What hardware (config) and software (os version/app version) is recommended for developing for ASP.NET/Coldfusion and MS SQL Server?

Question

Hi,

We are a small company and would like to know the best possible (and affordable) hardware and software configuration we ought to be using for our development environment. At this moment we are a team of four people who work remotely from different locations and each one of us uses a laptop and ADSL connection to work on our projects.

This question should help us identify a path towards optimizing our hardware and software so as to make the most of these development environments. Do we need to run everything locally on the laptops or some sort of distributed solution is possible? Which software versions do you recommend given that both Windows 2008 and SQL Server 2008 are available options? Do we use a central server or run these locally on our laptops?

We're a young team so any help would be welcome and much appreciated! Thanks!

Ym

Answer 1

For a team, I would suggest that you set up the local environments (laptops) as development environments, with a local DB copy and running CF developer version. Version control (VSS, Subversion, Git, etc.) is pretty much mandatory.

Have a testing/staging/QA server with the same configuration as the live version (as much as this is possible). It should have its own CF license to follow the licensing agreement. You should put checked-in code here for everyone to test and to check integration. Several version control systems offer ways to automate this, or you could do this manually.

Production, obviously, should be its own thing. I would suggest that you separate the database and app/web server on two separate boxes.

I know this might be a little more/less than you were asking, so feel free to ask for clarification.

Answer 2

MS SQL Server 2008 Express, it's free. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=B5D1B8C3-FDA5-4508-B0D0-1311D670E336&displaylang=en
Windows XP (prof. edition) is stable and use less resources than Vista. For asp.net I suggest using Dev Studio 2008 Pro.

For the computer itself, you want lots of memory (2-4 GB). A fast dual-core CPU. And you will see a difference using a faster HD (on a laptop, 5400 RPM HD are fast and 4500 RPM are the standard)

I recommend working locally and update all on a central location (with source control as Ben wrote).

Answer 3

I would use whatever server hardware you can afford 1/2/3 machines with plenty of ram and disk space and use Virtual server, or vmware server. That way you can simulate a ntier architecture. You can VPN/rdp/sslvpn etc to the virtual machines for your QA environment.

My QA environment has 7 machines, I have 3 physical servers, the biggest server runs SQL 2005 ent on the physical machine, it hosts 2 virtual machines one being the domain controller that all machines use for authentication. the 2 other server each host a virtual machine each. That way i have a 3 tier architecture for QA and a separate 3 tier architecture for UAT. Virtual machines are easy to spin up/ copy etc.

Answer 4

For either ASP.NET or ColdFusion, You'll want to have the developers set up with their own local development environments on their Laptops. With ColdFusion, this probably means ColdFusion 8 Developer Edition (Free) and either MySQL (Free) or MS SQL Express Edition 2008 (also Free). For the actual development, you'll want Visual Studio 2008 ($170 -> $1400) for ASP.NET development, or Eclipse with CFEclipse plugin (Free) for ColdFusion Development.

You will almost certainly need a testing/QA string of servers, with ColdFusion 8 ($1300) you can run Linux, MacOS X, or Windows Server. ASP.NET pretty much requires Windows Server 2003, but if you're feeling adventurous, you could probably use Linux or MacOSX with Mono (Free) For your database engine, you can use MySQL (Free), PostgreSQL(Free), MS SQL ($6000), or one of many others.

Your production environment should be basically the same as your testing/QA environment, though depending on your traffic, you may end up with some esoteric load-balancing solutions. If you reach the point where this is necessary, you'll be able to afford to hire someone to answer this question for you :)

Answer 5

Just curious, why do you want both ASP.net and ColdFusion?