We are a mid sized company and create a game engine by using C++ for all major operating systems (macOS, Windows and Linux). One issue we are facing is the amount of different configurations on developer machines. Some use different versions of Visual Studio, Xcode or other development tools. We have guide lines and a list with version numbers we officially use but at the end of the day we end up with these different configurations on everyones machine because everyone installs what they want.
Does anyone have experience with this problem, and how did you solve this? We often run into scenarios with "But it works on my machine".
I am eyeballing on (docker) containers to ensure everybody uses the same development environment, but I have my doubts its the right way to go for a C++ real time project. Any hints?
Disclaimer: I was wondering if SO is the right place to ask this question, according to MetaExchange, it is
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I am asking if anyone of you know the best solution for this case:
This semester I have to make a project with an eye tracker (Tobii Eyex), but the problem with the hardware is that it is only compatible with Windows. So my question is: Is it possible to code on Mac and then get the stuff with ease on Windows, but only in a few seconds?
I tried it with file sharing, but the problem is that I can't keep two Unity instances running on the same project.
The perfect solution would be, if I have made any changes, the Windows PC should automatically update the files.
Use Github. It will allow you to keep your entire project synced across all devices with minimal effort.
Now to test the websites I use multiple virtual machines (VirtualBox) with Web browsers.
I want to make portable versions of browsers (to collect IE, Opera, Safari, FF, Chrome and maybe another). I want that browser have development tool (e.g. like Firebug).
For virtualization apps I found several solutions:
BoxedApp
Cameyo
JauntePE
Spoon Studio / Xenocode Virtual Application Studio
VMware ThinApp
MoleBox Virtualization Solution
Tell me what there are and what should I choose for my task?
As far as I know, if to use boxedapp, your an application will run properly even if it doesn't have the right to write to the system registry.
I personally use VMWare Workstation. It has never given me problems. I'd recommend it.
In terms of what there is available out there, there is a ridiculous amount of programs to choose from.
There are my two cents! Hope this helps and good luck!
Can you please clarify what you are asking?
The assumption made by Jebego, and my understanding of your question, is that you are interesting in finding out what different Virtualization tools are available, though your comment:
I want to assemble a collection of browsers for testing as portable application. In addition to its main functions I want to be able to see html \ css \ js or something like Firebug.
Is slightly misleading as it refers to browsers.
Other useful information you may want to include is the size of your budget. You mention that you are currently using VirtualBox, which is Open Source, so I am assuming you ideally are looking for products which are free.
Anyway assuming my assumptions are correct, I can give details on a couple of options which I have experience with:
Micsoroft Virtual PC - I found Microsoft Virtual PC easy to set up and get started with. It is a free download, and if you have Windows 7 installed then I believe it is built into the OS. If you're looking for seomthing fairly basic, simply to run your application in a browser for testing purposes then this may be sufficient. Virtual PC allows you to allocate a specfic amount of RAM to each VM, but you cannot go over 3,712MB, which is pretty limiting if you need to do anything requiring significant resources inside the VM.
VMWare Server - I recently moved to VMWare Server 2.0, also a free product. I use a virtual machine for development tasks, and found that the RAM limit on Virtual PC was too low to run the developer tools and add-ins at a suitable speed. With VMWare Server, you can allocate as much RAM as you see fit (obviously you need to have it available in the host machine), and you can also specify the number of CPUs to allocate to the VM. The setup is slightly less starightforward than Virtual PC, but by no means complicated. The tools provided by VMWare offer more configuration options (such as those mentioned above).
This is a brief summary of my experience, I'd be happy to give more detail on either if you so require.
Some general things to bear in mind when choosing virtualisation software:
What OS do you plan to install on the guest? Some Virtualisation software is better suited to specific OS'es
How much poower do you need inside your guest VM? Again, this will influence your decision on which way to go.
Hope this helped, good luck with your search.
I am experimenting with different open source projects just to see which one I can work with since I am a beginner. Of course, many projects have different dependencies and programs that you must install. I want to keep things organized and I don't want to pollute my main windows account, since I use this machine for everyday computing also.
Will creating a seperate windows account on my computer help separate the dependencies for the projects? Are there any better alternatives (other than using virtual machines)?
