Mark Embling

Like many other developers from around the UK, I was at Microsoft's Reading campus on Saturday for DDD8. I have already had the chance to read several blog posts reflecting on the day and I echo the sentiments - it was (as always) a positive experience with interesting talks and the chance to meet people in real life and put a face to a (twitter) name.

Last night at DevEvening I did my first user group talk: an introduction to Git and PowerShell. As promised at the time, I have collected together some relevant links and made my slides available to download.

It is probably evident from previous posts on my blog that I like Git and working with it from within PowerShell. In the past I have talked about tweaking the PowerShell prompt to add git stats and setting up SSH-agent to work from PowerShell, however I have never actually gone through my entire Git/Windows environment and the steps taken in order to set it up. I thought it was time I did.

I've noticed with interest the 'NoSQL' movement which seems to have arrived recently and have on the whole ignored it. I generally find myself getting on well with relational databases and based on that fact (and the fact they are so commonly used), I have not looked into any of the alternatives. However, I have recently read various articles talking in particularly about CouchDB and MongoDB and after reading a little bit about both, I decided to give MongoDB a closer look.

Too often in my web development past I have found myself wading through huge clumsy CSS files of several hundred lines or more, searching for that place where a particular class is defined or to try and identify what it is that is overriding something else. It can be quite a nightmare. However I recently came accross .Less (pronounced "dot-less"), a port of the great Ruby Less library for .NET. This is a brilliantly simple-to-use solution to an often-painful situation.

Not long ago Jeremy Skinner created Phantom, a build system for .NET based on the Boo language. Since its creation, I have been following it with interest (and have forked it).

Up until recently despite my interest, I had not had the opportunity or reason to make any modifications to it. However, I have not long started developing a new site and I thought this was the perfect time to make use of it - it is clear that the clean Python-like Boo syntax is far more preferable than XML-based build files. However, it was missing a couple of features I wanted, so I have added them. I thought I'd briefly document them in this post for whoever might find it of interest.