Welcome to the first in this series of articles relating to development environment setup. What I’m trying to do here is provide an insight to our systems and the thoughts and reasoning behind why we’ve gone that way.

We’re not a leading authority on the subject but we’re hoping in committing this to the web we’ll stimulate comments and feedback that will help us whilst also providing a resource for others trying to do the same.

This first article is going to focus more on our motivations and limitations, giving background on who we are and what we’re trying to achieve. Later articles will focus on specific items and have more of a “how-to” flavour than this. I feel its worth discussing these items first to give you an idea of where we are coming from; that should help guide you as to how much of the subsequent posts will be relevant to you.

Who Are We ? Mighty Oaks From Small Acorns Grow

My name is Simon Crozier, and I am a development manager / lead developer at HighSpeedTraining, we’re based in Leeds (Yorkshire, UK). We’re not the biggest company (less than 15 people in total), and we work on a relatively modest budget – in short we’re no IBM. We definitely consider ourselves a technology company, although we work in a market that is relatively immature in IT and development terms (e-learning).

Technology in e-learning is generally regarded as equipment and resource rather than key business and market drivers, as such much of what is considered the norm in other industries have yet to be widely adopted in e-learning. We’re a fairly young company and as such it’d be fair to say our development team is still finding its feet slightly but we’re committed to doing things Right.

Its not all bad news though !… Being a small technology company everybody in the team, including non-technical members, appreciates that the good use of technology is key to allowing us to compete with our more established competitors. Further more being a young company we’re still defining our standards and we’re flexible enough to adapt and make big changes quickly. We’re also lucky enough to have a group of developers who are enthusiastic about their roles, see themselves as craftsmen and appreciate you never know enough. No RFAs here !

In short we’re currently in a really positive position, but we think the decisions we make at this point will have a big impact on the company’s future. Collectively we’ve no interest in being good enough; we want to be as excellent as budget allows.

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I admit it today I used a floppy disk! Who would’ve thunk it?

In order to build our dev environment we decided to buy obselete servers from ebay and use them as virtual hosts. The idea being that we could back up the virtual servers easily and just move them about as hardware dies or becomes bogged down. My advice if you are considering this same path is DON’T DO IT!

I thought floppy drives were a thing of the past, my development manager is convinced having DVD drives are a thing of the past but still one came to my rescue today. Turns out if you want to load a third party RAID driver into windows setup you need to use one, slipstreaming an install is an option but if you aren’t sure what driver you need you go through an awful lot of cd’s.

Also got to use a dos boot disk today aswell, even edited a config.sys file (remember them? think games an not enough high memory and it’ll all come flooding back…).

Still we now have a dual AMD Opteron 250 and a Dell Power Edge 2850 running 64bit Windows 2003. We’ll see how the hardware stands up to what we’re throwing at it.

Microsoft has announced a complete web development package called WebMatrix.

WebMatrix is everything you need to build a static or dynamic website – the package encompasses IIS Developer Express (a dev webserver), ASP.NET (web framework) and SQL Server Compact (embedded database).

The package integrates code editor, database editor, web server management, SEO, and FTP publishing, allowing you to seamlessly build, develop and deploy your web project.

WebMatrix provides an easy way to get started with Web development. With an integrated code editor and a database editor, Web site and server management, search optimization, FTP publishing, and more, WebMatrix provides a fresh, new Web site development experience which seamlessly bridges all the key components you need in order to create, run, and deploy a Web site.

WebMatrix is currently in Beta testing; however it is freely available for Windows users – Give it a spin!

Subversion server is a fantastic option for source control in your organisation, its both mature, reliable, free and makes Visual Source Safe look like a clumsy oaf.

You can install SVN server either on a Linux platform (we’ve had it running nicely on Ubuntu) or on Windows. You can then perform all the required updates etc to your code using the fantastic tortoise SVN Client - http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/

Now it’s easier than ever before to install on Windows so there can be no excuses! A developer called bkohrs has developed a 1-click setup App that is effectively just “fire and forget”. You can find this setup here: http://svn1clicksetup.tigris.org/ – many thanks to bkohrs for developing this tool.

This app gives you a basic install from which you can work, with this you can get an SVN Server up and running in minutes! To access your server using Tortoise simply enter the address for your repository in the form: svn://YOUR_SERVER_NAME and use the browse repo option.