Ash Tewari

version-control

Protecting Your Api Keys

tewari

I am working on a Windows 8 app (details to follow in a subsequent post) and the code is published in a public repo on github. My app uses third-party APIs and after I committed the first cut to github, I realized that I had included my api keys in the code. The whole world had access to my keys. I did not want to publish the developer keys for those APIs to the entire world. When the app will be released and distributed, those keys will need to be included in the app somehow. Once the keys are out there they can not be 100% protected from a determined mind. So, why bother? Why would I want to hide […]

SVN Merge – Selecting Changesets

tewari

Here is a simple scenario – I have already merged changesets 45-55 from the trunk to branch b1. After this merge, more changes (56-60) were submitted into the trunk and I now need to merge those changes also to branch b1. Which changesets do you select to merge ? 56-60, right ? Well, not exactly. It depends. If you are using Subversion merge command, you will need to specify 55-60. If you are using TortoiseSVN, you will select 56-60. You should keep this in mind if you are used to TortoiseSVN and you are attempting a merge using SVN merge command. Otherwise, you will end up with a merge without change 56. Selecting changes to merge can become non-trivial when […]

Code Validation in TortoiseSVN pre_commit_hook

tewari

If you want to abort a commit if your code fails certain rule and you don’t have access to the SVN Server to configure a hook. What do you do ? Assuming you are using TortoiseSVN, you can configure a Client-Side hook. Here is an example – Say you want to abort commit if you have a comment in your code that starts with //Do Not Commit. You can create a PowerShell script that validates all the files in your changeset and use this script as a Client-Side pre_commit_hook in TortoiseSVN. The pre_commit_hook configuration : //Powershell script : pre_commit.ps1 $donotcommit = “//Do Not Commit“; $changeset = Get-Content $args[0]; foreach($file in $changeset) { if( Get-Content $file | Select-String $donotcommit -quiet ) […]

Database Schema Version Control Tool

tewari

It is essential to treat database schema as source code and apply all the norms and best practices applicable to it. From what I hear and read, database schema version control is non-existent in too many projects. 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 […]