ASP.Net development environment

[elkdanger]

'allo

I'm trying to put together some sort of proposal for tightening up our in-house development environment, mainly for developing and maintaining ASP.Net websites, because the current system we have is no longer any use.

I'm one of two developers here at a small web dev company (which is growing pretty fast), and our current system involves us developing sites locally on our machines, then simply uploading them to our web server. We have no way of centrally managing code or databases. However, this is fine as up until now we've only had our own projects to work on. One major problem with this is the fact that more often than not we're forced to work with live data.

Soon though we're both going to be working on the same projects, and I feel this re-hash of our development environment is necessary. We have an in-house Windows server (which only serves Outlook and Saleslogix) which we use to store source code on (mainly for our PHP sites) but other than that it doesn't really do anything. I would personally like to put it to better use.

So I'm really just after some suggestions on how I can clean this up a bit and get some sort of structure in place. At the moment I'm thinking:

* Using our in-house server to serve websites in development using IIS
* Installing SubVersion on the server for source control (so that we develope the site using our own local copies)
* Installing SQL Server on our in-house server to serve the data. The exact version of SQL Server i'm unsure of - would Express edition suffice?
* When it comes to deploying the site to our live site, simply ftp the site into place on our internet web server. We would also need some sort of SQL Server running on their also, again i'm unsure of which version.

Does anyone have any thoughts and suggestions about this? I would much appreciate the help.

 

[roboffer]

No idea about versions of SQL Server and Visual Studio etc, I just like my managers sort that out! You will probably either want to implement Microsoft Source Safe or Sourcegear Vault for source control providers. Not really aware of SubVersion so no idea what its liek. The integration of the other two into Visual Studio is very good.

Let developers work locally, with their own version of the project which is managed through the soruce control, and then upload to a QA server then onto the live server.

Id also recomend forcing upload via FTP into a staging area on the live box, then a copy on the local machine (Probably via remote desktop) rather than allowing direct FTP or copying over a local network. Makes people think a little more before they push things live.

 

[elkdanger]

No idea about versions of SQL Server and Visual Studio etc, I just like my managers sort that out! You will probably either want to implement Microsoft Source Safe or Sourcegear Vault for source control providers. Not really aware of SubVersion so no idea what its liek. The integration of the other two into Visual Studio is very good.

Thanks for the reply. I've currently use SubVersion on our live server for a different reason, and with TortoiseSVN as an interface locally it works quite well. No idea if it's capable of being integrated with Visual Studio though; that would be nice.

Id also recomend forcing upload via FTP into a staging area on the live box, then a copy on the local machine (Probably via remote desktop) rather than allowing direct FTP or copying over a local network. Makes people think a little more before they push things live.

That's a nice idea, didn't think of that.