Freesome - Pete Hobson

It’s an unfortunate fact of life as a freelancer that at some point some client somewhere will insist on solutions built around Microsoft products. In my experience this most often happens, not through any direct choice, but rather due to the business having existing systems sitting on Microsoft servers.

I’ve recently had such a project, and it presented some issues as my Windows based laptop is still with ACER repair dept (2.5 months after being packed off (lets save that rant for another time though), and naturally Microsoft don’t produce any Mac development products at all.

There a few different options available for a Mac based developer when it comes to ASP.NET development, here’s what I did this time round...

The Text Editor with FTP integration method. This is a quick and dirty method, but worked for me on this project, as it was quite small. I got hold of a copy of TextWrangler – which is the free version of BBEdit. In the File Menu you have an option to open directly from an FTP server, so I connect directly to my external ASP Host, and edit files directly on the server.

There’s a few major downs with this method.
Firstly, and most obvious is the time lag, as your communicating with a remote server. However this method would have been completely unworkable only a few years ago, but with today’s connections its not too bad really.

Secondly TextWrangler although it can maintain many open files at once, it would only let we select one file at a time form the FTP server. This contrasts quite badly with say UltraEdit32 on Windows, which gives a live tree view of the FTP server, and allows you to open multiple files for editing with the standard shift-click ctrl-click methods. I checked BBedit, and unfortunately this shares the file open dialogue with TextWrangler.

A major issue with this method, is that you cant produce compiled components (at least I couldn’t). It works fine for .Net’s User Controls though – which suited this particular project fine.

To compile .NET Byte code, I could of taken a look at MONO. However, this was my first ever project with .NET, and I wanted to focus on learning the framework, rather than learning Mono. Perhaps next time though, as I’m hearing lots off good reports about Mono recently.

The big issue really is database setup. Although I’ve never had much use for the the full on Visual Studio experience, I am a big fan of the SQL Administration tools. I could of possibly set the database up entirely through SQL Scripts, but this felt to me like a great deal of pain and sorrow.

I also could of tried one of the WEB Based admin tools, which I believe would operate very much along the lines of myPHPAdmin tool for MySQL. However, I ducked the issue, as I was a little short on time, and also wanted to try out Parallels virtualisation Beta. Previously I had been giving the Q Emulator a whirl, but found this too slow for practical use – it’s a great little app though, and for a Mac based web dev who just needs to test sites in IE its more than adequate. Parallels however, seems pretty good. The speed increase was obvious immediately. So yeah, I cheated, and installed the free SQL Express tools in my virtual PC. I guess in future the obvious thing to do would be to simply set up IIS in this virtual PC, and develop there.

I’m pretty happy though, its occasional projects like this which stopped me converting to a Mac a long time ago. However the Intel Chips seem to do the job in allowing virtual setups to be fully useable, those times when native apps just don’t exist.