Wednesday, April 29, 2015

Vagrant: Optimizing virtual Ubuntu/Debian boxes

A while ago, we used hilverd/vagrant-ubuntu-oracle-xe to alleviate the testing bottleneck, i.e. too many developers on too few dedicated testing environments. Since then, i am a big Vagrant fan as this really boosted up our testing feedback cycle time.

However, even oracle-xe is anything but a lightweight installation, so minimizing your base box is a good thing to do.

There are quite a few resources on how to optimize virtual boxes for vagrant. I picked up some of these and documented what worked well in this gist mkoertgen/vagrant_export_vbox_vm_basebox.md. Enjoy!

Sunday, April 26, 2015

Squirrel.Windows - Starterkit

You probably know Slack, the team communication tool. If not, go see. It's awesome. The Slack windows app is one of the most prominent users of Squirrell for installation & update. Squirrel itself is an ingeniously simple library for installing and updating desktop windows applications. It uses NuGet packaging to build app releases and supports delta compression for updates. You don't need a NuGet feed to host your releases, just a static web server. If you want to try out Squirrel, you may have a look at the starter sample mkoertgen/hello.squirrel i comitted today. It's a minimal WPF application with an update button.



As extra candy i automated "releasifying" updates with msbuild, i.e. you can build updates by typing

    build.bat HelloSquirrel\HelloSquirrel.csproj /t:Deploy /p:DropLocation=c:\temp\Releases

Enjoy!

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Faceted Search using Elasticsearch and WPF

Today i uploaded a quick sample on how to build faceted navigation for Elasticsearch in WPF which includes highlighting of search results. Below is a screenshot of the sample app. Enjoy!



Sunday, April 19, 2015

Work tip: Disable Chrome history

If you are using Google Chrome at work you should probably disable storing history to avoid your intranet urls being synced out into the Google cloud. Here is how: How to Prevent Google Chrome From Storing Browser History. Chrome basically stores history and other data in a local SQLite database. The tip is a little bit of a hack: You first empty the database (clear history) and then prevent Chrome to modify it (by making it read-only).