Free Application Lifecycle Management Tools for .NET Development

Question

I would like to achieve the following: I want a free Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) environment surrounding vs2008 sp1. (My company is short of cash).

I want all the stuff: CI, BugTracking, task panel, Wiki, Source control... all integrating themselves. If I could have some kind of scrum managing tools it would be better.

Any recommendation?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

It does perhaps not fill the "all integrating themselves" part, but the following toolbox should take you rather far:

• Visual Studio 2008 Express
• TestDriven.NET (won't work as an addin to VS, I think, but will work well with CC.NET)
• Subversion
• TortoiseSVN
• CruiseControl.NET

Regarding bugtracking I have not used any OS bugtrackers, so I leave that up to others to suggest.

Answer 2

• SharpDevelop or visual studio 2008 express for an IDE
• Subversion for source control. (With tortoise svn and ankhsvn for clients with a visual svn server)
• Cruise control .net for continuous integration
• NUnit for unit tests
• BugTracker.net or Trac for a defect database (Trac also has a wiki)
• ScrewTurn for a standalone wiki.

This is pretty much the set-up we have.

If you have a full version of visual studio 2008 rather than the express edition, it integrates the inbuilt MSTest much better than NUnit does, and cruise control also supports MSTest.

BugTracker.net and Trac both have subversion integration, (although IIRC trac is a bit weird to get set up). The gotcha to watch out for with Trac is that it doesn't support multiple projects very well, this was why we went for BugTracker.net in the end. (This may have changed, I know it was planned for a future version when we were last looking at it 6 months ago)

Answer 3

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/express/

http://monodevelop.com/

Answer 4

Source control:

• SubVersion
• Git

and two widely used open source tools. Then look for integration for choices of other tools.

Answer 5

I would use the following tools:

• IDE: SharpDevelop
• Source control: SVN and TortoiseSVN
• Bug tracking, wiki, ...: Redmine

Answer 6

Hey,

try using informUp. the have a total application suite for ALM. it's free for startups, so cash shouldn't be an issue (http://www.informup.com/StartUpFree.aspx).

I have been using their Bug tracking system and it is really good!

thanks :-)

Ben

Answer 7

Concerning code quality checking, architecture exploration, code versions diff and more... you can have a look at NDepend. It is a commercial tool, but comes with a free limited version, free for OSS and Academics projects.