Who did this? Who would leave such mighty poo below my bell pepper? Our fence is too tight for rabbits...

Tutorials​

Git is a fabulous tool for source control management. While incredibly powerful, it can be a little daunting to learn at first. The following tutorials will help. They are organized from basic to more advanced.

Here is a a brief demonstration of authentication and authorization using the FlightNode.Identity API. Significant help developing this received from ASP.NET Identity 2.1 with ASP.NET Web API 2.2 (Accounts Management) by Taiseer Joudeh.

Requires cloning the FlightNode.Identity and FlightNode.Common repositories.

Once upon a time, not far from downtown high rises, the greens and ponds of a golf course took over a portion of forested river bottomland. The river, having a mind of its own, would periodically flood out the golf course. The players complained about the mosquitoes and the stench of sewage from the treatment plant not far upstream.

Concerned about the quality of the water, and needing an outlet to lower the river's flood levels near downtown, someone decided to do something. The City took over the courses, much to the unfortunate owner's chagrin, and partnered with experts to remake the land. Where fairways once stood, now wetland ponds flow, further cleaning the already-treated waters. The greens were pulled up and natives plants installed, leading to a beautiful renaissance of prairie grasses, wildflowers, and their marshy kin too.

The general problem, succinctly stated:

As human-dominated land uses replace native landscapes across North America, there is growing concern about the impacts this habitat loss will have on native bird populations. With many migratory bird species in decline, it is essential to assess the effectiveness of our conservation initiatives [1].

Of course, this applies around the world, not just in North America. There are hundreds of organizations and researchers working to understand the characteristics of current bird populations, and our impact on sustaining and growing those populations. The need for this work grows ever more pressing for those who recognize the value of maintaining diverse and vibrant ecosystems, especially in light of climate change [2].

Recently I ran across and old article from Phil Haack, about moving his blog to Jekyll using GitHub. And I realized that this is (or might be?) a perfect solution for managing content about the FlightNode project (though it will not be part of the platform itself).

There is a lot of work to do in terms of getting content up and getting it formatted. This is just the start of getting the framework going, so that I can get all the text and pictures out of my head and into documentation that other team members can use.

Citizen-science: meet open source software. I'm starting an open source project called FlightNode, which will be a platform for citizen science bird conservation monitoring projects.

This project builds off the IbaMonitoring.org project I took on in 2010. I've been approached by a conservation organization here in Texas, asking for my help to build something similar to that site, but tailored for their purpose (I need to get their permission before using their name). What they want and need is more than I can provide in my "spare time." And I know of other programs that would be interested in using components of these projects.

Recently I was talking with a friend and extolling the virtues of using NuGet packaging for application and web site deployments - and I nearly forgot the core advantage: dependency management. It is all fine and well to have a fancy zip file, relabeled as .nupkg. You get the benefit of version control on the package itself, and you get the nuget.exe or choco.exe installer (or coming soon, OneGet).

But the most important piece is this: you don't have to bundle your dependencies with your installer package. You just need to "wire" them up properly in the .nuspec specification file, and make them available. Now, let's talk about managing those packages.

NuGet has been helping .NET developers maintain package dependencies for a number of years now, and any good dev should know the basic operations from within Visual Studio – how to add, update, and remove packages in a solution, using the NuGet Gallery. But to use only the NuGet Gallery is to know only half – or less – of the story. You might be missing out on…

• Testing out pre-release versions of your projects key dependencies.
• Reverting to older versions of libraries.
• Stand-alone tool installations using NuGet.
• Full-fledged Windows installations using Chocolatey.
• Placing your custom packages into private repositories.

Here are a few tips for moving toward mastery of this crucial part of the .NET development ecosystem.

More than twenty years ago, the National Spiritual Assembly of the Baháís of the United States published a statement declaring that "[r]acism is the most challenging issue confronting America" (The Vision of Race Unity). This past year has reinforced the public awareness of this truth: 59% of the nation's population believes that "our country needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites", compared to only 46% about a year ago (Pew Research Center). I grieve to wonder how many of the remaining 41% recognize the systemic challenges faced by African Americans, and either don't care or, worse yet, are satisfied with them.