CodeClimber

If you follow me on twitter you might already have understood something: last week I gave my two months notice to my employer, Avanade Italy. I've been working with them since the end of 2007, and during the almost 2 years and half I learned a lot. Especially I added to my skills-set some competencies I never had the chance to practice working for a web agency and for a product company: the so called consulting skills. I also had the great opportunity to coach on the job some junior developer that just come out from university (or with little experience): some were more receptive, other less, but at the end I hope they learnt some of the principles of good coding and software design.

And also worked with many great colleagues, some which I’m really going to miss.

So, why am I leaving?

Avanade is a great company, so why am I leaving?

• Web Development - In Avanade one thing was really lacking: some real web development. I'm a web developer at heart, and in Italy all of the "real" web development (where with real I mean big B2C websites or big online magazine/newspaper) is developed by web agencies like the one I worked before going to NZ.
• Product expert vs software developer - It seems like all the big consulting companies are trying to sell solutions based on products that require very little to almost no development work: like SharePoint, CRM, BizTalk, Commerce Server and so on. I’m not interested in becoming an expert on customizing a specific product: I’m more interested in “custom development” and in the way people work together.
• Italy is getting worse and worse every day - Italy is a mess: it might have great natural and historical places but if you are not a tourist Italy is not a good place to live.
• No “my office” - And the last reason is that the working condition of the consulting industry are really bad: 90% of your time is spent at the customer site, working a small 15” laptops, sitting in temporary places, with just enough space to fit your laptop and move the mouse. And I really miss a place I can call “my office”.

And where am I going?

I think you might have heard of my new employer: it’s called the European Union, and specifically I’ll be working in at the Council of the European Union.

I applied to the open competition for becoming an EU official in the field of IT when I was still in New Zealand, in summer 2007. It took one year and half to pass all the stages of the competition, and then one year for someone to pick me up from the pool of possible employees. Starting from the the 1st of April, I’ll join the IT department as Team Lead and Architect of the team that is building all the public facing web sites of the Council… and as you have probably seen yourself, there is lot of work to do.

So, after more then 3 years I’ll work on public websites again. And my first task will be moving the team away from the VSS Hell and trying to steer it to a more Agile way of developing software.

Moving away from Italy

But I’m not only changing job, I’m also changing country: I’m going to live in Brussels, Belgium.

Unlike 3 years ago, I’m not going abroad because I want to live in that specific country, but because I want to go away from Italy: I already know I’ll miss the Alps, the lakes, but, as I said before, living here is becoming very difficult. So I’ll consider myself in self-exile and I’ll come back to Italy if/when things get better.

And, if you were wondering, I’m moving with my wife Daniela, which resigned as well, and will look for a job as UX in Belgium after she learn some French.

What changes in my development community involvement?

A nice thing about Belgium is that there is a vibrant development community, both in the .NET space and in the opensource space. I already know some developers from Belgium, like Ivan which I met in New Zealand, and some other MVPs I know through blogs and twitter. And I’ll try to know more of them at the upcoming MVP Summit in two week.

And also being in the middle of Europe, it means it will be easier to go to all the conferences held in London, Amsterdam and in Scandinavia.

But I’ll also keep on working together with Emanuele and Claudio to organize the future editions of the Italian ALT.NET Conference.

PS: Since many people are asking: “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish” is the title of a book from the  Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series written by Douglas Adams. But also a geeky way to say goodbye with an hidden meaning.

PPS: If you know Italian, there is also a similar announcement on my Italian blog: Self-Exile.

Lately I’ve been reading again lot of discussions going on about whether WebForm is a much wiser choice for developers, if it will die in favor of ASP.NET MVC, or how much ASP.NET MVC brings productivity away because it forces you to learn another framework or because it makes you think more about pattern, or name-your-other-rather-random-opinion.

Even if I wrote a book about ASP.NET MVC, I’ve to say I’m getting pretty bored about this discussions: like it or not many big companies cannot afford to rebuild their whole web applications on ASP.NET MVC, even if they want the TDD experience or the fine control over HTML markup. The only possible outcome is that projects will be a mix of both WebForms and ASP.NET MVC: probably it has been marketed in the wrong way by Microsoft itself (you remember the “4 pillars of ASP.NET”?), or probably it was the only way to do it at the time since ASP.NET MVC and Dynamic Data came out as OOB release and as part of a Service Pack.

