I bet many of you are working on your own software projects and would love to have a version control at their disposal. This is useful for many reasons. If you are working with one or more friends on a joint project, if you have a desktop and a laptop and you want to work from both computers while keeping the files synchronized, or if you just want to be more organized and keep versions and backups of your work. You can also use Visual SVN to sync folders or documents between several computers.

This article will have 2 sections One will discuss the SVN Server installation and configuration and the second part will be about how to use the SVN client.

First you have to download the Visual SVN Server Installation

Installing the Visual SVN Server

Double click on the Visual SVN executable to begin the installation. After a few next next next clicks you will get this screen:

After I published a post about SDEdit which is a free desktop sequence diagram editor, I received a mail from Steve Hanov who wanted to introduce me with a very impressive alternative to SDEdit. Steve has created a web service that creates renditions of sequence diagrams, it is completely online and does not require a download. Well, after reviewing this tool, I decided to let Dev102 readers know about it too, it is really great.

Like SDEdit, the UML sequence diagrams are created from a textual syntax and not by drawing objects and lines. Lets take a look at the following example:

Alice->Bob: Authentication Request
note right of Bob: Bob thinks about it.
Bob-->Alice: Authentication Response

You can notice that the syntax is easy and if you ask from the tool to draw it, this is what you get:

This is something for all you .NET developers who have a WordPress blog which is in PHP and some time you need to do some PHP work (Like me). Or if you just want to work with PHP on your Visual Studio 2008/2005. jcxsoftware have developed such a Visual Studio Plugin.

It supports PHP4 and PHP5, you will also get Syntax highlighting and Intelisense for the following:

This one is for all you bloggers or all you who intend to open a blog. If you have read Dev102 you probably saw that a couple of months back a lot of theme tweaks, moving stuff from here to there. I promised back then that I will tell you why we did that, so here goes.

We wanted to increase our number of page views. Back then we had about 1.20 page views per visit and we wanted to try and make that number grow. The changes to our theme were all test to see what will make people (you) stay and continue reading more posts and articles. We tried a lot of things but they were mainly two ways we tried to increase our page views, so here they come with their results.

This is a guest post by Ryan Lanciaux.

Hi my name is Ryan Lanciaux. I want the thank the guys at Dev102 for giving me the opportunity to write about a topic I find very interesting — jQuery and the ASP.NET MVC Framework.

With WebForms, integrating with Ajax libraries other than ASP.NET AJAX was slightly painful. With the new ASP.NET MVC Framework, however, you can use jQuery without these additional headaches. We’re going to take a quick look at how the Frickinsweet.com Theme Generator uses some of the built in ASP.NET MVC utilities combined w/ jQuery to give the user an update with out reloading the page. The example we’re going to look at is a little simplified but the concepts are still there.

The first thing we’re going to do is create an ASP.NET MVC (Preview 4) Project. Create a new view and controller action under your Home controller and add the following line to the view.

This is a guest post by Sam Agarwal from the Bitrix Team.

The first impression you might get when you open the Bitrix Site Manager’s Photo Album is that it resembles any other photo sharing application. However, as soon as you start working with it, the enormous differences become more than apparent.

Hey all

Here are some great tools that will help you diagnose problems and errors on your applications. Don’t leave home without them!

SQL Profiler

We all know that most problems start in the DataBase. SQL profiler will help you to locate…

Today, in many applications there is a need to know and use HTML. And if you are a Web applications programmer you probably should know HTML :).

The question is do you know all the HTML tags? Do you know exactly how they work and what each tag does? And the most important of all, how each tag acts in each browser?

There are hundreds of books, articles, WebSites, posts, blogs and manuals that claim to "teach" you HTML. I on the other hand think that there is no experience like hands on experience so I wanted to introduce you to HTML Playground . This is one of my favorites sites for HTML.

This is a simple hello world example with ASP.NET MVC, to help you build your first application step by step. I will not explain the ASP.NET MVC here, you can find plenty of excellent resources on the web for that, you can try one of these: Kigg - Building a Digg Clone with ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET MVC Framework, An Architectural View of the ASP.NET MVC Framework . We’ll create a web application with two additional views - the first will ask for your name, and when you submit it you’ll get a greeting message in the 2nd view. Lets start:

1. Download and install ASP.NET MVC Preview 3.

2. Create a new ASP.NET MVC Web Application, Call it MVCHelloWorld

Here are two interesting tools I found while working on our Silveredo 2 theme.

Install Multiple Internet Explorer Versions

This one is quite helpful and a must if you are working and building themes. Usually you want your theme to be compatible with FF2/3 and IE7 which we all know has its issues…

I bet there are many people who want their site to be compatible with Internet Explorer 6 too, having IE6 and IE7 working together on your windows is a problem, as it turns out, you CAN have all the Internet Explorer versions working along side each other, all you have to do is to download the multiple IE version installer and install any version you need.