A Clockwork Durian

I managed to grab a brief sale of the Toshiba A205-S6810 on Amazon, for $749, with free shipping within US. It was not as low as the $699 when I first spotted it, but it was still much lower than the $979 regular price. I’m happy I made this purchase. (For those in the Philippines who are interested in getting cheap laptops in the US, go for Amazon and have it delivered through Johnny Air Cargo in New York. I learned about this in a post in Tipid PC. You still get a lower price compared to what’s sold locally, even if you pay for more than $100 of shipping.)

So, with a Vista powered toy in hand, I proceeded to install all the software for my new development machine, starting with the latest from my MSDN subscription, stuff which I held up from installing because they were meant for Vistas, multi-core CPUs, and larger RAM. Stuff such as running server products (Sharepoint Server 2007, Visual Studio Foundation Server 2008, and the like) off Windows Server 2008 through a Virtual PC.

Now, I’m ready to set up for my agile development environment, starting with source control through Subversion. I learned that Subversion interfaces with Apache, but not with IIS. A minor setback, but that’s alright. I also learned that my old version of WAMP won’t run on Vista because of tighter security measures (it is unable to write to the registry or start a service on its own). I then went ahead with downloading the newer WampServer 2 and a Subversion version that runs for Apache 2.2. It will be integrated using instructions from this TrajiklyhHip blog entry.

This will be followed by an installation of TortoiseSVN, the Subversion client for Windows, and integrating it into Visual Studio 2008 with guidance from Garry’s Bit Patterns blog entry.

I will proceed with NAnt, NUnit, CruiseControl and BugTracker.Net when I’m done with source control setup.