Feature Toggles Links

At work we want to use Feature Toggles (Branching in code) to avoid “Feature Branch Hell”. Here is a list of links with experiences and definition from others with thanks to Pete and Natalya.

• Feature Toggles (Martin Fowler)
• Feature Branch (Martin Fowler)
• Feature Toggle Experience report
• Feature Branches are poor mans modular architecture
• Feature Bits by Erik Sowa and Rob Loh (Presentation, 56 min)
• Interview with Jez Humble and Martin Fowler (38 min)
• Feature Flags by Flickr (Blog)
• Chrome Release Process (Slideshow)
• 10 Deploys per Day at Flickr
• Switching incrementally to Cassandra at Twitter
• Continous Deployment
• Continuous deployment at outbrain
• nToggle implementation

Visual Studio 2010 Javascript Snippets for Jasmine

Because Resharper 5 does not support live templates for Javascript I’m forced to use the built in VS2010 snippets. The default Javascripts snippets are located here:

%ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Web\Snippets\JScript\1033\JScript

The ‘1033’ locale ID may be different for your country. I’m using the following snippets for creating Jasmine specs:

describe

<CodeSnippet Format="1.1.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet">
  <Header>
    <Title>describe</Title>
    <Author>Christian Rodemeyer</Author>
    <Shortcut>describe</Shortcut>
    <Description>Code snippet for a jasmine 'describe' function</Description>
    <SnippetTypes>
      <SnippetType>Expansion</SnippetType>
    </SnippetTypes>
  </Header>
  <Snippet>
    <Declarations>
      <Literal>
        <ID>suite</ID>
        <ToolTip>suite description</ToolTip>
        <Default>some suite</Default>
      </Literal>
    </Declarations>
    <Code Language="jscript"><![CDATA[describe("$suite$", function () {
        $end$        
    });]]></Code>
  </Snippet>
</CodeSnippet>

it

<CodeSnippet Format="1.1.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet">
  <Header>
    <Title>it</Title>
    <Author>Christian Rodemeyer</Author>
    <Shortcut>it</Shortcut>
    <Description>Code snippet for a jasmine 'it' function</Description>
    <SnippetTypes>
      <SnippetType>Expansion</SnippetType>
    </SnippetTypes>
  </Header>
  <Snippet>
    <Declarations>
      <Literal>
        <ID>spec</ID>
        <ToolTip>spec description</ToolTip>
        <Default>expected result</Default>       
      </Literal>    
    </Declarations>
    <Code Language="jscript"><![CDATA[it("should be $spec$", function () {
        var result = $end$       
    });]]></Code>
  </Snippet>
</CodeSnippet>

func

<CodeSnippet Format="1.1.0" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005/CodeSnippet">
  <Header>
    <Title>function</Title>
    <Author>Christian Rodemeyer</Author>
    <Shortcut>func</Shortcut>
    <Description>Code snippet for an anonymous function</Description>
    <SnippetTypes>
      <SnippetType>Expansion</SnippetType>
      <SnippetType>SurroundsWith</SnippetType>
    </SnippetTypes>
  </Header>
  <Snippet>
    <Code Language="jscript"><![CDATA[function () {
        $selected$$end$
    }]]></Code>
  </Snippet>
</CodeSnippet>

Removing the mime-type of files in Subversion with SvnQuery

If you add files to subversion they are associated with a mimetype. SvnQuery will only index text files, that means files without an svn:mime-type property or where the property is set to something like “text/*”. At work I wondered why I couldn’t find some words that I know must exist. It turned out that subversion marks files stored as UTF-8 files with BOM as binary, using svn:mime-type application/octet-stream. This forces the indexer to ignore the content of the file.

I used SvnQuery to find all files that are marked as binary, e.g. t:app* .js finds all javascript files and t:app* .cs finds all C# files. With the download button at the bottom of the results page I downloaded a text files with the results. Because svn propdel svn:mime-type [PATH] can work only on one file (it has no --targets option) I had to modify the text file to create a small batch script like this:

svn propdel svn:mime-type c:\workspaces\javascript\file1.js
svn propdel svn:mime-type c:\workspaces\javascript\file1.js
svn propdel svn:mime-type c:\workspaces\javascript\file1.js
…

After this change indexing worked again. I now run a daily query that ensures that no sources files are marked as binary.