Category: ED for Windows

Subversion is the most popular free, cross platform Version Control Systems (VCS) available today. It also happens to be open source, is being actively developed and has a strong community behind it.

To quote from the Subversion Web site:

“The goal of the Subversion project is to build a version control system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source community. The software is released under an Apache/BSD- style open source license.”

Version Control gives you a time machine for your files, enabling you to go back in time to any earlier version, see what changes have been made over time, and revert your work to an earlier version if need be. It also gives you an audit trail of changes and a commented history of those changes, amongst other capabilities.

The easiest way to use Subversion in Microsoft Windows is to use TortoiseSVN  To quote from the TortoiseSVN site:

“TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows. Since it’s not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like.”

TortoiseSVN  is a GUI client shell around Subversion and most anything that can be done on Subversion can be done in TortoiseSVN. TortoiseSVN (TSVN) includes Subversion (SVN), so you don’t necessarily need to download and install it.  I’m very pleased to say that both SVN and TSVN are very well documented, which is atypical in the open source world. As much documentation as there is, I still found it difficult to both comprehend how SVN works and to start using it. Continue reading “Get up and running with TortoiseSVN and Subversion in 15 minutes.”

Ruby is the most expressive and interesting language I’ve come across in all these years of developing our programmer’s editor/ide ED for Windows. It takes Object Oriented programming and Dynamic language support to new levels, at least in my eyes.

Ruby enables you to do more than other languages in less lines of code and still be reasonably readable, and important asset for any language. The library that is included with Ruby is the most comprehensive I’ve seen, which means there is less searching out other libraries or having to write your own code. The bottom line is simply that you should be more productive writing in Ruby than other languages, which is pretty important in todays fast paced world. And if you can do more with less code, there should be fewer bugs, right! Continue reading “Write Ruby code faster with ED for Windows”