magazine®

I have just decided on starting my own little projects that I will soon be sharing via CodePlex and the first thing that popped into my mind is what Version Control that I should use. Actually I have 3 choices:

• SVN - this Open Source Version Control was the first that popped into my mind, since I'm quite used to it (my past employer uses SVN)
• Visual Sourcesafe - I'm also pretty much familiar with this since I'm a heavy user of VSS at my previous job
• Team Foundation System - Well, this is the one that I really like to learn!

These 3 software have already proven their "worth" as being the best 3 Version Control software around. Which makes my decision quite harder.

Before I proceed, you might be wondering on why I need a Version Control. Well, to make it short, I'm pretty quite used to working with projects that has (in any way) been part of a Code Repository. I really like the ability of being able to rollback to your last-saved code whenever you get lost at coding. And I really suggest developers to also make it a habit to use a Version Control even though you are the only one developing the project. Just think of your Version Control software as your automated backup system. I think that's enough, time to get back to the topic!

Since SVN is at the top of my list I went directly to subversion's website and searched for a downloadable installer of Subversion for my Vista x64. I found one, but the problem with SVN is that it requires Apache web server to be installed. Which in my opinion is quite an overkill for me since I am just the one that has access to this repository.

Team Foundation Server. Now this is a new tool from Microsoft which boasts of a complete solution that helps Project Managers and Programmers take control of the development during a project. I was quite hesitant on the SVN approach because it requires Apache Server to be installed, but in the case of TFS, there's a whole bunch of softwares that needs to be installed (Sharepoint, SQL Server 2005, IIS). So if I labeled SVN to be overkill this would basically place TFS in an over-over kill solution for me.

Visual Sourcesafe. This was actually at the bottom of my list since this was the very first Source Control that I used, and I want to learn new stuff. But as I weighed my options, this is the source control that really fits my needs. Light-weight, File based and no server needed. So I've made my decision and will be using Visual Sourcesafe as my "Internal" Version Control.

If you're looking for a Version Control that you will be using, I would probably recommend SVN since its free and I guess it's pretty much impractical to spend a couple of bucks just to have an Internal Source Control (lucky for me I'm a MSDN subscriber which makes Visual SourceSafe free for me). But if you would be working on a team, especially if your using Visual Studio I would highly recommend TFS (Team Foundation Server) for its a complete solution and is specially catered for large .Net Projects.

I just had this task at my work which generates a documentation for a given database object (Table, View, Stored Procedure and Function). The output documentation is in HTML format. There's basically no problems on running HTML locally (double click on the Windows Explorer). I have decided to place some JavaScript routines to enhance the UI of the HTML documentation. And thus the problem of running JavaScript locally arose.

I mean, you can easily run an HTML with JavaScript by just accessing it directly of Windows Explorer, what I didn't like was IE prompting the user to enable or disable the JavaScript contained in the local HTML in which this doesn't occur when the HTML page is deployed on a web server.

I know it is a security feature of IE, but I really want to be able to execute my HTML just like it is being executed on a web server (no more JavaScript prompts). The first solution that I got was pretty quite simple. Just rename the HTML file to HTA. It seems that HTA files are local HTML files. It seems kind of the solution that I want. But the problem is, when a user generates multiple HTA's and then decides to deploy it to the web, he would have to rename all files to HTML again (which is quite frustrating). So I've searched again of another way to solve the problem. That's when I found the "Mark of The Web".

Here's MSDN's definition of MOTW:

The Mark of the Web (MOTW) is a feature of Windows Internet Explorer that enhances security by enabling Internet Explorer to force Web pages to run in the security zone of the location the page was saved from

It's clearly the one that I was looking for. Insert something in the Tag and voila! Problem solved!

<!-- saved from url=(0014)about:internet -->

That tag should appear after the <!DOCTYPE tag in the html. If you place that tag, it means that the security being applied to your page is the same security zone applied to the supplied URL of the tag. With this, the JavaScript prompting would be gone and your HTML acts as if it is being executed within a Web Server.