Tim Gifford

Thanks to all who met for lunch to review the applications for the free non-profit websites. We’ll find a way to give everyone who contributes a way to acknowledge your hard work

I’m concerned about the new security setup in Vista. Now that Vista allows developers to develop without being an administrator on a workstation, I fear the IT/Networking/Security Departments!

Why do I fear them? Because they resist change. Each time I request to have a new anything (font, VS Add-In, or tool) installed on my workstation I have to:

·         Submit a request to my team leader/manager/supervisor

·         After approval, forward the request to the IT Department for review/approval

·         Wait…

·         Respond to questions about the request

·         Wait…

·         Defend the request after it is refused

·         Re-submit the request to the next level of management (Once I had to request approval from the CIO! By the way, CIOs don’t like to be involved in what tools are installed on developer workstations.)

·         Wait…

·         This is typically when a meeting is called between someone in IT, myself, and a mid to upper level manager

·         Finally, get approval to download and install the software

I can understand if I had to go through this process the first couple times I made a request for new software, but I’ve done this a half dozen times and there still isn’t a level of trust between the IT department and myself or the development team.

Today I requested to have the Consolas font installed, we’ll see what happens…

 I ran into an issue today that was driving me crazy. I upgraded the version of Rhino Mocks (I love Rhino Mocks!). I thought it would be easy. Download the latest version and drop it into our \lib folder, re-build and “BAM, it’s just that easy”…or so I thought.

After I added the reference, my workstation built correctly and so did the other team members. But when Cruise Control tried to build the project, the build failed! I don’t like to be “the guy” who breaks the build. Since the build server uses the msbuild nant task and VS 2005 uses msbuild (and magic) there is a disconnect between the build processes and I’ve never been able to integrate Nant into VS 2005 in a way that didn’t make the team grumble.

I couldn’t take it anymore so I did some research and found a way to integrate NAnt with Visual Studio 2005. It still isn’t seamless, but I don’t hate it…yet. One gotcha I discovered, you’ll need to name your build file “default.build” for nant.exe to pick it up.

I still wasn’t able to figure out what was causing the build to break, but at least I didn’t check-in and break the rest of team.

Now if I could find a way to run a .cmd or .bat file from the Solution Explorer….GRRR!

Is there an easier way? Should I be using msbuild for my build scripts over nant?