Standards of Coding

I just gave a presentation to a team of developers about coding standards for .NET.  I was a bit nervous as most of them were/are smarter than I.  I think it went off really well.  Better than I thought it would.  At least that is the feedback I got.  What I covered was that using .NET, there really are not ’standards’ to follow that are better than another.  What needs to be considered is that a set of standards are made and then followed by the development team.  These standards can be something created by a team member or something pre-built by a third party (MVC, nTier, etc.). What I am saying is that standards can be anything the team comes up with.  They only become standards if they are used as such.  If I came and implemented standards for the team for .NET and nobody used them, then what you have in essence is a different way of coding than that of anybody else.  If everyone used the methodology put forth, that’s when standards start to take shape.  I know there are many different methodologies but you only need one to get a team on the same page.  I am interested on any other thoughts on this subject. Have fun coding and as always, if there are any questions or suggestions, they are welcome.  Thank you.

Having Issues w/ Local Development and MS Server 2008

Our organization recently (within the last week) switched from server 2003 to server 2008.  When we were on server 2003 I developed my .net applications locally on my workstation, tested them and then uploaded to the development server for testing by the customer. That worked out well because both instances were running the same environments.  Now that we have gone to windows 2008, I can no longer develop on my workstation and upload to the development server. For one the environments are different. I use IIS 6 and server 2008 uses IIS 7. Another change is the development structure. I used the same directory structure as development and now it has changed because of incorporating CMS into our coding. It has been a long time coming. I am glad it is finally being implemented. Also there are differences in the OS’s so when I develop on my workstation I have to change code to work on the new development environment. It wouldn’t be so bad except that when there is an error, how does one troubleshoot if the environments are different?  Hence the steps of setting up remote debugging.

Well, that is another story. I have tried, I have connected, I have not successfully hit a break point yet.  I hope to have that fixed very soon. Once I can debug remotely, it should make it a bit easier, in theory anyway. The reason I brought this up in the first place is that I had an application almost completed and one of the last things I worked on was the addition of using the windows desktop search within the application which I have wrote about in the past. I’ll tell you what, in the 2008 environment, it has changed. What worked previously does not work currently. The syntax is different.  Triflin’! Anyway, I just wanted to put that out there. When I find the difference (which there is not much documentation on it at all) I will post it and name it the same but for server 2008 or something like that. Until then, have fun coding and as always, if there are any questions or suggestions, they are welcome. Thank you.

 

Oh, and Happy Birthday Elvis!