The RSPB required a web application through which they could provide learning material to people interested in birds and birdwatching. Once a user has logged-in they are presented with 6 different modules as well as access to the resource library which contains the RPSB Handbook of British Birds and Where to Watch Birds - Britain.
Over the past month or so I have been using Subversion, Visual Studio 2005 and more recently Basecamp on a project that I have been working on, and so I thought I’d share my experiences so far.
It has long been a need for us to have some form of version control system to prevent writing over each others code changes and for us to internally monitor where a project is at in terms of alpha, beta and final releases. Previously we have used Macromedia Dreamweaver’s rather primitive but working ‘check-in check-out’ ability. This has its flaws at it only allows for one ‘developer’ to work on a file at a time which can result in downtime and in the worse case a project running over budget.
This is where Subversion came into its own. It keeps a copy of every change that has been committed to the repository where the project files are stored which allows for easy roll-back to an earlier version for any number of reasons. If two or more developers have been working on the same file within a local copy of the repository and wish to commit their changes, Subversion is able to merge the changes into one document. As you expect it can’t get this right every time so it’s best to be cautious when working on the same document as others. As well as being able to manage versions of code, it is also suitable for managing any graphic or document changes, such as buttons or Gantt chart revisions.
As well as using Subversion, another new application we are using for this project is Microsoft Visual Studio 2005. It was chosen over Dreamweaver for its better integration with IIS and SQL Server and on a rapid development the easier and quicker it is to code the better. When loading up Visual Studio 2005 it is quite slow at getting going, but once the project ’solution’ has been loaded in, you’re good to go. I can’t really comment on how easy it has made the development of the ASP.NET as I have only really used it for creating skeleton HTML templates with which the developers add the necessary functionality. So far though it has been less buggy than Dreamweaver and proved a stronger tool in a collaborative development environment.
Lastly we have also started to make use of the 37Signals app, Basecamp. Although Basecamp can be used fully as a project management tool, for the purpose of our development we have made use of the To-Do List feature. This way we can keep on track of little tasks that are still needing completion and assign them to the relevant members of the project team. One feature that I particularly like is the ability to subscribe to the project calendar via an iCal feed. Through Sunbird and Google Calendar (both of which I have integrated) I can see what milestones are approaching and therefore manage my workload to accommodate.
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