Thanks
Although you mentioned other than them, but virtual machines are actually the best option if you're planning on working with a lot of different projects and you don't want to pollute your environment too much. If you build them right, you can have a baseline VM that is simple to revert back to if you want to start from scratch because the environment got too polluted.
The problem with only using a separate account is that many installable tools and libraries means they're still going to be made available for all users on the machine, so it doesn't keep things cleaned up. For example, if Visual Studio tools typically apply to all users on the machine. COM dependencies aren't user specific. Some things install Windows Services that need to be running most of the time, but you don't use unless you're developing for them (like SQL Server Reporting Services).
How about installing many kinds of operation system?
If you have enough money, you can buy a computer only for experiment
Virtual machines is definitely the way to go - most non-trivial software modifies more than HKEY_CURRENT_USER machine state. If you don't want full-blown virtual machines (but oh, they're sweet, especially the ones supporting state snapshots!) you could look at something like sandboxie.
I have secured the budget to upgrade the individual workstations and latops. While newer, bigger screens were welcomed with enthusiasm, the thought of re-installation tools and settings caused most of them to blanch and I got one "Do I really have to?".
How much downtime do you usually have when you move to a new machine?
Do you employ tools or script to set up your dev environment, tools, db's, debuggers etc.specifically for a windows environment?
Is there a standard image that you keep and then let devs move in and tweak the machine as necessary?
My company essentially virtualized in order to stop wasting so much time with upgrades/system failures.
Whenever a desktop/laptop failed, we'd have to spend a better part of a day fixing it and reloading the software.
So, we went out, bought iMacs for everyone and loaded Parallels (a VMware like product for OSX) on them. Then we made a standard dev image for everyone, and just copied it to everyone's machines.
Essentially, if anyone's configuration got messed, we just loaded in a fresh image and kept on truckin'. Saved a lot of time.
Some additional benefits:
When new software is out, we just make a new image and distribute it. Not OS re-installs or anything like that.
If hardware changes, doesn't matter, just move the image.
You can run multiple os's concurrently for testing
You can take "snapshots" in your current image and revert if you really messed something up.
Multiple builds on the same machine...since you can run multiple os's.
Surprisingly the overhead of a virtualized system is quite low.
We only run the software on a real machine for performance tuning/testing purposes.
One day is generally enough for upgrades. I do keep digital copies of VS.NET so much easier to install.
When it comes to other tools generally it's just better to go to websites and install the latest version.
Also it's a good idea to install tools whenever you need instead of trying to install everything at the same time.
The last time I upgraded to a new machine, I think it took about 4 hours to get most of the necessary tools reinstalled. Over time, I've had to re-install quite a few more tools, but I think it's worth it.
If you can get a ghost/image of the default tool set (Visual Studio 2003-2008, Eclipse, NetBeans, or whatever you're using), and all the major service packs, that would help a lot with the initial setup.
I think the downtime is definitely worth it, a new, faster machine will make anyone more productive.
You can have 0 downtime by having both machines available. You will not have as much productivity.
This depends on the number of tools needed by the development team. Tools such as Rational Software Architect can take hours to install on their own. The exercise of having the developers list the applications they need before moving in can help you optimize strategies to deploy effectively. Both machines should be available for a fixed period of time and having them available can allow develoers to both work and kick of long running installs at the same time.
Creating a standard image based on the list provided to you can improve efficiency. Having the relvant software on a share could also let them cherry pick as needed and give the development team the feeling that they can go back as necessary.
Tools to assist in catpuring user settings exist. I have only ever had experience with Doctor Mover. If you have 100 or more developers to move it may be worth the cost. I can't complain too much but it wasn't perfect.
I have never had a problem with just getting a list of all the software a particular users uses. In fact I have never found the base install to be much of an issue. The parts I tend to spend the most time on are re-configuring all of the users custom settings (very common with developers I find). This is where it is very valuable to have the old machine around for awhile so that the user can at a minimum remote-desktop to it and see how they have things set up.
Depending on how your team works, I would highly recommend having every user receiving a new computer get the latest source tree from your source control repository rather than by copying entire directories. And, I would also recommend doing that before actually sending the old workstation elsewhere or even disconnecting it.
One of the great things about tools like CVS and SVN is that it is quite easy for developers to end up with an unofficial "personal branch" from things that are not properly checked in, merged, etc.
