Building my ultimate development computer (Part 3, Software)
Now that I have a clean development environment running as a virtual machine, it’s time to set up the software I need to do my work.
The first thing I did to my development virtual machine was to set the desktop background to a different color. Since I’ll be switching between multiple VMs, I figured I’d add a visual indicator as to what machine I’m currently on. Obviously, the background won’t be visible when I have my programs open. If I still need something to remind me what machine I’m on, I’ll use one of those utilities that keeps the machine name and details floating above all applications.
For web browsing, I downloaded an installed the following:
Firefox
Opera
AdBlock
Avast! anti-virus (I had been using AVG, but it’s been having some problems lately. See here and here for more
details)
AdAware
For .Net development, I installed the following:
IIS (Map a virtual CD drive to the operating system ISO, to get the required files)
SQL Server 2005
Visual Studio 2008
Silverlight
Then, the development libraries and tools that I use on a regular basis:
RhinoMocks
NUnit
TestDriven.Net
ReSharper 4.0 is next on my list
For source control, I went with Visual SourceSafe. I prefer to use Subversion when developing with others; however, VSS suited all the extremely basic requirements I need for solo development. Plus, it integrates better with Visual Studio than Subversion does. When I tried VisualSVN and AnkhSVN, there were still a few things they had trouble with (moving and renaming files, IIRC).
For my continuous integration build server, I went with TeamCity, since it makes builds so much easier to create and manage than CruiseControl. Ideally, I’d set this up on another VM, but I’m keeping things simple, until I find a need to make them more complex. Something I’ve seen with their system tray notification tool is that the web server service hasn’t started before the system tray notification tool tries to connect to it. I get a pop-up that the build website is not available yet. I just give it a minute for the website to start up, then tell it to retry connecting. I sent off an enhancement suggestion to the TeamCity developers that it would be nice to have a configurable wait setting before the notifier tries to connect to the web page.
TeamCity
Although it’s not on my development VM, I want to mention that I also installed SpamBayes on my ‘office’ VM. This is a nice filtering tool that helps keep spam out of my inbox.
SpamBayes