Version control, deployment and continuous testing in a single-person devteam (.NET platform)

Question

I am the only developer in my company, and as such I control everything from deployment to bugfix to new features. My tool of choice is VS2010 and I code primarily in ASP.NET for new features and Classic ASP (sigh) for the bugfixes. I only have VS2010 Pro and I do not have access to any of the MS Team software.

Now we are setting up a new production environment as we are moving and therefore I want to get into some new routines and habits. I currently do a lot of the bugfix directly in production code.. Not so good.

Our application and it's friends are very good candidates for some kind of continuous integration. However, since I do everything myself, I might be doing other work when a bug gets reported, and so my codebase is not ready for deployment.

I am currently trying to utilize GIT for this purpouse, using it's branches and such, and this works kind of ok most of the time, but it's a bit tedious.

Can anyone recommend a good book or some good links that deal with these issues? I realize that this whole question got kind of obfuscated, but I think you can deduct a point after reading it :)

My current devenvironment consists of Windows 7 running VS2010 and cygwin for GIT.

Answer 1

From you question is seems that you're missing a CI (Continuous Integration) process in palce to guard you against regression bugs.

I suggest using TeamCity server - it's easy to install and maintain and you should be up and running in no time.

Part of your development process should be writing tests - you can use the unit testing framework that is bundled with VS - called MSTest which TeamCity can run on each commit to make sure that nothing was broken.