As this is my first post in this blog, it’s probably best I introduce myself. I’m Rob Gray, a team lead at Spectrum Data Systems International (http://www.sdsi.com.au). We are the Australasian vendor Tritech’s (http://www.tritech.com) VisiCAD computer aided dispatch system for emergency services.
We’re a small team but we’re passionate about what we do. Being a small team, from time to time we all get wear different hats. One day I’ll be developing, another I’ll be supporting a customer, and another I’ll be onsite gathering requirements or attending high-level management meetings. I think that’s fairly typical of how small companies operate.
I also own my own software dev business, RG Software Solutions, which I work on the side with (paid) help from a friend and former colleague. We’re developing mobile and satellite phone contract management software.
I've described myself as a .NET journeyman because I feel I'm no where near the expert I want to be, but I've completed university studies and a few certifications from Microsoft. I marvel at the awesomeness of so many .NET people out there and I don't feel I'm up to their level. But I am constant learning and trying new things, so hopefully one day...
We just received our new Dell PowerEdge T300 servers this week. We’ve got four, two for support and two for development. Our lab currently has numerous old machines, with specifications and limited as PII 350Mhz CPU’s up to Xeon 2.6Ghz Quad Core Stratus servers. The PowerEdge’s will replace the older spec machines we’ve had for the last 5 years.
Another benefit of having these machines is that each department can now run multiple virtual machines on each of them. This will allow us to replicate production environments at customer sites more readily; at least the database servers. One of the biggest frustrations we’ve had over the last few years is having to spend 30 mins configure and setup when changing servers. Because machines were in short supply some servers were playing host to multiple CAD server configurations, each running different versions of CAD, not just different data.
Another improvement by way of Virtual Machines is the use of Virtual development environments. We’ll now have a dev VM for each different client. This VM will contain the basic dev tools, VS 2003, VS 2008, VB 6, and Sql Server tools, along with reflector and TestDriven.NET . It was only today that one my of co-works, Kevin, voiced his frustration with the delays in work brought on by having to configure different environments.
On the RGSS front, I picked up a “new” server last week so I could move the server out of a VM (it had lived on my media centre!) to it’s own machine. Took me a while to get the thing up and running, thanks to peculiarities with the Dlink DSL-502T router I’m using here. Seemed it would lose the port forwarding if using a static ip. I changed the ip back to DHCP assigned but tied to the MAC address, and it worked again.