Friday, March 24, 2006

Car Care Calendar

Well my first post is going to be a pitch for my new web site, the car care calendar hosted web application. It is currently being developed (.net 1.1). And of course it's taking a lot longer than I was hoping. Naturally I'm trying to build it 'right', keeping on top of security issues, and performance.
So, just getting started was pain indeed. I wish creating projects in Visual Studio 2003 was easier. Since I have such a limited short term (and long term) memory, I always forget what "automatic" stuff VS creates when you start a new project. I invariable create a new (duplicate) directory one level lower than I wanted, and have to move the project file etc. up a level. The solution file is in some documents and settings user folder completely disassociated from the project files. Now whenever I open the Solution, VS complains that it was unable to refesh some folder or whatever. It always takes me far longer than expected to move stuff, edit .sln and .csproj files, verify and reopen before I ever start coding. It would probably be worthwhile creating a VS macro to automate this... but of course, once I get set up I quickly forget about the setup pain as I being to feel the onset of new pain.
Tools I'm using include
NCover. It's an opensource project so I cut it a lot of slack. Right now I've set up a batch file to instrument my files, compile them and produce a test coverage report. NCover is not great at dealing with errors, like invalid file paths, so it took me a fair amount of trial and error to get it working. As I'm writing this, I'm looking at the NCover site and it looks like they have a new version so maybe it's friendlier. NCover has Nant support, and I suspect that works much better than batch files.
I've also set up
Subversion to help me back out of my usual plethora of bone-headed mistakes. As a one-man development operation it seems strange to use a Source control system, but with my history of wackhackery, a source control system is a minimum must-have. I'm still new to subversion, I like it so far... (sort of, why are my folders always red, and why do I have to update so much), I suspect I will be blogging more on SVN soon. It is not set up to run as a service yet, which I would also like to do.
Of course I'm using
NUnit. Love this tool.
And
NUnitAsp which I really like and think has great potential, but seems to have lost momentum? If had had more time* (*If I was smarter, and knew how browsers worked) , I would join this Sourceforge project and get this project back on the tracks. I need NUnitAsp for .net 2.0 and all of the fancy new ASP.net 2.0 controls.
I would also like to introduce a profiler, maybe
NProf? and probably Cruise Control.net which I am essentially afraid of, basically due to what I remember reading about configuring it. But, I will conquer my fear over time, and get CCnet up and running and cruising and notifying, and I will blog extensively about all of my pain with that too.

No comments:

Post a Comment