Friction on new projects

As the last post mentioned, I have been involved in a new project at work so it has been a good opportunity to introduce the team to some new concepts and investigate a few things my self.

Firstly the good:

• The last post mentioned that I have cleaned up the way we do stuff in terms of "code on the page". Its always good to be able to clean up coding standards
• introduction of IoC using Structure Map. I choose SM as I felt it was one of the most user friendly for those un familiar to IoC. I have used the Castle a fair bit however, what is good for me is not necessarily best for the team.
• Introduction of Rhino Mocks. Even though at work we are still .Net 3.0 Rhino Mocks we felt was a good choice over NMock2 as it has more fwd compatibility and the strong type of the delegates is well received (I hate strings)
• A much more refined user friendly architecture and overall structure

The Bad

The Friction on TFS, MSTest and MSBuild has been, to be honest, amazing. If the same project was using SVN, Nant and (N/Mb/x)Unit the CI would have been trivial, 30mins if all went well and maybe a couple of hours if things got a bit hairy. Not so with this nasty little threesome. TFS in itself is pretty good at combining check-ins with bugs/tasks and it has a nice interface. However the price tags and the pain in the ass it becomes when anything else needs to be done is just silly. MSTest, well does any one like it? As for MSBuild, well I don't mind it, I just prefer Nant as my main build script

So if you are going to go Greenfield be sure to check out what you need to do to get the whole system up and running. Unfortunately the powers that be a petrified of any OSS entering the realm of their MS world... I should probably keep quiet that the ORM, IoC, AOP, Logger and who knows what else all fall in to the banished category...

So this week I guess I will have the fun of putting my fingers in to all of this mess. I am not really sure where to start.. CI Factory? Until then we just have a continuous compiler