Eric Rogers

Programming Projects

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My Development Environment

The launch of this blog gives me the opportunity to discuss my development environment.

My development environment has not changed much over the 20 years of my career. I started out as an intern in 1998 right around the release of Visual Basic 6. My first job was VB6 using a SQL Server backend.

Since then I moved to C# but continued to work with Visual Studio and SQL Server throughout their subsequent upgrades. Right now my environment looks like this:

  • Windows (7 at my day job, 10 at home)
  • Visual Studio (2015 Pro at work, 2017 Community at home) with ReSharper
  • SQL Server Express (only at home)
  • SQL Management Studio (again only at home)

I have used this environment to build ASP.NET MVC apps, WPF apps, Windows Forms app, ASP.NET Web Forms apps, and Xamarin mobile apps. While it has served me well, I am wanting to shift towards more of a free/open source environment.

The main reason I want to do this is for app development. As you probably know, you have to have a Mac if you want to build iPhone apps. You can do all the development on another machine but you have to have a Mac of some kind to build, test, or deploy.

I worked on mobile apps at a previous position. The Mac requirement meant I was walking around with 2 machines. I had my Alienware laptop for development and then a low end MacBook Pro for when I needed to test or deploy the iPhone app. I would love to be able to have one machine to do it all, which means I have to find a way to do my development on a Mac.

Luckily Microsoft has really embraced open source over the last few years. This makes it possible for me to stick with C#/.NET while not being tied to Windows anymore.

Here is the development environment I am going to be using for the projects I write about on this blog.

  • Windows 10 (For now. I will be looking to get a Mac in the near future to fully make the transition.)
  • VSCode
  • MySQL

I will use these programs to build .NET Core applications. I am also using this as an excuse to finally learn Angular.

I have tried to make this transition a few times in the past but have been tripped up by a couple things.

  • No ReSharper in VSCode – I have come to rely on this plugin a lot, which is probably not a good thing. It will probably be good for me to get away from it. I just have to push through the initial frustration.
  • The command line – It is going to take me some time to get used to doing things through the command line.

These hang-ups are not too much for me to overcome if I just resolve to do it. So that is what I am going to do.