But with the forthcoming ASP.NET 4 and probably even more in the next version (either they call it 4.5 or 5) we are starting to see a lot of cross pollination between the 3 UI frameworks:

• ASP.NET WebForms gained a lot of the good things that were born with ASP.NET MVC: routing, cleaner html, cleaner client id, less ViewState, SEO specific APIs. And you can easily put a Dynamic Data control inside a WebForm.
• ASP.NET MVC got the Templated Helpers, model validation, inspired by Dynamic Data. And it already got MasterPages and some of the good things of WebForms

And probably we will see even more for ASP.NET vNext; to the point that in 2 years we’ll probably decide whether to use ASP.NET MVC or WebForm in the same way we had to decide between a ListView and a Repeater back in the ASP.NET 2.0 days.

UPDATE: Just noticed that Jimmy Bogard wrote a similar post: My picture of an MVC-WebForms marriage.

I know it’s already 13 days into the new year, but a year cannot start without the usual  retrospective on the year that just ended and with the resolutions for the year that is coming.

Who did 2009 go

Let’s start with evaluating how 2009 go and let’s see if it went as I hoped at the beginning of last year. I already did 2 intermediate checkpoints, one at the end of Q1 and one in mid Summer.

• Personal Resolutions:
  • Go Back Climbing - I climbed during Q2, but then when we came back from our summer holidays in Hokkaido we didn’t go climbing any more. Overall I did a bit of climbing, but not as much as I wanted to. NEUTRAL
  • Take Part in one Triathlon Competition - part of the reason why I didn’t climb a lot after summer is because I trained for a triathlon. Actually I even did two of them, one at the beginning of September in Locarno, Switzerland and one at the end of September, in Alba. I didn’t finish in last position, but around the middle of the ranking, which is not bad since I train when I can, and don’t follow a strict planning. My best part is the cycling one, and I’m really bad at running. GOOD
• Blogging and community involvement Resolutions:
  • Blog more tutorials and technical articles – I wrote a few series: one about Ninject on ASP.NET MVC and one about Lucene.net (still going on) and then some more posts about ASP.NET MVC, which were all well received by the community. Not as much as I intended to write, but still something. NEUTRAL
  • Opensource development – Not a lot development till this autumn when I started working on Subtext to include one the new feature of the upcoming release: FullText search powered by Lucene.net. NEUTRAL
  • Produce some content about ASP.NET MVC in Italian – I produced 3 screencasts about ASP.NET MVC, and delivered 2 talks at two user group meetings. NEUTRAL
  • Redesign my blog – Even if my wife Daniela designed it in January 2009, I hadn’t found the time to convert it to a Subtext skin. Actually I did a bit of HTML, but still far from being a Subtext skin. FAIL
• Technology Resolutions:
  • Enhance my .NET skills – I planned to study more jQuery, more Linq, more Expression tree and IoC. At the end of the year I didn’t studied anything about the Expression tree and Linq (but now I can do it with the help of Justin Etheredge and his Mastering Linq series on TekPub), but I worked a bit on WCF and lately I’m playing with NHibernate (that even if used it 2 years ago I had to “relearn” it) and FluentNH. GOOD
  • Start developing for Mac/iPhone – I did a prototype of a e-banking application for Avanade in the first months of 2009: enough to see that developing on the iPhone is great for the usability stand point, but a bit strange and complicate from the coding stand point (Objective-C is a bit weird). GOOD
• Unplanned:
  • UserGroup Meetings – I organized 2 UGIALT.NET events, I spoke at 3 different UserGroup meeting, and I attended the StackOverflow DevDays in London.
  • ASP.NET MVC Book - the book took longer then expected and was available in stores only in August. Also, a free refcard has been published in September.
  • Trip to Hokkaido – I didn’t expect I would have gone to Japan, but at the end we did it, and Hokkaido is a great place. I really like Japan.
  • Cross-Country Skiing: I already started xc-skiing in 2008, but only in December, when I bought a new set of skating ski I really got fond of XC-Skiing.

So, just 1 FAIL, 3 GOOD and 4 NEUTRAL. 2009 didn’t went great, but at least aligned with my expectations after all.

My resolutions for 2010

This year I want to reiterate the experiment: I think it helped me evaluate how the year was going and helped keep me focused with what I planned to do.

