Aug. 12th, 2008

netbard: (Default)
So tomorrow we're having a meeting to discuss the development environment that we're going to use for an upcoming project. This has kept me somewhat busy thinking about it, but I'm reasonably sure I know what we need.

First, hardware. I'm going to be proposing that we buy a new server. A big, beefy server that can run up to three VM instances on it. Those three VM instances will be our development environment web server, our development environment database server, and a development server running a couple of other things. If we can't get one that will run three instances, than we'll get one that can run two instances and another, smaller one, for our development server

The development environment web server and db server are boring. IIS and SQL Server 2005. Yawn.

The development server is the really interesting thing - in one fell swoop I'm proposing updating a lot of our development practices:
  • Install Subversion as our source control client. This is head and shoulders above Visual SourceSafe, and represents a new model of source control that makes multiple people editing a file easier and makes it a lot easier to branch off the main development trunk. This will involve installing TortoiseSVN and AnkhSVN on developer boxes.
  • Cruise Control.NET. This is iffiest - I'm not sure I can get support for true continuous integration.
  • nAnt. If I can't get support for continuous integration, I'll need this anyways. Minimally, we're going to do nightly builds. They're the best way to determine that progress is being made and that quality is being maintained during the code construction phase of a project.
  • fxCop. This allows us to do code construction checking based on a set of rules generated by Microsoft guidelines. We'll be taking a close look to turn off rules that are stupid.

In addition, we'll be upgrading to Visual Studio 2008 as soon as possible . I believe the plan is to get the MSDN SKU of it, which will be awesome. We'll also be creating a seperate area of FogBugz for the use of this project and discussion best practices for using that.

Getting all this through will probably be a not easy task. But doing it will get us right on line for some world-class development environment characteristics. And it will make our projects more successful - which means it will be worth it.

netbard: (Default)
Well, once again woke up later than I wanted to. Got up, though, dressed, showered and shaved and headed to work. I spent most of the day today finishing up the Action Planning translations - I've got one more display issue (that I know about) to work out and then I should be done. Also took a look at a demo of a document management product. Its not too bad, and it might have saved us a lot of development effort on a side project if we had known about it six months ago. Ah well. Got out of work and headed home where we will be watching the Olympics.

Have continued reading the book on LINQ that I purchased last week. LINQ is, so far, absolutely amazing - it really redefines how to access data sources, whether these be data stored in XML, SQL, or just object graphs. Extension methods are pretty amazing - they seem somewhat silly when you think about them just being written about classes. Where they really get their power, it seems, is when they are written for interfaces - an extension method written against IEnumerable<TSource> works against an incredible array of collections. Which is of course what makes LINQ work.

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