SURVEY: Team Development with Visual Studio .NET and Visual SourceSafe

I’m trying to convince my coworkers that we should use the Isolated development mode for ASP.NET projects as described in the Patterns and Practices document Team Development with Visual Studio .NET and Visual SourceSafe. They’ve agreed to read the document and we’ll meet to discuss. I hope the document convinces them, because I’ve had too many headaches in the past dealing with FrontPage extensions.

My question to you all out there is do you set up your own development environment according to the guidelines set out in this document? How is it working for you or how have you changed it?

Comments

4 responses

Steve Griffin • August 10th, 2004
I've had the chance to implement this particular "Pattern & Practice" at two different companies. My personal experience is that the methodology works great....but the hard part is getting the developers to use it properly and embrace a "formalized" practice. Both shops I helped implement this at were of the "run-and-gun" type that coded on-the-fly and had no formal practice of working in a true "group" environment. But, once everything was put into place and the methodology was in full swing, the developers quickly saw that "formalization" of team development was a blessing in disguise.

Additionally, the end-users we worked with also had to learn that any fixes that we implemented would not be rolled out immediately. We generally had a structured release schedule once a month (duration could be tweaked to fit your situation) for all fixes that were to go out instead of hot-fixing things on the fly. I guess my advice on this point is to be prepared to not only move developers over to the "formalized" process...but your end-users who are expecting patches as well.

There are a number of things throughout the practice that we customized to fit the situtation. For example, we automated the build process by writing our own custom build program instead of using the suggested "BuildIt" program listed in the Patterns & Practices document. We also added the maintaining of all database change scripts to the process as well which is pretty much left out of the P&P document. One of the most important things we added to the practice was the use of a bug-tracking system that integrated directly into Visual Studio .NET. I believe we used a product called "Bug Tracker."

Overall, once things are in place and customizations to the practice are made, I think it is a great methodology and I highly recommend it for formalizing a development process in a Visual Studio environment. Good Luck!!

Haacked • August 10th, 2004
At my previous company, I also didn't use BuildIt. I used NAnt. I think the increased formality, while remaining agile, is important for the software industry as a whole.

Thomas Wagner • August 11th, 2004
Phil - we use the equivalent of isolated. I wouldn't dare mix code of various developers on one shared web server project. You might be able to do it with 2 or even 3 people but once you got 12 guys banging away it would be a nightmare.

nospamplease75@yahoo.com (Haac • August 13th, 2004
Even with 2 or 3 it can become a nightmare. ;) It turns out that the team agrees! :)