• Personal Resolutions
  • Climbing - Last year I didn’t climb as much as I wanted (even if more than the year before): in 2010 I’d try climb a bit more.
  • Triathlon - Last year I really enjoyed doing triathlons, lots of nice people at the races. And I think it’s also a good way to stay fit: know, running,cycling and swimming. I don’t want to get too mad about this, but doing the Locarno race again and maybe another one would be great. And I’ve to focus more on the running leg of the race since my current 5 min/km (8:03 min/mile) takes me to the bottom of the run leg ranking.
  • XC-Skiing – I just started using the skating technique, and I hope I can go XC-Skiing more and acquire a bit more of technique (and hopefully stamina) before the end of this skiing season.
• Blogging and community involvement Resolutions:
  • Redesign my blog – number one priority is finalizing my new blog design before it becomes outdated. Daniela was very proactive and last year she designed it following the 2010 design trends, but not sure if they will last till 2012.
  • Write an eBook – Last year I helped publish one, but this year I’d like to publish one myself: maybe about ASP.NET MVC v2 or about Lucene.net
  • Be more constant in my blogging – Even if I published a good number of technical post, in 2009 I was not very constant: I had prolific periods followed by one month or more of less technical blogging. This year I’d like to be more constant.
  • Make a better blog - Last year I bought the book 31 Days to Build a Better Blog, I read it, followed some of its advices, but never stuck to a plan. (BTW, if you are interested, if you buy the book by Tuesday 19th you get 3 cool bonus)
  • Subtext – One of the reason I started working on Subtext 5 years ago is because I wanted plugins: two years ago we kind of added them, but then something bad happened, we had to revert back, and we lost everything: next year I want to add plugin support to Subtext.
  • Produce more content in Italian – Last year I did only 3 screencasts, but Italian people don’t like reading in English, so I should try harder and helping them.
• Technology/Work Resolutions:
  • JavaScript/jQuery/CSS – I used to be quite good at these when I worked in my first job in a web agency, but since I moved to New Zealand and then to Avanade I’m not doing any real web development any more. I’d love to work more in the client side of web site
  • HTML5 – Find the time to experiment with HTML5 and all its new API and elements.
  • Work on public B2C web sites – This doesn’t really depend on me, but more on the kind of projects my company finds on the market,  but I’d love to work on a project where the problems of the client side (good javascript, client side optimization, performances) are as important as the backend ones.
  • NHibernate – I used it 2 year and half ago, but then I stopped using it when I moved to Avanade. In my latest project I started to use it again, and in the next year I’d love to get deeper into it.
  • Be an agent of change in my team – I’m a strong believer of quality vs the “do it quickly” approach, of agile methodologies and “craftsmanship”. I’d like to introduce this way of thinking into my team as well.

Is this too much for just one year? I guess it’s not. We’ll see at the beginning of April when I’ll do my first update on how my plans for 2010 are going.

[Ilanaaq, the inukshuk by Tim on Flickr]

Did you ever rename a file from inside Visual Studio? Did you ever move a file from one folder to another from inside Visual Studio? I think you did.

And what happened when you tried to commit your changes to a SVN repository with Tortoise SVN?

You probably got this:

Here I moved a file named MonitoringControllerTest.cs file from the root to the Controller folder: Tortoise SVN didn’t recognize the file as just moved, but instead it found a new file in the Controller folder, and a missing file in the root folder.

If you want Tortoise to understand “moves” you have to do it from the File Explorer, dragging the file to the destination folder with the secondary mouse button while holding the Shift key. But this is annoying because you always have to move back and forth between Visual Studio and Explorer.

A few days ago I found this feature, maybe I was the only one in the world not aware of it: Repair Move.

If, from inside the commit dialog, you select the two files that are supposed to be the same, and right click on them, you will find this new menu command: Repair Move.

When you click on it, Tortoise SVN will recognize the two files as a move operation instead of a new file and a delete, and the commit dialog will show it in the way it shows moved files (a delete and an added +).

The same command also fixes rename operations.

I don’t know since how long this feature is available, but if I had found it out before, this would have saved me quite a few time.

Another option would have been adding something like VisualSVN or AnkhSVN that will automatically marks moves (together with a lot of other things). But I don’t like the integrated SVN clients.

