance to demonstrate a feature toggling library to a customer last week, and wanted to share what I did.  Feature toggles, in case you don't know, let you to configure how your system behaves without redeploying code.  This is fantastic if you have a feature that needs to launch at a particular time, or you want to experiment with by switching off and on in different environments.  Feature toggles act like an if statement around a code of block and can be switched on or off as desired, without requiring a restart.  Martin Fowler covers this in some detail  here . Filling out my timesheet is one of the least favourite parts of my week, but I thought I would build a simple timesheeting system for my demo.  I have a UI written in Angular using the Angular Seed  project and the Angular Material components.  The basic UI looks like this: I am working on a couple of features that aren't quite ready yet - being able to add and remove time...

Last week I started a new project with VSTS , setting up some Git repos for my code.  Now it's time to set up some requirements and planning for the development.  I chose to set up an Agile project last week, which is one of 3 default project types in VSTS.  This affects a number of things, including the form the requirements take and the development process used.  Agile is the most flexible, and is the one that I use most often.  Requirements are added to a project as Work Items: Agile Process Work Item Types - from the Microsoft documentation Most of my requirements will take the form of User stories, a common Agile construct.  These stories express a requirement in terms of a Persona, performing some Action to achieve a Result.  When you use this format you tend to drill down on the requirement, writing it in a format that's easy to understand and to develop.  Features are a piece of functionality that you want to deliver, and can be use...

Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) is an Application Lifecycle Management tool - it handles the whole lifecycle of software development from idea to requirements, planning, development, code reviews, build and release.  It is designed to support your team no matter what methodologies or languages you use.  While most users pay for a license or use their MSDN subscriptions to log in, Microsoft make VSTS freely available for teams of up to 5 users.  I am going to use my free account to plan and develop a new project, and share some tips along the way. Start off at  VisualStudio.com  where you can sign up for a free account.  After you choose your account name, you can create a new project: Choose a Git repository to save your source code, and select the Agile work item process.  This process works well with most Agile methodologies without constraining you to a particular Scrum template.  When you press Create you'll be taken to the new p...

It's very easy to add columns to a Product Backlog Board in VSTS - you can use the board settings to create new columns, rename and re-order, or even remove columns from the board.  The only special columns are the first and the last one, which can't be removed or deleted since they have a special meaning as far as work goes - they represent the start and end state of the work you're managing. It's more tricky to add columns to a sprint view, though - but this is really useful as it lets you customize the tool to your own workflow and preferences.  You have to be an administrator for the VSTS installation to do this, though - I'll show you how using one of my demo projects. Use the main config menu (the cog wheel) and click on the Process from the Overview tab: My project is an "Agile" project – it uses the Agile template.  From Process you can clone your current process and make your own.  Unfortunately you can't change the proces...

In my previous post  I did a simple migration of a Subversion project to Git.  I didn't want to keep any branches or history so purposely got rid of the history - it was more of a copy than a proper migration.  This time I will show you how to pull across some branches, and check that your commit history survives. Instead of starting with an export of the SVN project, we can use a Git tool designed for Subversion.  Run this command to tell Git where your SVN repo is, and a little about its structure: git svn init http://svn.example.com/subversion/Project ↩ --prefix svn/ -T trunk --b=branch --t=tag Initialized empty Git repository in C:/tmp/Project/.git/ My repository had slightly odd names for the branches and tags folders so I had to use the --b and --t flags tell Git what where to look.  Next you can associate any Subversion accounts with the new Git logins.  To do this, create an authors.txt file, formatted like this: svn_username = Git Use...

I've been helping a company move its source code from Subversion to Git recently to support their Agile transition. They're moving their build, issue tracking and code repos to Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). This is the cloud-hosted version of Microsoft's Team Foundation Services, with built in Git hosting, build tasks and a Jira-like issue tracking system. I really like it, plus it's free for teams of 5 or less, making it perfect for my development needs at home. Check it out at VisualStudio.com  Most of my customer's projects don't need to keep their Subversion history - unfortunately they had no policy for commenting commits and most check-ins have empty messages so aren't of much use. The teams have made a conscious decision to abandon the past and drop the history. We will keep the old SVN repos alive for a while so if we really need to we can look back at changes, but don't expect to use it much. The simplest way to migrate these proj...