blog-j: Symbolizing, Coding, Objectifying, Processing

I bumped into a friend of mine on the way into work this morning. I’d heard that she’d recently started a new job (really, I’m a Facebook stalker…much easier to keep up with friends like that - no need to actually have a conversation…), and I was curious how it was going. Her reply (paraphrased):

“It’s been a switch moving to an [Advertising] agency. They don’t even have source control! And I only have one monitor - it’s killing my productivity!”
Name withheld to protect the innocent…

Let that be a lesson to you.

Really, if you aren’t using some form of source control, you’re in trouble. And do not make the mistake of confusing source control with backup: the intent of backup is to ensure that you always have a certain entity, be it a file, a set of files, perhaps an (il)legally downloaded music collection. Source control isn’t concerned with the whole, final product; its intent is to capture change. Hopefully, as a developer or designer or hybrid, you see the value in that. If not, if you haven’t been bitten by this particular dog, I’d recommend you start using source control and avoid it entirely.

You see, developing a product, be it a website, mashup, game, desktop app, what-evah, is an iterative process. You go from A to B to C to D. You’re always in flux, always moving, incorporating new ideas, recalibrating, learning and relearning. And one day you’re going to break something that worked fine yesterday. Or have a client tell you they liked it the old way. Hell, you might like it the old way yourself! And then, boom - your ever-overwriting backup strategy goes to hell. You’re stuck going back to figure out what the hell you did to have it work the way it did before. With source control, you can simply roll back or merge the old with the new (well, hopefully simply…).

Now stop being selfish and thinking only about yourself. Most of us don’t live or work in a vacuum, after all. You’ve got multiple people working on the same set of files. To quote the Big Bang Theory, “I believe the appropriate metaphor here involves a river of excrement and a Native American water vessel with out any means of propulsion.” Overwriting other team member’s changes, losing your own changes, it’s a nightmare.

Really. I’ve been there.

So do yourself a favour: set yourself up with source control. First day at the new job, and they don’t have it? Set it up. Quit if they don’t let you. What to use? Lucky for you, you’ve got lots of choices. Microsoft shop? Use VSS. (Ok, that’s a joke…if you can afford it, and really have the need, pick up Team System.) Set your team up with SVN (and, if you’re on Windows, grab Tortoise - you’ll thank me). Find a plugin for your IDE of choice (you do use an IDE, right? sadly, there’s no SVN plugin for FlashDevelop that I know of - yet - but working with Tortoise makes it relatively easy). Go to town. Don’t have your own server or infrastructure to install on? Use unfuddled.com - an excellent project management and collaboration tool that includes both SVN and GIT, along with a suite of other tools for you and your team.

So there you have it. Many have said it more eloquently before me, and many more will say it better (Jeff Atwood of StackOverflow.com fame, for one). But if you’re reading this, forget about how horrific my prose is this evening and get yourself some source control.

(Don’t even get me started about how bad email is for communication…set yourself up on a collaboration platform and get the important crap out of your inbox…)

(Ok, I really think I’ve put off doing my timesheets long enough…bags…)

For as long as I can remember (please, no snide comments from the peanut gallery - yes, mom, I mean you), I’ve wished for Actionscript support in Visual Studio. Fed up with the Flash IDE’s inability to keep up with the capabilities of other modern IDEs, over the years I’ve turned to various external editors for AS coding joy; I used to swear by SE|PY, and more recently have been known to shout the pleasure that is using FlashDevelop from the proverbial (and virtual) rooftops. So you can imagine my excitement on seeing Jon Dowdell’s tweet about Tofino, a Visual Studio plugin adding support for Flex and Actionscript development directly in Visual Studio.

This is, I have to say, cool as hell. I love working in FlashDevelop, but as good as it is (and it is freakin’ good), Visual Studio (imnsho) takes the cake as far as IDE’s go. It’s powerful, fast, makes a developer’s life easier, etc (yes, FD does all that as well, just not quite to the same extent). It’s particularly cool in that people are seeing the benefits of working inside of Visual Studio, particularly for projects that have a .NET based back-end layer. So of course I had to download and install the beta.

Off I go, and, with beta’ed breath (ewww), fire up VS and create a new project. Lovely options - Flex App, Flex Library, or Actionscript Application. I can feel the love. Being more of an AS junkie than Flex-able, I create a new Actionscript project. I like the default project layout (though it would be nice if it asked for a default namespace); it includes a src directory, bin directory, and an html template directory (which, though I haven’t tried yet, appears to be editable and allows one to customize the html generated on publish/compile). Quickly open up the default .as file, which contains a class that lovingly extends Sprite. I hop into the constructor to add a call to super() and…

Type s and press CTRL+Space. Bam. The nothingness I am greeted with rattles my teeth. What’s this, I think to myself. No code hints/intellisense? Hrm. Maybe they’ve only got that for MXML at this point. Ok, I’ll try a Flex project. Open the default MXML, try adding an opening chevron and hitting CTRL+Space; again, nahda. Add an mx: and try again? Still no love.

Ok, it’s a beta. I try simply compiling the app (Flex now as the default project), which works beautifully, opening up Firefox and showing the “Hello, World” label. Well, that was fun.

I’m not trying to detract from what they’ve done - this is a huge step forward for the Flash (and .NET/Visual Studio) community. It will be even nicer as it continues to evolve and adds things like Intellisense support, unit testing (to be fair, it might have that now, haven’t tried it, though), a visual mxml editor, integration with the Flex ISAPI filter for IIS, etc. But to me it’s more of an alpha than a beta (ok, it purports to support debugging, which alone makes it a beta, but from a pure “writing code” perspective, there’s a lot to come.

My wishlist, in no particular or practical order:

• Integrated ASDoc or XML Documentation (eg: it reads the documentation and includes it in a tooltip when relevant, for example when showing Intellisense or hovering over a method/class/property)
• Actionscript Intellisense (for both intrinsic/flash and custom classes)
• MXML Intellisense
• Support for non .swc references (eg: reference a folder structure containing .as without bringing it into the folder structure of the project)
• Visual MXML editor
• Use SwfObject as the default embed methodology (or allow a choice, either global or on a project-by-project basis)

There’s probably more, but that’s my ask for today. And though my initial review may seem a bit lukewarm, I’m really, really, really excited about this. I’ll be following proress on Tofino’s development very closely.

Get it for yourself @ ensemble.com.