Andrew Peters’ Blog

Looking for a free-as-in-beer issue tracker, forum, and generally flexible project management web application? If so, you could do a lot worse than checking out Redmine. We’ve been using it for a few days at work and I have to say it might be the nicest issue tracking system I’ve ever used.

Here’s the high-level feature list:

• Multiple projects support
• Flexible role based access control
• Flexible issue tracking system
• Gantt chart and calendar
• News, documents & files management
• Feeds & email notifications
• Per project wiki
• Per project forums
• Simple time tracking functionality
• Custom fields for issues, projects and users
• SCM integration (SVN, CVS, Git, Mercurial, Bazaar and Darcs)
• Multiple LDAP authentication support
• User self-registration support
• Multilanguage support
• Multiple databases support

Out of the box it works just great, but it’s also extensible and modular and thus easy to customize to your particular requirements. It’s Rails-based too, so diving into the source is pretty easy. We’ve customized how it receives emails and themed it up a little.

Kudos and thanks to the Redmine team for a great piece of software!

Seems like I’ve been double tagged. I shall use that as an excuse to be twice as terse!

How old were you when you started programming?

20.

How did you get started in programming?

I needed a career and Computer Science had to be more interesting than Econ 101 *shudder* - Conveniently, I actually enjoyed it.

What was your first language?

Turbo Pascal and C++ at university. PowerBuilder commercially - long live the Data Window!

What was the first real program you wrote?

Something at ‘varsity. Maybe a DFA/NFA Regex thingie.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Turbo Pascal, C, C++, PowerBuilder, Java, PL/SQL, VB/Script, JavaScript, Ruby, C#, Haskell.

What was your first professional programming gig?

Working on a land information system at the New Zealand Department for Courts.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Yes.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Find what you’re passionate about and do that.

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had… programming?

Whenever I can solve a challenging problem. A Haskell term unification program springs to mind. Along with the LightSpeed query engine and NHaml - variety is the key and constantly challenging yourself.

Over to:

- Turtle
- JD
- Newt
- Agile Kiwi
- Kirk

Home coffee finally reaches acceptable levels!

Kit:

- Rancilio Silvia
- Rancilio Rocky
- Caffe L’affare Primo

Yum!

Dave Newman has created a cool NHaml syntax highlighting add-in for Visual Studio. Thanks Dave and keep up the good work!

Quite a few people have asked me how to use NHaml outside of ASP.NET MVC. Here’s how to do it:

1) Create your project and add a reference to MvcContrib.NHamlViewEngine
2) Use code like the following to compile and render a template.

var templateCompiler = new TemplateCompiler();
var viewType = templateCompiler.Compile("MyTemplate.haml");		
var view = (ICompiledView)Activator.CreateInstance(viewType);
 
string output = view.Render();

In this case the haml template is located in the same folder as the application.

As always, a good way to figure this stuff out is to take a look at the unit tests. In this case I copied the code verbatim from the NHaml TestFixtureBase class.