UPDATE: My DNS have now been updated, email seems to be working fine, also from Exchange servers, sorry again for any problem that might have caused.

If you sent me an email in the last days and you got an error back, please try it again now in a few day, or contact me on twitter @simonech. Same problem happened if you contacted my through the contact page of my blog.

Also, if you are sending emails through an Exchange server (like if you are from Microsoft) you probably got a similar DNS error since the beginning of December: I'm really sorry for this and please sent the me your email again, and I'll try to answer it immediately.

If you are interested in why that all happened continue reading...

Why that all happened

During last autumn I decided I would have discontinued my WebHost4Life account

I thought that moving sites was difficult, but transferring a domain to another host is even more: the biggest problem is when you cannot afford to have a single moment without having the correct DNS records for your domain, especially for your email service to keep on working.

I had to contact Aruba via a support ticket to ask them to pre-configure the DNS with my records, because they change the authoritative NS to they own (instead of keeping the old ones) and they don't let you do it yourself before the domain has been successfully transferred to them. They probably screwed something up, and I was not able to receive emails from people sending from Exchange.

I discovered this problem just before Christmas, and yesterday, when I finally had time to sit down and try to fix the problem I asked them to move the authoritative NS to the one of Linked Labs, which is holding all my other DNS records. The problem is that they immediately deleted all my DNS records on their servers (piyosailing.com is not working either). This wouldn't have been a problem if the NS change was done automatically upon the request from the admin tool. Unfortunately for me it seems like NS changes have to be manually approved. So, as result, I'm without email for the weekend because, obviously, their support team is not working on weekends.

I hope everything goes back to normal in few days. Sorry for the problems

The end of the year is approaching and it’s time for a recap on what happened during the last 12 months. As I did in 2008 I blogged a lot about ASP.NET MVC (around 40 posts) and few about jQuery (just 6 posts), but unlike last year where the most popular posts were about jQuery, this year it’s all ASP.NET MVC. Probably that’s because the technology is more mature than it was during 2008.

The most popular posts of 2009

1. 13 ASP.NET MVC extensibility points you have to know – This post goes through all the extensibility points that are important to understand if you want to fully exploit the ASP.NET MVC framework

2. 12 ASP.NET MVC Best Practices – A list of some best practices for developing good asp.net mvc applications. This is the content of a presentation I held in October at the Gladiator Fest in Rome.

3. How to create a DropDownList with ASP.NET MVC – Building a dropdown list in ASP.NET MVC requires a different approach from what you were used with WebForms, but also differs from the other HtmlHelpers: this post explains how to use the DropDownList HtmlHelper

4. How to use Ninject with ASP.NET MVC – Ninject comes with a sister project that helps registering controllers inside Ninject’s Kernel: this post is the first of series of 5 posts that explain how to use Ninject inside ASP.NET MVC. This post was about Ninject v1. Later in the year I also wrote a post about Ninject v2.

5. How to improve the performance of ASP.NET MVC web applications – This was written in response to another post that showed how to improve the performance of ASP.NET MVC applications. My point was: caching data is the best performance optimization you can do.

Looking at the posts from 6-10 there are other 3 posts about ASP.NET MVC (my stack, how to use Ninject 2 with ASP.NET MVC and one with some suggestions for RoR developers that what to start using the MVC framework by MS), one about Lucene.net and one about jQuery and Ajax.

And what about the most popular of all time?

Since I skipped the usual blog-versary post I also want to quickly list the top 10 posts since I started blogging.

1. How to make a Gmail-like loading indicator with ASP.NET Ajax (67376 views)
2. How to refresh an UpdatePanel from javascript (65561 views)
3. Ajax TreeView (40261 views)
4. How to manage ASP.NET validation from Javascript with jQuery (33433 views)
5. Milan l'é semper Milan (30082 views)
6. How to add a required validator to a CheckBoxList (25876 views)
7. Rss2BlogML: export any RSS feed to a BlogML file (20688 views)
8. .NET Ajax Survey results (18940 views)
9. 13 ASP.NET MVC extensibility points you have to know (16454 views)
10. The book writing process (15064 views)

The top spots didn’t chance since last year but it’s nice to see that one post I wrote this year already made the top 10 of all time.

