Orchestra ERP

The stock market was getting challenging for technical analysts so I lost motivation in developing the Euclid project (mentioned in the previous post.) Perhaps I will revisit it once the markets and trading get interesting again.

I have instead resumed developing my WPF ERP framework. I am currently using / planning to use the following free frameworks / tools available for my client layer:

This WPF ERP framework will start off as two-tier, consisting only of a client and a remote database, most probably SQL Express Edition.

The design, however, should be scaleable enough so that I can move the business layer to a server and put a service layer on top of it. When this happens, I will be using WCF, naturally.

VersionOne and Trac

Curious about Agile web tools, I installed VersionOne’s Agile Team Edition (free for up to 10 users) and Trac.

VersionOne is a leading Agile Project Management tool, built with Scrum, XP and agile in mind. Trac is a bug/issue management system with a wiki and Subversion integration.

They both work alright on Vista. For V1, I had to reinstall my SQL Server 2005 Express Edition as it needed the Full-Text Search Service. For Trac, after fiddling around with installing Trac’s individual components and scratching my head with Python version compatibilities and component integration, I went for Visual SVN’s Trac installer which hooked up everything out of the box.

Subversion and Live Mesh

I’ve always been paranoid about my home code. After doing regular backups at home on a spare hard drive, I always felt that I needed to have an offsite one.

When I discovered Live Mesh, I thought that this was the answer to my need. I immediately connected my project folder and my Subversion folder to the mesh (to have both in-progress and committed copies). The best part is that this is all done in the background. I love it!

It turns out somebody else had the same idea.

I prefer this approach over publicly hosted SVN services, which may require you to post your code publicly for free.