This morning I started working on a new library for a new feature we'll be rolling out in the not too distant future. It is the first production code that we're developing at PH using Visual Studio 2008, which brings us C# 3.0 and Linq.

Just one morning into it, it already feels like a vast improvement. It took all of ten minutes to get the DLinq classes generated in Visual Studio; it would have taken under five if it hadn't been my first time doing it and working it out as I went. Then they were ready to use, which was also trivial. No more writing SQL or stored procedures or calling methods on a data reader to get the data out: just instantiate the DataContext (which represents the database), write the query, and it's done.

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I'm now working as lead developer at Programmer's Heaven. Every so often, I'll be bringing you a little look inside, sharing some of the tools and techniques that we use to build and run the site.

Last week I completed migrating the Programmer's Heaven source tree to the Subversion version control system. Before I arrived, we were using a commercial offering, which I won't name here. I tried to give it plenty of chances to work well, and was patient when I heard a new version was coming out. However, the new version introduced new problems more than resolving the old ones, and I could never track down a pattern to the most serious issue, which led to broken builds a couple of times. It was frustrating knowing there were better tools out there; I had worked with Subversion on numerous projects before and knew that it was simple and Just Worked most of the time. It has its quirks, but nothing as close to annoying as what we were using.

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