How 2009 was different from 2008

In 2009 I posted 110 posts, almost 40% less posts than 2008 (where I wrote 183 posts). And on the traffic side, it grew by almost 50%, going from 250k views to 370k views. Also the number of subscribers grew, going from the 1000 RSS subscribers of the end of 2008, to the almost 2400 RSS subscribers of today.

What’s going to happen in 2010?

Since I started using Twitter the types of blog posts change from what it used it be in the past years: personal and quick thoughts are now on Twitter, and only technical posts make it to the blog. And I expect next year to be the same: I’ll post more about ASP.NET MVC, more about Subtext and everything that I come across during my future projects.

If you haven’t already, consider subscribing to my free updates via RSS

This 2009 has been in important year in my career, more on the community than in the real day-time work side of things, but I’ll come on this later. For now, I just want to send to my almost 2400 readers my best wishes for a

Merry Christmas and an Happy New Year

Most of the mainstream IoC containers have their own implementation of a custom controller factory for ASP.NET MVC, but Unity doesn’t. There is an implementation in the MvcContrib project, but I don’t like the way it works, so I decided to implement it myself.

Unity Controller Factory

After a few mail exchanges with a guys of the p&p team and with Brad Wilson I came out with the following 35 lines of code.

public class UnityControllerFactory: DefaultControllerFactory
{
    protected override IController GetControllerInstance(Type controllerType)
    {
        IController controller;
        if (controllerType == null)
            throw new HttpException(
                    404, String.Format(
                     "The controller for path '{0}' could not be found" +
			"or it does not implement IController.",
                     this.RequestContext.HttpContext.Request.Path));
        if (!typeof(IController).IsAssignableFrom(controllerType))
            throw new ArgumentException(
                    string.Format(
                        "Type requested is not a controller: {0}",
                        controllerType.Name),
                        "controllerType");
        try
        {
            controller = MvcUnityContainer.Container.Resolve(controllerType)
                            as IController;
        }
        catch (Exception ex)
        {
            throw new InvalidOperationException(String.Format(
                                    "Error resolving controller {0}",
                                    controllerType.Name),ex);
        }
        return controller;
    }
}

public static class MvcUnityContainer
{
    public static UnityContainer Container { get; set; }
}

And the only things needed to use it is creating the container, passing it to the controller factory, registering the dependencies (repositories, services) and finally setting the custom controller factory.

//Create UnityContainer
UnityContainer container = new UnityContainer();

//Configure container
container.RegisterType<IFrontendService, FrontendService>();
container.RegisterType<IDateTimeProvider, DateTimeProvider>();
container.RegisterType<IFrontendDataAccess, SqlFrontendDataAccess>();

//Set container for Controller Factory
MvcUnityContainer.Container = container;

//Set for Controller Factory
ControllerBuilder.Current.SetControllerFactory(
                    typeof(UnityControllerFactory));

Implementation possibilities

There are two possibilities when you want to write a custom controller factory:

• Implement IControllerFactory and implement the CreateContoller method that returns a controller based on the controller name
• Inherit from DefaultControllerFactory and override GetControllerInstance which returns a controller based on the type that is needed

The first gives you complete freedom on the naming conventions of your controllers, but has two downsides: first it needs you to register not only the external references but also the controllers (container.RegisterType<IController, HomeController>("Home")). Second you also have to implement the logic to discover the correct controller based on the namespace and, more importantly with MVC v2, with the Areas.

The second approach delegates to the default implementation the mapping of the controller name to the type of the controller. Less freedom with the naming convention, but also less code to write both in the controller factory and also during the setup of your application.

Applying the same concept to Ninject

I think the Ninject controller factory uses the first approach and might not work with Areas in MVC v2, so I think I’ll submit a patch to adopt this easier approach.

Standing up an hour or so after the day starts is one of the (first?) changes I’m trying to introduce into the team I’m working with now. Well, not just standing up around a water cooler, but also talking about what everyone did yesterday, what everyone is going to do today, and if there are some blocking issue that are preventing work to proceed correctly. This is not something I invented, it’s called “Standup Meeting” and is one of the first steps for introducing some kind of Agile into a team.

There is a lot of literature around that specific practice so I won’t explain here what a Stand up meeting is, but I’ll just point you to other links I found interesting.

