Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

OK, so it appears that I still suck at blogging regularly.
This one, however, was worthy.... I'm a fan of the whole TDD religion and I've had mass forced conversions to the religion here at my place of employment over the past couple of years. One of the tools that I've used throughout my crusade is TestDriven.NET. It is a great tool that integrates the process of testing very smoothly in Microsoft's Visual Studio.

I've been mired in the unfortunate business of ISV reality this week: Delivering software to customers. We have at least two dozen different installers of our various offering for Windows and each is done in different ways using different tools, (mostly some version of Install Shield,) by different teams at differing points in the development cycle, (although mostly well after the development/qa cycle.)

And this is just wrong. Wrong, wrong wrong. As any fan of an integrated, continuous build system will tell you, you just can't wait until the end to start pulling certain pieces together and the install is no different. The WiX (Windows Installer XML) Toolkit allows you fix that problem. Since it is in XML, it is more developer friendly, more SCM friendly and more reusable friendly.

So, some background. My company was scooped by another company and in turn scoops up other companies. My company was a VMS shop, then added Unix, then windows... Right now we probably sell 90% Windows but we still support VMS and Unix. Our product is an app that is powered by a 4GL that was written 25 years ago and has had its UI moved forward from green screen, to Client/Server, to the Web, and now to Smart Client. (BTW there are still parts of the Application written 20 years ago running in production today.)

So in the several years since I had the (mis)fortune of running into atrox, kebernet, et al., I've kinda changed the moniker that I use when hiding on the interweb. So, once I saw that I could change my username on the new penguin, I did and thus sticks now makes his screaming-penguin debut.

And his blogging debut. Exciting time for all, really.