Joe Freeman

An integrated Microsoft environment provides a lot of standard infrastructure for your project.  It also requires a certain amount of standard infrastructure irrespective of the size of the project. Active Directory is the most obvious example of this   Developers that want to test out Microsoft tools or sub-systems almost always need a multi-system environment because most  Microsoft products work best when bound to Active Directory, a tool that needs to run on its own system.  Virtualization can help here making it easy to build virtual labs , "personal clouds" or use something like Azure. I've been working on a Microsoft project where all of our virtualization is done using Microsoft's Hyper-V.  This pushes me towards Hyper-V as my virtualization platform when sharing work with others on the team.  My most powerful laptop is my 16GB Quad-Core Macbook Pro.  Hyper-V doesn't run on OS/X so we can instead make use of a technique used by a lot of VMWare users.  Ru

I've updated the sample Java based build monitoring program to add support for some of the LED feedback lights I've built in the last year.  The program obtains build status from Hudson, Jenkins, Cruise Control and others by parsing the very common cctray.xml format originally provided by Cruise Control. Code is available on Git Hub  .  It was a messy combination of older hacks.  Now it's marginally improved. Configuration happens via properties files instead of with bunches command line arguments.  Properties files provide flexibility to increase the number of configuration parameters for various devices.  The best way to do fix this is  to use Dependency Injection like I did for the C#/Spring.Net TFS build monitor I built last year. In the mean time you can configure the properties file in the tree or create an external one that you pass in on the command line. Device support includes. Ambient Orb with serial port Arduino Dual RGB discussed in an older blog articl