While it will cost time to deal with the shift if things are not properly synchronized, it is an invaluable opportunities to catch those things before they come to haunt you later.
The Free MS Windows replacement operating system ReactOS has just released a new version. They have a large and active development team.
Have you tried your software with it yet?
if so what is your recommendation?
Is it time to start investigating it as a serious Windows replacement?
Targeting ReactOS specifically is a bit too narrow IMO -- perhaps a better focus is to target compatibility with WINE. Because ReactOS shares so many of its usermode DLLs with WINE, targeting WINE should result in the app running just fine on ReactOS.
Of course, there will always be things that WINE can't emulate well (hence the need for ReactOS). In this way, it seems that if something runs in WINE, it will run in ReactOS, whereas the fact that something runs in ReactOS doesn't mean that it will necessarily run in WINE.
Targeting WINE is well documented, perhaps easier to test, and by definition, should make your app compatible with ReactOS as a matter of course. In this way, you're not only gathering the rather large user base of current WINE users, but you're future-proofing yourself for whenever anyone wants to use your app with ReactOS.
In their homepage, at the Tour you can see a partial list of office, tools and games that already run OK (or more or less) at ReactOS. If you subscribe to the newsletter, you'll receive info about much more - for instance, I was quite surprised when I read most SQL Server 2000 tools actually work on ReactOS!! Query Analyzer, OSQL and Books Online work fine, Enterprise Manager and Profiler are buggy and the DBMS won't work at all.
At a former workplace (an all MS shop) we investigated seriously into it as a way to reduce our expenditure in licenses whilst keeping our in-house developed apps. Since it couldn't run MSDE fine, we had to abandon the project - hope in the future this will be solved and my ex-coworkers can push it again.
These announcements might as well be also on their homepage - I couldn't find them after 5 mins. of searching, though. Probably the easiest way to know all these compatibility issues is to join the newsletter, or look for its archives.
I have been tracking this OS' progress for quite some time. I believe it has all the potential to really bring an OSS operating system to the masses for it breaks the "chicken and egg" problem: it has applications and drivers from the very beginning (since it aims to have full ABI compatibility with MS Windows).
Just wait for their first beta, I won't be surprised if they surpass Linux in popularity really soon after that...
Post Edit: Found it! Look at section Support Database, it's the web place to go look for whether a particular piece of hardware of some program works on ReactOS.
ReactOS has been under development for a long long time.
They were in some hot water earlier because some of their code appeared to be line by line dissasembly of some NT kernel code, I think they have replaced all of it.
I wouldn't bother with cross platform testing until they hit the same market penetration as Linux, which I would wager is never.
Until ReactOS doesn't randomly crash just sitting there within 5 minutes of booting, I won't worry about testing my code on it. Don't get me wrong, I like ReactOS, but it's just not stable enough for any meaningful testing yet!
No, I do not think it is time to start thinking of it as a Windows replacement.
As the site states, it's still in the Alpha stages. More importantly, whos Windows replacement? Yours? Your users? The former is one thing, the latter is categorically a no-go.
As an aside, I'm not really sure who this OS is targetting. It has to be people who rely on Windows software but don't want to pay, because people who simply don't want Windows can use MacOS / Linux, and the support (community or otherwise) for these choices is good.
Moreover, if you use Linux you already have some amounts of Windows software support via Wine.
Back to people who rely on Windows software but don't want to pay. If they are home users they can just simply pirate it, if they are large business users they already have support contracts and trained people etc. It's hard enough for large businesses to be OK to update to new versions of Windows, let alone an open source replacement.
So I suppose that leaves small businesses who don't want to obtain illegal copies of MS software, can't afford the OS licences and rely on software that only runs on Windows and has bad of non-existent Wine compatibility.
It is a useful replacement for Windows when it runs 'your' software without crashing. At the moment it is not a general purpose os as it is too unstable (being only alpha) but people have used ReactOS successfully in anger for specific tasks already. As a windows replacement it has multiple potential uses, sandbox systems, test and development systems, multiple virtual instances, embedded devices, even packaging/bundling legacy apps with their own compatible o/s. Driver and application compatibility, freed from Microsoft's policy of planned obsolescence and regular GUI renewal, what's not to like?