Rebuilding my Developer Platform – For the Last Time!

I have finished enough of a ground-up rebuild of a developer machine to take stock. The rebuild process went something like this:

Step 1 – Start long running installation

Step 2 – Wait for installation to complete

Step 3 – Go back to Step 1. Rinse and repeat …

Hard Learnt Lessons

• Building a Windows based developer workstation takes more TIME than you imagine

• Long periods of WAITING for installations to complete is WASTEFUL

• Rebuilding workstation machines is REPETITIVE

One more point on the the manual build process. I will never have to do it again!

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TODO Comments have no place in Master

Don’t get me wrong, as a professional C# developer I love using TODO markers in my code. They document minor details that I need to revisit and allow me as a coder to keep moving with the aim of getting an overall structure in place. I do this in feature branches and I often do a git rebase -i to tidy up all of my local commits into something more meaningful to merge back into the develop or master branch.

As you are reading this I hope that you will agree with the next few points that I make about source code best practices. So here are my views on what I believe to be a sensible perspective on how you treat releasable code.

Working on Sitecore.Mvc

It’s been an interesting few weeks since I came back from vacation. Found myself transferred to the Sitecore.Mvc project, something that in the past would have been considered a bit of a poison chalice. Not this time around. As a project we started by asking and listening to what the Sitecore development community were calling out for. As far as I know this is a first for my organisation, the feedback though is where it matters.

Model View Controller

It’s no secret that Microsoft has re-invented itself around engaging with the community since Scott Guthrie and others started to lift the covers on internal development activities. Microsoft went further than most commercial organisations are able to go, it open sourced a great swathe of its intellectual property and even opened it up to public pull requests via GIT.

Glimpse for Sitecore

Welcome to a new era of server side diagnostics with Sitecore. In the past we had the following tools to help us identify performance issues with our Sitecore installations:

• Sitecore Log Analyzer (SCLA)
• ASP.NET Trace
• Sitecore Debugger
• Sitecore Admin pages
• Sitecore Rocks

These tools could be used in circumstances where it is not possible to attach a debugger or application profiler like the ANTS Performance Profiler to a running web application. No there it’s time to add a new tool to this list, that tool is Glimpse.