Web Development workflow & tools

Question

Hey Everyone,

I am an independent Web Developer and I am always looking at ways to improve my product and how I communicate with my clients. Can anyone recommend areas for improvements or tools to help streamline my process. Areas that I know need work are deploying the code and bug tracking.

Tools Visual Studio 2008 SQL Server 2005 Entityspaces ORM Subversion (scm)

Project Management: TeamWorkPM (Project Management Tool) - www.teamworkpm.net http://lowdownapp.com/ - looks interesting

Overall i'm pleased with subversion and the MS stack but was wondering what people do for deploying. Do you create a seperate project and use that to build your web app? I remember a tool called BuildIt for VS2003 that worked great but that tool is now gone. Does anyone recommend Nant?

Also..what are people using for bug tracking? I would love it if teamworkpm.net had an integrated bug tracking feature but they don't. Ideally the least amount of tools would be best. Simple is the key because clients log bugs and not a QA department.

Thanks for the input!

Answer 1

Do you have Visual Studio 2008 through an MSDN premium subscription? If so, you might want to look into TFS Workgroup Edition, it is included with the premium subscription for up to 5 users.

If you do have the subscription, the 2010 Basic version of TFS would probably be a lot more applicable to your specific needs. Beta 2 should be coming out soon and might be worth the wait. The Basic version of TFS 2010 will include Source Control, Work Items, and build definitions. It is lacking the sql reporting services and sharepoint site integration.

http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2009/10/01/tfs-2010-for-sourcesafe-users.aspx

Answer 2

The Ruby stack has, IMHO, the two best deployment systems around: Vlad the Deployer and Capistrano. Vlad is a clone of Capistrano that makes a lot of improvements on the original. Both should technically be usable outside a Ruby stack, but it's a no-brainer if you're already using Ruby. However, Vlad and Capistrano really need non-Windows environments. Incidentally, Lowdown and Cucumber are also Ruby tech.