• Daily Stand Up Meeting – Directly from the Extreme Programming site, the definition of what a Stand up meeting is.
• Daily Standup Meetings - Introduction and 5 useful tips – From Five Whys, the new Roy Osherove’s blog dedicated to aspiring managers, and introduction of the standup meeting and some (actually 5) tips to get the most out of it.
• Daily Stand Up Meeting Guidelines – Another introduction about it: it has a different approach, is a bit more “technical”, so worth reading.
• Getting Started With Agile - Daily Standup Meetings – Another nice intro, this time with a video, from Atlassian series on Agile.
• It's Not Just Standing Up: Patterns of Daily Stand-up Meetings – Martin Fowler explains how Stand up meetings can evolve into, and how to detect wrong approaches and correct them. A more advanced reading then the previous ones, but very useful if you want to make the most out of the Stand Ups and, more importantly, don’t make them become yet another loss of time
• Stand-up Meeting Antipatterns – This post outlines the bad habit that can make your Stand up meeting fail.
• The Stand Up Meeting - Aya Raafat El Gebeely talks about is experience taking part in stand up meetings. Nice read, and some nice cartoons.

We have introduced this new practice into the team only 2 weeks ago, and so far the things are going fine. The biggest benefit is that now people have an official moment in time to talk about blocking issues, while previously it was more difficult to try and get the attention of the team.

Let’s see how this turns out in a month or so.

After almost one year of using Balsamiq I decided to give Blend SketchFlow a try. After using it in one project, I realized it’s not a sketching/mockup tool. And here I’m telling you why.

My definition of a sketching/mockup tool

I think a sketching/mockup tool should be a replacement for sketching on paper. It should allow you to “draw” lines, add a textbox and some text, without thinking too much about alignments and about how you will “implement” UI element in the real application. And must have a quick way to include common UI elements like windows, dropdown, tabs, grids and so on.

Test-driving SketchFlow

SketchFlow could be improved in many ways, but there is one main point that would probably need a more high-level rethinking: it’s not intuitive and forces you to think too much about how the design will be implemented. But let’s look at it in detail:

New Project window: SL or WPF?

First thing I didn’t like is the “New Project” window: why do I’ve to choose between a Silverlight and WPF application? What if I want to prototype a web application?

You have WPF/SL Controls

There is only a very small selection of sketch components and for most of the complex UI elements you either have to design them with lines and rectangles, or have to use the standard SL/WPF controls. For example you have to use a DataGrid if you want to display a table with data. Or the calendar, the canvas layout, the stack panel, the grid layout and so on. This is a problem because it forces you to think in terms of controls rather then in terms of sketches.

You need to understand data binding

If you want to add text to a list, a combo or the aforementioned data grid, you have to understand data binding: add a sample data source, bind it to the UI element and configure the visualization options.

Default style is not a sketching style

One last point is that I would have expected to have the sketch style (the wiggling stroke) by default. But the default style is the standard WPF/SL one. To get the correct style you have to click on the tiny little arrow button and choose from the big list of controls.

Advanced animation

With SketchFlow you can do fancy animations or state transitions, but I don’t think this increased power will be used by interaction designers and by UI experts. And since these advanced features must be developed with code (or by dragging behaviors) I think they are just adding complexity if you all you want is a sketch of your application.

Wrapping up

Probably I was using SketchFlow for the wrong purpose, but it seems to me like a tool for prototyping the UI of a WPF/SL application rather then a general purpose sketching application.

After using SketchFlow in this project I think I’ll never use it for sketching web applications again. Probably I’ll use it when I’ll need to design a WPF/SL app, but not for web apps. I’ll stick to Balsamiq for now.

What can Balsamiq learn from SketchFlow

But not everything that SketchFlow has is bad. It also has some interesting features that I’d love to see also in Balsamiq:

• the navigation tree that makes very easy to create the “flow” of the application (Peldi says they are working on it)
• the possibility to “componentize” some parts of the sketch, like a navigation bar that is the same in every screen (There is a lot of talking on this in Balsamiq forums)

Exporting a Balsamiq sketch to a player

Another feature of SketchFlow that I now I want so badly with Balsamiq is the possibility to export a “playable” version of the sketches for sharing with stakeholders. And you can do it now using Napkee, a very nice AIR application that can export Balsamiq projects to both Flex or HTML/CSS/JS.  There are also other opensource tools to export to various other formats.