Refresh Database–Speed up Your Development Cycles

Rob Reynolds — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 22:40:42 GMT

Refresh database is an workflow that allows you to develop with a migrations framework, but deploy with SQL files. It’s more than that, it allows you to rapidly make changes to your environment and sync up with other teammates. When I am talking about environment, I mean your local development environment: your code base and the local database back end you are hitting.

Refresh database comes in two flavors, one for NHibernate and one for Entity Framework. I’m going to show you an example of the one for Entity Framework, which you can find in the repository for rh-ef on github. One note before we get started: This could work with any migrations framework that will output SQL files.

What is this? Why should I use this?

How long do you spend updating source code and then getting your database up to snuff afterward so you can keep moving forward quickly? Do you work with teammates? Do you have multiple workstations that you might work from and want to quickly sync up your work?

It’s a pain most of us don’t see and an idea that was originally incubated by Dru Sellers. He wanted a fast way of keeping his local stuff up to date right from Visual Studio. Out of that was born Refresh Database. We are talking a simple right click and debug to a synced up database.

Others have talked in the past about how you want to use the same migration algorithm and test it all the way up to production. Refresh DB allows you to test that migration from a local development environment many times a day. So by the time you hand over the SQL files for production (or use RoundhousE), there is no guess work about whether it is going to work or not. You have a security in knowing that you are good to go.

It’s definitely something that can really speed up your team so you never hear “I got latest and now I’m trying to sync up all the changes to the database.” This should be easy. This should be automatic.

You should never again hear “I made some domain changes but now I’m working to get them into the database.” This should be easy. This should be automatic.

Whether you decide to look further into this or not, it doesn’t matter to me. It just means my teams will get to market and keep updated faster than you (given the same technologies, ).

How does this work?

This is the simple part. Convincing you to look at it in the first place is the hard part. I have put together a short video to show you exactly how it works. You will see that it is super simple.

Conclusion

Refresh Database has been around for over two years. It’s definitely something that has paid for itself time and again. It’s something you might consider looking at it if you have never heard of it.

If you don’t do something with migrations and source control for your database yet, please start now. This will save you countless hours in the future. I’ve walked into more than one company that was hurting in the area of database development b/c they didn’t treat the database scripts as source code in the same way that they did the rest of the code. It’s a must anymore. I also see teams doing shared development database development. This is a huge no no (except in certain considerations) due to the amount of lost time it causes. That however, is a discussion for another day.

AppHarbor - Azure Done Right AKA Heroku for .NET

Rob Reynolds — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 12:49:23 GMT

Easy and Instant deployments and instant scale for .NET?

Awhile back a few of us were looking at Ruby Gems as the answer to package management for .NET. The gems platform supported the concept of DLLs as packages although some changes would have needed to happen to have long term use for the entire community. From that we formed a partnership with some folks at Microsoft to make v2 into something that would meet wider adoption across the community, which people now call NuGet. So now we have the concept of package management. What comes next?

Heroku

Instant deployments and instant scaling. Stupid simple API. This is Heroku. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you think of how fast you can go from an idea to having someone else tinker with it, you can start to see its power. In literally seconds you can be looking at your rails application deployed and online. Then when you are ready to scale, you can do that. This is power. Some may call this “cloud-computing” or PaaS (Platform as a Service).

I first ran into Heroku back in July when I met Nick of RubyGems.org. At the time there was no alternative in the .NET-o-sphere. I don’t count Windows Azure, mostly because it is not simple and I don’t believe there is a free version. Heroku itself would not lend itself well to .NET due to the nature of platforms and each language’s specific needs (solution stack). So I tucked the idea in the back of my head and moved on.

AppHarbor Enters The Scene

I’m not sure when I first heard about AppHarbor as a possible .NET version of Heroku. It may have been in November, but I didn’t actually try it until January. I was instantly hooked. AppHarbor is awesome! It still has a ways to go to be considered Heroku for .NET, but it already has a growing community. I created a video series (at the bottom of this post) that really highlights how fast you can get a product onto the web and really shows the power and simplicity of AppHarbor.

Deploying is as simple as a git/hg push to appharbor. From there they build your code, run any unit tests you have and deploy it if everything succeeds. The screen on the right shows a simple and elegant UI to getting things done.

The folks at AppHarbor graciously gave me a limited number of invites to hand out. If you are itching to try AppHarbor then navigate to: https://appharbor.com/account/new?inviteCode=ferventcoder

After playing with it, send feedback if you want more features. Go vote up two features I want that will make it more like Heroku.

Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with AppHarbor and have not received any funds or favors from anyone at AppHarbor. I just think it is awesome and I want others to know about it.

From Zero To Deployed in 15 Minutes (Or Less)

Now I have a challenge for you. I created a video series showing how fast I could go from nothing to a deployed application. It could have been from Zero to Deployed in Less than 5 minutes, but I wanted to show you the tools a little more and give you an opportunity to beat my time.

And that’s the challenge. Beat my time and show it in a video response. The video series is below (at least one of the videos has to be watched on YouTube). The person with the best time by March 15th @ 11:59PM CST will receive a prize.

Ground rules:

.NET Application with a valid database connection
Start from Zero
Deployed with AppHarbor or an alternative
A timer displayed in the video that runs during the entire process
Video response published on YouTube or acceptable alternative
Video(s) must be published by March 15th at 11:59PM CST.
Either post the link here as a comment or on YouTube as a response (also by 11:59PM CST March 15th)

From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 1

From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 2

From Zero To Deployed In 15 Minutes (Or Less) Part 3

Rob Reynolds - The Fervent Coder : NHibernate, Tools