Version 3, Code generation and testing.

So, Version 2 is continuing to work remarkably well for me. Today I added yet more database fields and functionality and again things went really well. My little SchemaUpdate method is making deployment a breeze and  Fluent NHibernate is making the code changes themselves incredibly easy.

But, the plan with Version 3 is to make software that I can sell in the local community cheaply and quickly and I'm fearing that I'll end up finding that no 2 customers are as much alike as I'd like to think. My original idea was to have a "core" product that likely wouldn't meet anyone's needs out of the box, but which I could expand as needed and slowly build "core" variations for various industries as well. So, an application for a restaurant would have some of the same concepts as an application for flower shop, but neither would flow in the same fashion, look the same or have identical databases. But if I did software for 2 different restaurants, the hope is that they look and act close enough to each other that when I go to write restaurant app number 2 I'm making more cosmetic changes than anything else.

The fear, I guess, is that I'm wrong even on that. Which got me thinking that maybe the better way to go is to build code generation software upon the framework and design principles I've learned along the way so that building an application from scratch that will take less time instead of building a core application and hoping it meets the needs of customers close enough that I don't need a complete re-write every time.

I still need a testing framework. Up until now the applications I have been doing have a single modal screen open at any one time and the functionality on a single screen had been very concise, so manually testing, while still not ideal has sufficed for now. Maybe I'm moving too fast. See! Putting my ideas in a blog is helping me. I think I'll slow down and decide on a framework for testing. Visual Studio has one built in and there is also NUnit I know of to consider, so I guess the research will begin on that when I have free time this week.