The Johnson Blog

The development of Chef has been pretty interesting thus far. I had almost forgotten how much work is involved in getting an application shippable like this. My previous experience was with the release WakeUp! Alarm Clock, but that was as off-the-cuff as you can get: simple version control (umm, none at first then graduated to [...]

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A while back I discussed needing to look into a new source control solution for Chef.  To recap, CVS had just gotten on my nerves for a few things: file deletion and moving; pretty crappy windows client support (gui); clunky (to me) branch management; and poor infrastructure on my network.  I just don’t feel comfortable [...]

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Well it’s a week and two days later than desired, but it’s finally here.  The first beta of the new Chef!  For those of you that are going to be trying it out and providing your feedback, thank you very much - I really appreciate it.
Details available at www.ejichef.com.

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Last night I put together a simple build system and got some of the application versioning in place for the future.  I’m running CruiseControl.NET for the builds but haven’t set it up for continuous integration since I’m the only one coding.  I’m also not running any build tasks other than a straight compile, although once [...]

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Over the weekend I finally spent some time to tackle the problem of registration keys.  Particularly, generating them.  The last piece of software I attempted this was WakeUp! Alarm Clock, with a very cheesy, homegrown routine for creating a key tied to the user’s name.  I never ran across any cracks/keygens for WakeUp! but I’m [...]

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A while back I tossed around the notion of having a beta of Chef available for testing by Thanksgiving.  So far I’m doing quite well with this goal.  Now that the setup situation has been resolved, I can work on a few other issues that have to be done before I add the few final [...]

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Over the past week or so I have been reviewing the landscape of Installers that I can use to get Chef installed on people’s machines. The landscape has changed quite a bit since the last time I looked, with a lot more small install authoring tools available. Before, it was just InstallShield or [...]

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At work yesterday I created my first Visual Studio Addin.  Now that I know how to do it, I’m going to create one for something I’ve always wanted: launch windows explorer on a folder in the solution explorer.  There apparently used to be a powertoy for this feature, but that was for VS2003.

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