Solo Technology

We’ve had a low-priority challenge at the office for quite some time. You see, a lot of our web apps (many classic ASP) are developed by small teams working out of a common development directory. That in itself is typically all well and good, however there’s also a config file in that same directory that has some key application settings — in particular, the database connection information.

It gets a bit awkward when two developers are working against the same code but want to use two different data sources. We end up doing things like copying the main development directory to a different “sandbox” location just to tweak that config file. But then we have the source control shuffle: Files are checked out/in from the common directory, so have to remember to copy them to the sandbox, code and test the changes, then copy back to the common directory and check back in.

Very prone to mistakes.

A couple of us were discussing this at work when I said, “Ya know… if we were a *nix shop this would be a no brainer. We’d just use links.” If you were there you might’ve seen a little lightbulb light up over my head. Maybe a 30 watt job, but still…

Less than an hour later I found NTFS Link. After just an hour of playing with it, I can see that this is going to save us a LOT of time.

Now, my “private” directory has links to all the common .asp files, just the config and branding stuff is different. I can check out to the common directory, do all my editing in either common or private (same file either way) and check in. No fuss, no fuss and no more wasting time trying to keep my sandbox in sync with the development directories.

Once we get more comfortable with this I look forward to considering using this for production stuff. Why copy the same base code to a bunch of virtual sites when they could all link to one base set? Promoting new code just got a lot quicker! Granted, we need to learn more about what (if any) server load impacts this has.

If all this “link” stuff is greek to you, have a look at the NTFS Link FAQ page, it may help clear things up.

[Update 12 hours later] Well… this isn’t working out so well for the “sandbox” idea.  Turns out some editors break the file links.  Not all, but some.  And getting folks to change editors isn’t the easiest task in the world!

Nuts.

However, there is much excitement about using this to help enable our production deployments and patches, so all is not lost.

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