The wind of change blew across my desk this Monday. After nearly 8 years of being almost exclusively a unix development team, we have radically changed direction. About 70% of the work we have planed for the next series of releases is Windows based.
Our new portal, our new back ends and finance system are all now going to be running on Windows servers.
Deep sigh. Now despite being a confirmed mac fan boy, I don't hate Windows. Before my mac days I was a windows user and I still use Windows at home from time to time. There are a few things which Windows is just better for or bits of software which while they have been ported to the mac, aren't quite as good there. For this reason I keep my trusty PC under the desk with Windows XP installed (the best version of Windows so far).
The problem I have with this new direction is that we only have 2 developers that have any experience of Windows programing at all and even then that is a fairly limited experience and we now have 5 weeks to find our way with new tools and languages and deliver some fairly significant projects ready for deployment. This I'm thinking is a big task, one that is probably to big for the small team size we have.
A side effect of this that I need to have a Windows machine on my desk! Yes I can still keep the Mac (yay!) but my trusty unix test/dev work station has had to have Windows installed on it.
To continue the unix development for our legacy products we are now using VMware. This is actually a very cool technology and one that I've been used to using on the Mac first with VirtualPC and then with Parallels. It actually, I think makes better use of my massively over powered workstation (an extreme edition pentium 4 I think), as I can keep my development machine separate from the testing machines. It also means I can run tests I in slightly more realistic environment, none of our servers on the internet run all of the services needed to provide the overall package (although they could if needed) and I can now duplicate that sort of division.
For all of this I think it is a sad day however. I think we are losing more than we are gaining, especially when I look at all the problems we have having setting up Exchange server! Yes we might be able to get support on this direct from Microsoft, but I've seen the quality of support we are getting, and it's now great!
Still it's the way we are going, so I need to put up or shut up and leave!