05 June 2014

Coming soon

Now that I've had a few weeks with my Nokia Lumia 920, I'm going to start a series of posts about what's good (and bad) about Windows Phone 8.1 compared to iOS on my iPhone 4S.

Warning signs

AKA Ugly truths about the current gig:

  • old tools: we edit and debug with VS 2005 and manage builds with VS 2008 and TFS 2008. We should be building with VS 2010, ideally with VS 2013, but change is bad, apparently.
  • improper use of tools: warnings are not set to 4, static analysis is not enabled
  • no unit tests: seriously
  • no continuous integration: seriously
  • not everything is under version control: "large" (300 MB) Notes databases, golden data sets
  • versioning: we hand-code version numbers instead of letting the build set them
  • Rally: oh. my. God. I hate Rally. I've never seen a defect tracking system which is quite as opaque, and I have some experience with ClearCase and ClearQuest.
  • external dependencies: I should not have to set include and library options to build

No place is perfect, but some of this stuff is just... sad.

Oh, and I asked the TFS admin if any of the projects are set up to use a symbol server and he replied "NO"

I take it from the caps that these newfangled tools aren't welcome.