Remembering the Future

WhiteHorse: The most fascinating new feature I have seen from a deployment issue is WhiteHorse. It is not a builds program like Msbuild, but more importantly it is a modeling/framework using policies and gui representations of the logical and physical layers of your enterprise. Whitehorse can enforce these policies on a developer box. Most enterprise deployments encounter severe bugs at deployment because of the developers ignorance of their final environment. I have overcome these issues by completely understanding the deployment environment and then reproducing that environment on in my developer environment. That can manifest itself as many machines to gain physical separation (firewall issues and remoting realities), developing with developer tool on the actual platform server OS(such as Windows 2003), and enforcing authentication and authorization representing the deployed environment. Well I would like to have all of that on my portable laptop. Yes my lap top would weigh 85lbs and cost 10% of my yearly income, maybe 20% some years. I usually try to mitigate the cost of multiple machines using VM Ware, but that also demands many hard drives to get any kind of performance at all. You try to carry three hard drives on your back. If WhiteHorse can deliver I will save a lot of money, not to mention a nice pretty diagram that integrates in the IDE and helps me compel fellow developers to think about the platform they are developing for.