One of the things I hear myself saying nearly all the time sounds something like “if I were starting over…†If you make a living writing software, building websites, building databases, or writing reports you must have, on a regular basis, one of these moments.
For me, the reason I feel this way is because there are always parts of an application that aren’t quite right. I’d like a chance to make it better.
Since this isn’t always possible we’ve made a huge effort to allow for a way to add and remove parts of your application in a simple, safe, and discoverable way. In fact, this idea of “feature versions†is a first class concept in the Platform.
A feature version allows you to add metadata and code and tag it with a name that won’t be available in your live application unless you enable the version. This works for all important metadata objects – pages, mappers, fields, and extensions. Because it works with extensions you can actually write code, add it to the build, installer, and publish it to your live site without any risk of the code kicking in before the feature is absolutely ready.
Feature versions allow you to make your Great New Feature – the one you got to “start over†on – show up at several levels. The simplest way is by setting the version on an extension – for example, say you’ve built Version 1.0 of a task queue feature and you’ve written an extension for Version 2.0 that does much, much more. In this scenario, you would set the MinVersion value on the ‘task’ version to 1 and the MaxVersion to 1. Then you set the MinVersion for the next extension to 2.
When you set the value of the version to 2 your new extensions automatically kicks in. Simple, safe. You’ve just started over.
If you are lucky enough to be starting a new project then you really, really should take a good look at the NetQuarry Platform today. Contrary to the popular thinking of project managers and software architects, custom applications do NOT require custom infrastructure. Really. Spend a few minutes with us – talk to one of our customers. It’ll be short. We promise.
NetQuarry – Start Right.