Developing Tools in a Heterogeneous Environment Series Introduction In my current position (as a system architect in the enterprise management group of a managed service provider), I find myself dealing with development using different platforms, programming / scripting languages, and project methodologies. It is the type of environment that can be quite jarring when switching between each project. Going from developing a BASH shell script on RedHat Linux 2.1 to a .NET project written in C# and back within an hour takes it's toll on a developer’s mind. One of the things that we have done to reduce the stress caused by our project demands is to try and consolidate some of the tools that we use. In a series of postings, I am going to share information about several of these tools, talk about how they are helpful to us and try to provide some real examples of how this “common toolset” helps us be more productive. The topic of this first posting in the series will be the different tools that we have deployed to support source code control (and project artifact versioning). Part One - Tools for Source Code Control Concurrent Versioning System Given our requirement to be "multi-platform", we have chosen the Concurrent Versioning System (CVS) as our central SCC system. While there are numerous source control options available, we found that the CVS platform has many complimentary tools that are well positioned to support each of our environments and needs. TortoiseCVS TortoiseCVS is an implementation of the CVS client tools for a Windows environment. It integrates cleanly into the Windows explorer process, providing an easy to use set of CVS functionality. The application is released under the GPL. TortoiseCVS comes with the TortoisePlink application, which is a distribution of the Plink part of the Putty application set. SSH / Putty / Pageant / Plink TortoiseCVS can make use of the SSH protocol to allow clients to communicate with the central server holding the CVS repository. This means that all of the traffic between the clients and the server are encrypted, something that adds a certain level of privacy for any proprietary information stored within development artifacts. Our toolset of choice are the Putty set of applications, written by Simon Tatham. These tools provide all of the functionality required to integrate with our CVS repository. The Putty applications are released under the MIT license.

I saw this in an email signature:

"if you do not assume responsibility for breaking the system in the way you want it broken and then integrating it to a better plateau, it will break by itself to a worse plateau. So inaction does not save you; it gives the power of your demise to outside forces"

Ichak Adizes, Managing Corporate Lifecycles