Graham Gardner is writing about building standard operating environments (SOE) and his first post outlines a simple process of how to get from nothing to your first candidate SOE. As a developer I have always treated the SOE process with a degree of suspicion because more often than not its like a pair of handcuffs. So while this post is not a retort to Graham, its a plea for understanding from software developers to system administrators everywhere!
If you are a developer who has been responsible for getting a development project off the ground in a corporate environment you will be familiar with the incredulous looks you get when you tell system administrators that you what the ability to log into your machine as an administrator (note, I am being very careful not to start a debate here about whether your standard user account should have administrative rights or not).
It seems thats that no amount of explaining can convince some people that you can’t develop software effectively without having the ability to run as an administrator to debug processes and simulate multiple users accessing a system. Life can get even harder when the SOE is so locked down that you can download your favorite tools and install them (Reflector, NAnt, NDoc, and MbUnit) because you can change files in the Program Files directory.
Some organisations seem to alternate between having an isolated developer network and shoe horning developer requirements into the existing SOE. The problem of course is that developers develop software for a diverse set of deployment scenarios including web applications, windows services, desktop applications, mobile devices and various server products like SharePoint.
It gets interesting when you start talking about developing and debugging for the 64–bit platforms, most SOEs are going to get shot to pieces then. Basically what I am saying is that if you have a team of developers, get them two machines (it will cost less than the lost productivity). Give them a standard SOE machine and then give them another box and the flexibility to change its configuration to suit their requirements.
And for the record – no, you cannot all debug the one shared instance of IIS!