A few weeks ago, I downloaded Scratch from M.I.T’s website. Scratch is a programming language for kids. You drag/drop and (literally) snap together programming constructs to create games. Within a couple of minutes, I had a diver chasing a ball bouncing around on the screen.

I showed it to my 5 year old son and he watched as I “changed the game” and had the ball chase the mouse cursor and the diver chase the ball. He sat down with me and asked me if I could make it a dog chasing the ball instead. Sure! Then we started customizing further. Make it run faster .. Yeah! Let’s turn him into Clifford – The Big Red Dog … Can he bark ? Sure. Let’s turn it into a basket ball .. I want it red, blue, yellow, … Let’s make a basket ball hoop and have Clifford play basketball … Sure.

It was a quite productive pair programming session . No TDD yet – he is too young for that kind of stuff .

I was relieved that I didn’t loose his attention while I was “programming”. Now, my son does have a pretty long attention span for his age, but a lot of credit goes to the designers of Scratch. The entire “artwork” was created within the Scratch application and the “programming” was just a pure joy for my son. And we were just “scratching” the surface there. Explore the possibilities here.

You can download the game here : Clifford-ball.sb. Be careful, sometimes the dog turns upside down. There are some bugs to be fixed . Where is the debugger ?

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Various techniques to accomplish version control of database schemas have been discussed and published. Martin Fowler and Pramod Sadagale has written a comprehensive article on Evolutionary Database Design. It is a must-read for everyone involved with database development.

K. Scott Allen writes in detail about an excellent system here – Versioning Databases – Change Scripts. This approach is sufficiently light-weight (for my taste) and provides complete control over the whole process.

I am providing a free tool here that you can use to implement this system. It will even create the SchemaVersionsLog table for your database, if it doesn’t exist. If you are using this tool with MSSQL Server, you can get started with very little effort. If you are using a different DBMS, you can still use this tool. It uses NHibernate to access the SchemaVersionsLog table. So, any DBMS supported by NHibernate is acceptable, as long as it comes with a command line tool to execute the sql scripts.

Download DbUpdater here.

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