Garry Pilkington

It has been a few weeks since my last post, so apologies for that. I have finally passed MS exams 70-292 and 70-296 so I am now an MCSE on Windows Server 2003 at last; hence the disappearing act.

I am sure there are a lot of developers out there who already use Continuous Integration (CI). personally I plan on moving over to a CI environment but I want to dip my toes in the water first to see how the various aspects of CI can work for me. Readers of my previous blog will know that I have already set up Subversion. More recently I have started to use NAnt and in this post I will quickly cover how I set it up to be run from VS 2005.

This is something I have come across during our SQL migration which I didn't even think about. You can zip up your bak files and save considerable hard drive space. We have a 14 gig database which happily compresses down to 2 gig. With hard drives coming down in price, you may think why bother. Well in our migration we have two separate domains for testing purposes which have to stay separate at all costs. Compressing our bak files we can burn it to DVD and move it to the test domain regularly for testing our in house applications.

Well everyone is doing it, so I think I will also. I am going to quickly list my goals I wish to reach for the next six months. I think having goals that are achievable is a good thing, when you have reached that goal you can look back and feel good because you have just improved yourself.