Hi Robert, I work for a public university so I understand some of the challenges you're facing as I have faced them as well. A couple resources that might be helpful: 1) ITANA is a higher ed focused Enterprise Architecture collaboration that deals with these types of situations. I highly recommend you check out their material here: Home - Itana - Internet2 Wiki[^] 2) If your institution uses EAB, Gartner or Educause I would setup an analyst call to discuss your specific needs. These calls are usually including as part of your university membership. I find that most IT folks don't know that they have access to these resources. Posting to the Educause forum is a great way to get resources that are higher ed specific. I have 10 years in private sector IT and 10 years in higher ed IT. It is hard for people who have never worked in higher ed to understand that things just work differently until they experience it. I hope this helps.

Eric

We are doing it at my place of employment and it works well. Download source here: GitHub - NuGet/NuGet.Server: The home of the NuGet.server package, a lightweight standalone NuGet server[^] Load it up on VS and deploy to a web server near you. You will need to update the web.config settings and maybe some director permissions.

Eric

We use a tech stack that includes NHibernate in our enterprise environment and rarely have issues. It helps with TDD. I would suggest pairing it with a good IoC Container (like AutoFac) though. Side note, you can run raw SQL, HQL or execute stored procedures from NHibernate. Here is our server side stack: C# (WebApi) AutoFac (IoC Container) Fluent NHibernate (ORM Tool) MsTest (Testing Framework) Sqlite - InMemory Database configuration (Used in unit testing) MSSQL Server - Production NHiberante ASP.NET Identity OAUTH/OWIN Middleware Implementation Client Side: Twitter Boostrap (Front-end framework HTML framework) Typescript (Staticly typed, Class-based Transcompiler to JavaScript) AngularJS (MV* Framework) UI Bootstrap (Bootstrap components written in AngularJS) Font Awesome (Icon Framework) Jasmine (Javascript/Typescript Testing Framework)

Eric

Nathan Minier wrote:

Resharper.

:thumbsup:

Eric

+1 for pluralsight.com

Eric

WINSCP for the win

Eric

Documentation just before vacation | CommitStrip[^]

Eric

Ri_ wrote:

SOAP shudder

+1

Eric

The other issue they were having is that there isn't an easy way to write comments into JSON.

Eric

Plus 1 for Pluralsight. Best technical training out there.

Eric

I have used both Entity Framework and NHibernate extensively. I would say that if you are using the ASP.NET 5 (ASP.NET CORE) technology then EF7 is a good tool but if you aren't using the cutting edge ASP.NET tech then I prefer NHibernate but EF 6 will work as well. Please note, EF7/ASP.NET 5 (CORE) are not out of beta yet... Like others have pointed out, this also depends on your project. From my recollection, NHiberante has the ability to connect to a lot more data providers so if you need to integrate with MySQL, MsSQL, Oracle, etc. in the same project then NHiberante might be a better choice. Food for though

Eric

When you stop writting SQL and let your ORM handle it! ;P

Eric

I use 4 at home: Monitor 1 - Code Monitor 2 - Web Browser (for code) Monitor 3 - Web Browser (for research) Monitor 4 - Other (Music, Youtube vids, RDP sessions, log viewing (tail -f), etc) At work I only have 3 and I can say that i do miss my 4th monitor... I guess it is one of those things: once you have it you don't want to be without it.

Eric

Oh GWT... We thought you were the future and then Google released AngularJs. On a serious note, we have a GWT app that we are retiring after 6 years and migrating to Angularjs. GWT just has to much baggage. We found that we could get a lot more done using a restful json API and Angularjs.

Eric

I would recommend using the open source version of SugarCRM to start.

Eric

While doing linq in VB.NET is possible it is implemented much better in C#.

Eric

Launch what you have and do bi-weekly sprint meetings. So launch on day 1 and decide on what feature/features to release in two weeks. Then sprint toward those and only those features, leaving your yourself some time to fix bugs and then do it all over again. Some weeks might not have "features" but might be bug fix weeks. The important thing is that Management, with your input, decides what features are delivered each sprint. If a feature will take multiple sprints that break the feature up into smaller parts. This helps to avoid the software death march: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_march_%28project_management%29[^] My two cents.

Eric

Used Redmine for a long time. Had all the features we needed and is open source. You can get a pre-configured turnkey linux copy here: http://www.turnkeylinux.org/redmine[^]

Eric

I am constantly formatting the document. In VS it is Ctrl+E, D. This keeps the braces matched up.

Eric

My primary way of learning technology is to use youtube coding tutorials. I ALWAYS start with youtube when learning a new technology and branch out to written tutorials from there. If you want to learn c# this is one of the BEST video tutorial playlists i have found https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAC325451207E3105[^]

Eric