Last weekend a colleague and I entered the RadRace competition, a two day programming contest. The contest took place at our offices in Nieuwegein and we had to bring in our own equipment. However, WiFi, GPRS/UMTS, Sattelite Networks were not allowed to make sure that only 2 programmers were building the software and not 20 guys/girls in our Bangalore operation.
We decided to use the Visual Studio .Net 2005 CTP release of december 2004 and the Yukon beta 3. I ended up with in the week before the competition lobbying for more hardware and fiddeling around with virtual servers, domains and networks. On friday morning i found out that the well behaved application had some lost some connectivity as the virtual servers couldn't find each others, no remote desktop connections where possible and my laptop refused to install the VS2005 at all.
After some tense first hours we finally managed to get our environment technically up-and-running.
That didn't mean we didn't face any problems, they were just starting. The handy functionality for jumping to the line where a compile error occured didn't function. Well, it functioned in away that wasn't adding to our RAD effort: it crashed the IDE. In the ASP.NET designer the properties windows didn't showed up (most of the time). We went back to the ASP time and changed the properties directly in the page source (Intellisense worked, pfff). And creating an indentity column on a table in Yukon was not possible in the UI, but the DDL didn't allowed us to create it either. The help-file stated: TBD. We wondered if it was To be Done or To be Decided.....
Before hand we were warned that you should only enter the competition with a proven environment which you know very well. The software was released three weeks before the start of the competition so obviously that not enough time.
In case you wonderded: we didn't win, we only managed to create 10% of the needed functionality.
Who did win? You don't want to know. Ok: Oracle Designer 6.x/Oracle DB 7.3.4 with HeadStart. This toolset was released in 1994 and the guys working with it used those tools from day one.....
