Starting with a lot of optimism and confidence in our toolset, we had some trouble today in saving data. This took a long time to fix, mainly because of our little experience with the OR-mapping framework and de GUI components. Building just a small test app was clearly not enough preparation (as we had expected though...). Luckily, Rene managed to push out some reports in ASP.NET, which was a hell of a job as we did not discover any support for building ASP.NET applications in MonoDevelop. So he did it by hand (and with some browsing through the examples). This is clearly something to work on, because the technology already works. We also built a webservice, deployed it on the server to run under the XSP-webserver and called that from the Forms application we were developing, and it worked right away...
And then, at 13:00 sharp the final whistle blew...leave your keyboards and the room, gentlemen. The floor is for the jury now.
The long waiting for the judgement began, as teams are called in 1 by 1 to show their results to the jury (we were 7th in line...). But luckily there was food (litterally and for thought) enough to keep us busy. Discussions between teams started on 'did you build that' or 'how did you solve this'.
To be short about our own achievements, we did not build enough of the process to get a high score. But, because of our guts to do things completely different from the rest of the teams (see my previous blog for details), we 'won' the 'innovation prize': a set of mini-screwdrivers, because the jury felt there had to be some work done on the toolset we put together to get really competitive...
It was a lot of fun to attend, and we hope we can come back next year, possibly to defend our prize with another innovative, challenging development toolset.
Our prize:
Well, it has been some time I wrote stuff here...because I was preparing for the internal RADRACE 2006. RADRACE is a developers competition were you create a working application in just about 1 and a half day with a team of 2. You're free in your choice of 'weapons' for this battle, and, as the main stream in our company is Oracle, Java and Microsoft these are the most represented technologies.
Because I'm in the Microsoft Competence, Microsoft .NET is a logical choice. But I and my partner in crime, Rene Schrieken, who is also a blogger here, are always looking for that extra bit of experience. So last year we attended with a CTP version of Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. It was a 2 day struggle with the development environment, climaxing Saturday morning when I discovered that the guys from Redmond had disabled the creation of identity columns in the release of SQL Server we took...
For this braveness, the jury gave us a complimentary reference...well better that than nothing. (in fact the competition had already enough teams so this was the only reason we could attend)
Having learned from that experience, we took another strategy this year, so we''ve chosen 'proven' technology: the Mono.NET framework 1.1 on Debian Linux with MySQL as database. I can say that during the preparations alone we already had a lot of fun, strolling the Internet in search for a useable toolstack to tackle the challenging problems of our upcoming assignment.
So, this morning at 8:30 sharp, the race began. We started with 10 teams, 3 Oracle teams, 3 Java teams and 4 Microsoft teams (including ourselves). We got the assigment (the job to do) from the organisation with an hour of explanation. Then at 9:30 we finally could hit our keyboards. I can say things are rolling, not always as fast as we like but we're reasonably steady going towards a working app...at least we are far enough to come back tomorrow (if you're too far behind the others, your race stops at day 1)
For the interested, here's our complete toolset (and hardware)
Hardware
- 1 desktop (acting as server and workstation 1) and 1 laptop (workstation 2) running Windows XP as host OS and Virtual PC
- 1 network switch
- 1 portable 160GB harddisk containing copies of all Virtual PC images plus lots samples and documentation
- a spare laptop in case of trouble
Software
1 Virtual PC image for the server containing:
- Debian Linux
- Apache2 (webserver, serving all our HTML documentation)
- MySQL 4.1 (relational database management system)
- Samba 3.20 (server for Windows file/printer sharing)
- Subversion (version control system)
- XSP (a standalone webserver from the ASP.NET examples for Mono, written in C#, hosting our webservices 'coz Apache2 does not do Mono yet on Debian, Apache 1.3 will)
- Postfix, Procmail and Courier IMAP and POP3 (mailserver)
2 Virtual PC images for the workstations containing each:
- Debian Linux
- Mono 1.1.10 (the implementation of the .NET 1.1 framework on Linux)
- MonoDevelop (IDE to create .NET applications)
- NHibernate (a port to .NET of the famous Java framework Hibernate for Object-Relational mapping, a.k.a. our business and data access layer)
- a starter application and mini-framework to get a quickstart, written by ourselves to get familiar with the Gtk graphics and NHibernate
- Subversion (client for subversion server)
- Meld (version control client application, for checkin, checkout, diffs etc of the Subversion system)
- Glade (a graphical user interface design tool, based on the Gtk/Gnome libraries / controls, stores the painted user interface in XML files, so we're actually having some kind of XAML already)
- KMail (email client, like Outlook)
- smbclient (to get to the Samba filesharing server)
- and on the host OS Microsoft Office (MS Access plus some VBA hacking of me to convert the supplied data into SQL scripts to create and fill the database), MSDN Help, Visual Studio 2003 (as the Mono debugger does not work quite yet)
See us 'in action':
