Subversion made easy: VisualSVN Server

Subversion is fairly straightforward to install and maintain, but VisualSVN Server makes the process on Windows almost trivial:

1. Download
2. Run Installer
3. err, that's it

It bundles Apache and the SVN server, and comes with a nifty Admin console which makes it easy to change repo permissions. It even provides pretty repo browsing via XSLT in the web browser.

IISAdmin - multiple sites on Windows XP

The inability to run multiple concurrent websites from IIS under Windows XP is a pain. I need to run Server 2003 and IIS 6 to do that, and live with the resulting slowdown

There is a handy free utility, IISAdmin, which mitigates the worst aspect of the IIS 5 limitation: the need to reconfigure the Default Web Site each time I want to work with a different site. IISAdmin allows you to create new websites, each permanently pointing to a different set of files on disk. The limitation (probably in IIS 5 on XP) is that only a single site can be started at a time.

Simple CMS Frameworks

I have some experience with using DotNetNuke as a CMS. It's free, open-source, and has pretty good engineering. There are plenty of add-on modules available from sites like Snowcovered. Some of the UI elements are irritating: like a lot of early ASP.NET sites, there are too many postbacks, but it works well in general, and is easy to manage.

Community Server is targetted at a different market, and is ready-made for a typical portal site, with blogs, file downloads, forums etc.; whereas DNN is more like a toolbox, Community Server is one of those 5-in-1 screwdriver/drill combos. The asp.net site now runs Community Server, not surprising, since both are Microsoft-driven.

CMSs like PHP-Nuke are hopelessly out of date and riddled with bugs. In 2006 there is no excuse for having any SQL Injection vulns in web applications. Just do not execute raw SQL from the code: use Stored Procedures and parameters!

Joomla! is a fresh effort built on the base of Mambo, and is so far free of major bugs. It supports a flexible templating system, and has a bunch of nice features out of the can. It is, however, written in PHP, which is not very secure; PHP is seen by many as the scourge of the internet.

Issue Tracking Software

A crucial component of a successful software project is feature tracking. Bugs, issues, defects, requirements, tasks: whatever they're called, they need to be recorded, tracked, and dealt with.

At DevDoctor.com we started off with the free IssueTracker Starter Kit from the folks at Microsoft. This is a very simple, bare-bones application which gets the job done, but has some really useful features missing, at least in the version out-of-the-box. For example, you cannot view all tasks across all projects, only grouped by project. The Search feature is basic too, requiring SQL-like syntax (e.g. LIKE %crash%) to find matches.

Eventum is a well-featured system, running best on LAMP, but working on Win32 also. Particularly nice are the built-in time-tracking features, which allow a project manager to see at a glance where time is being spent on the project. It has email integration to allow issues to be created automatically, and for users to receive notification when they are assigned an issue. It also features integration with CVS, though Subversion support would bring it more up-to-date.

There are obviously free offerings like Bugzilla, but the interface sucks, and it's very unfriendly. A well-featured system I have used at a previous company is FogBugz (from Fog Creek software, of Joel On Software). It's therefore very usable: to bring up the page for Issue #51, for example, you simply type '51' in the search box, and hit Enter. It sports RSS feeds of issues, and has email, CVS, and Subversion (and even VSS) integration, allowing you to match up bugs fixed in code with the entries in the issue tracker. Sadly, it's not free.

Another system which looks nice is OnTime from AxoSoft. The single-user version is free, though additional users are rather pricey. It has a WinForms client in addition to the Web interface, so provides for a much richer interaction. It also has Visual Studio integration, so bugs can be managed from the location where they will be fixed: inside the IDE. Its feature list is pretty impressive; clearly, the focus is on .Net development teams.

All in all, what I want from issue tracking depends on the context. The ASP.NET IssueTracker works well for my own needs for personal projects. When projects become more comples, and there is a need for time tracking too, then Eventum or OnTime look good options. For ease-of-use, FogBugz probably comes out top.