Mere Idea Development Blog

Well, it’s been a while since I updated this blog. As usual, as soon as you start on one project, several others come up which take precedence. In this case some web sites I had to write/rewrite/update.

I thought I’d restart this blog by giving a suggested plan. No dates, but I just thought I’d list a possible order of play. This isn’t a firm or exhaustive list of things to be done, but it’ll give you an idea of what to expect on this blog.

• Update at least one machine to the latest SCons (version 1.2.0), and fix any problems.
• SCons and Microsoft Visual Studio – including installing Express 2008 and testing with the current code and creating Visual Studio projects in a sensible way so we can build and debug using the Visual Studio Express 2005/2008 IDE.
• Add a second library to the code to test other SCons features such as the ‘configure’ style features allowing checks to be performed for header files, libraries and functions. Also add replacement code in our library which is included only if a particular function isn’t available.
• Add executable code that makes use of both the libraries.
• Add a third, shared library (DLL/.so) and an executable which makes use of the shared library at runtime.

• Create a version of UnitTest++ which is built using SCons, so we can build it easily on all platforms (as we have SCons installed anyway).
• Change the simple tests written in the repository code to use UnitTest++.
• Work through an example of Test Driven Development using SCons and UnitTest++.

• Install the latest version of Buildbot and set up buildmaster and buildslaves.
• Set up automatic nightly building and testing of code (using SCons and UnitTest++), and submitting results.
• Set up one machine to do a continuous build.

This is the plan so far. If you have any suggestion of other things you’d like to work through with SCons, UnitTest++ or Buildbot, then please let me know and I may add them to the list.