So it’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog, having gotten caught up with a lot of things at work and in my personal life. But having now righted the ship, I’m back on track giving bland reviews of what I’m doing with my time. In this vien I also rethought what I’m doing with this blog, and trying to actively document what my technical activities as tutorials is way to burdensome to be realistic, along with potentially condescending to anyone who reads through this looking for information, given you probably have some idea of what your doing.
So while I reboot this blog, I’ve also decided to redo one of computing environments! (So hence the title, surprise surprise.) I’ve started using Visual Studio 2015 CTP, which has been looking brilliantly, and have set up a new project (Application Oriented Configuration Management Database) to play around in it. As can been seen by my code history, I was also trying out ASP.NET 5 (MVC 6) with Entity Framework 7. Overall it looks great and similar in function, but I spend so much time on small nuances that it was overall proving unproductive considering I’m hoping to have this project be live in a production environment this year. The straw that broke the Camel’s back was my fighting with getting code migrations to work, so I scrapped it for now and moved to a classic MVC 5 with Entity Framework 6.
Presently Visual Studio 2015 itself has been great. I love the new NuGet Explorer, I will definitely be getting the developers at my workplace onto as soon as possible. Easily browsing versions, updates, etc is fantastic. This is especially useful in our enterprise environment as we run an internal NuGet feed and have many version dependent applications. Most of our developers are already irked as they are moved to NuGet in general, and making them handle things using the NuGet command line in order to get required DLL versions has been a strong adoption sticking point.
My next favorite feature has been the suggestion light bulb, which pops up everywhere. This was especially handy moving my code from MVC6/EF7 to MVC5/EF6 as it continued suggestion where I needed to change references, etc. It seems to throw more errors about references which has been somewhat perplexing, as I’ll have something appropriately referenced with NuGet, etc but it will still pop up until I rebuild a second time.
I’m about to start the install of Windows 10, so I’ll be signing off here. But before I do one thing I wanted to also note was the excellent NewHaven.IO meetup I went to on pair programming last Thursday. (http://www.meetup.com/newhavenio/events/220445501/) It was excellently run and really inspiring, even though the entire stack was ruby instead of windows. But seeing how effectively it worked for them was great, and I hope we could get similar infinitives started at AIG. My thinking as with the advent of ASP.NET 5 I can launch educational campaign at work for both new technologies and practices to get us using technologies that play nicer with DevOps deployments.