opinions, musings, and other writings of a programmer and musician living in the puget sound

Or: Technological Ravings Regarding Production IT Tomfoolery

Lately, a good deal of my time at work has been spent investigating solutions to issues my team and I face as Web developers. Having taken into account our current stack of Windows Server 2003, IIS 6, ColdFusion 8, and MSSQL 2008, various languages and development platforms have  shown promise.

Initially, our collective push was towards Linux. A giant VMWare VSX box @ our server facility could easily spawn any number of headless Ubuntu/Fedora VMs. We could go Rails or Django or Kohana as primary frameworks, and maybe port existing codebases to something like the open-source CFML alternative, BlueDragon.

But that Unix backend, with it’s intimidating shell scripts, and oft-frustrating command line hacking… That’s where not having a UNIX guru on staff hurts. It’s really a show stopper, and in this case it just doesn’t fit.

And so, as of last week, my team and I will be moving to a stack consisting of: Windows Server 2008, IIS 7 for serving, C# for code, and ASP.NET MVC for framework. The reality of money invested in Microsoft SQL Server 2008 license fees; a metric ton of “TSQL spaghetti” codebases to support, and familiarity among team members with administering production servers on the Windows platform makes the choice obvious.

Now, I’m going to turn on rant mode.

I agree — this time — that a move to the Windows stack is easily the more practical. I’ve always been a “Windows is for end-users, Linux is for servers” sort of guy, but I am no Linux server administrator, and can’t take on that responsibility at my place on the workplace “food chain” — I’m just a coder, man!

I am most excited to move away from ColdFusion. After over a year of ColdFusion, I have yet to find it anything more than tolerable. As hilariously uppity that may sound, I mean it in only the most practical way. As of ColdFusion 8, it’s lack of a solid implementation of the ever-powerful “closure” is hard to stomach, CFML is <wordswordswordswords>wordsandwords</wordswordswordswords> verbose, the CFscript alternative is lacking in full functionality, the tags and language conventions promote copy & paste code, and a sane sense of variable scoping is about as present as normality between a couple of hipsters munchin’ on broccoli slaw. Weird.

The future is laden with continuos integration servers, .NET CLR, and miscellaneous DLL fever. A lot to learn, and I love to get engaged in learning something fully. All in all, it’s an exciting time that will hopefully lead to increased satisfaction in daily work among the whole team, the ability to develop in a more structured manner, and of course, the ability to deliver the right Web site on time.

That said, the whole reason I started writing this post — before I got terribly distracted — was to offer my recommendation for an excellent book. Anyone interested in ASP.NET MVC development should check out Pro ASP.NET MVC by Steven Sanderson. It’s written by an extremely knowledgeable and practical author. Basic request flow, in depth convention (and modularity!) explorations, unit testing, deployment, and much more are covered in excellent detail. I would go so far as to say it is a must read for any ASP.NET MVC beginner.