Visual Studio

In a complete one-eighty to what I said in my last post, I've moved to Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate for all of my C# development.

Because I've started some Windows Phone 7 development, using Visual Studio is pretty much required because of the need for the emulator. Since I'm learning my way around VS for WP7 development, I figure I might as well go whole-hog with it and use it for everything, to really get used to the environment.

It also helps correct one of my biggest problems when coding for myself, which is not using revision control. I just can't seem to get myself to do so when working on a project by myself (and thus without any issue of change collisions) and with no one to answer to about changes (because the projects rarely go beyond my own use). For this purpose I'm learning to use Team Foundation Server, which also provides me with a project tracker, something I should train myself to use more often as I expand my projects and find missing features and bugs.


I've made a little more headway on my UO asset stripping tools, adding them as a proper project in Visual Studio and expanding the set of data files they process. Now that I've forsaken Mono (for the time being, anyway), I have the full strength of .NET, Windows Forms, Silverlight... any method I like for developing a better-than-command-line interface. (Okay, okay, Mono supports almost if not all of these, but this is the "proper" way to do it!) And, I still hate to admit it, but I'm getting more and more used to Intellisense. And Expression Blend... pretty slick!

Revision Control

One of the first Wave ideas I had, while watching Google I/O presentation on Google Wave was to use it as a revision control system, allowing for reverting through the playback mechanism of Wave, and for simultaneous editing if a Wave client was used as the code editor. Later in the presentation, they mentioned this idea, and I wasn't surprised that I'd be the only person to think of it.

It's still in mind though, because here at work, we have a host management system, written in XML/XSLT, created by me. This concentrated all of the various data associated with hosts (network addresses, hostnames, usernames, etc.) into a single place, instead of across a half-dozen files, in various directories, on various hosts. This system, too, lives under revision control, to ensure those who edit it aren't colliding their changes. Presently, I'm rewriting the system into a Python/YAML system, for reasons of speed, sustainability and readability.

But as Wave is opening up, I picture this system using it, where a single Wave contains all of the data about all of our machines: multiple users can be editing this data at the same time, seeing each others' "presence" in the Wave as we're doing it, and a robot could watch the Wave and crunch the data when it detects that things have changed, immediately.

Of course, I doubt I'll be able to push a Wave solution here at work, at least, not until Wave takes over the world, but it's a nice idea...