Monday, April 20, 2009

Malevich has setup!

I've been working on Malevich - my code review system - on and off for almost 5 months now.

It turned out to be very successful - my team was using it for all of our first milestone, and was very happy about it (we're now pushing 1500 change lists that went through the system). Many other Microsoft teams adopted it since, to the tune of at least a couple hundred people - and these are just the people who contacted me.

The biggest problem so far was the setup. The deployment was hard - it required Visual Studio, a service pack, an expansion pack, and tons of manual work. A lot of errors were made, and in many cases I had to drop by and set things right afterwards.

Not any more! The first official build is out, and it has a real setup! The setup checks the dependencies, deploys the database, publishes the web site, and configures notifier automatically, no Visual Studio is required!

So if you wanted to try Malevich but were intimidated by the complexity of installation - the wait is over. You still do have to install Server 2008 with IIS and SQL Server 2008, but the rest is done for you.

Just get the MSI here: http://malevich.codeplex.com/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=26374

Happy code reviewing!

3 comments:

DzembuGaijin said...

This is AWESOME Serge! Great project!

As I happily looking on development I only have one question left: do you relay need a "heavy artillery" like WS2008 and SQL ( from this installer pre-requisites) ?

Say, it is fine for MSFT.

But look on a "outsider"

5-clients ( is this a cheapest version ) 800$

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-Server-Standard-Client/dp/B0011F19MG/ref=pd_bbs_sr_11?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1240260763&sr=8-11

WTF? Is this REALY THAT FUCKING expensive?! ( Had no idea) $5,849.99

http://www.amazon.com/Edtn-2008-Proc-Processor-License/dp/B001B8D4Y4/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1240260791&sr=1-4

Probably I did some mistake in my search, but can is that posable that your "Free as a beer" and quite useful I believe software needs more than 6000$ investment just to work?

I think it is posable to write some thing very similar in good old C/C++ using some open libs like SQLite and put it in small single exe. That can be deployed by simple copy. Also, it may be trivial to make it cross compile on OS X and Linux as well for virtually no money ( it is command line and web UI as I understand). It may be even easier if you have Apach/PHP installed or would not mind to use external server as a "hub" to make setup and configuration trivial. ( Like on OS X it is build in as probably on most Linux distros anyway)

Granted, It will probably take more efforts compare to C# to write, but will be more "free" - without a very costly pre-requests. More like in "beer" :-)

Talking about ones, what are tricks to get Malevich run on budget in it current form? Is it posable with under XP or Vista Home with C# Express ?

Sergey Solyanik said...

Malevich definitely runs on both Vista and Win7.

This: http://msmvps.com/blogs/bernard/archive/2006/06/02/98661.aspx says that Vista Home Premium and up comes with IIS7.

As far as SQL server is concerned, you only need SQL Server 2008 Express Edition to get Malevich to run, which is free.

Express Edition has limited database size (2GB), but we've been running Malevich in a team of 50 people for 4 months, over 1500 change lists, thousands of files, and it's still under 500MB. So 2GB will last 50 people for over a year.

BTW, here is a link for SQL server pricing: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/pricing.aspx

And here's MySQL (note that their pricing is per year): http://globalspecials.sun.com/store/mysql/ContentTheme/pbPage.categoryEnterprise

Vadik said...

MySQL may be as good as dead soon: Oracle bought Sun :-)

This is very cool that Malevich can run on typical dev box ( with manual setup today?), becouse WS2008+SQL is a bit too much for small start up :-)