I think I’ve finally come to grips with what I appreciate out of a development environment/toolset—it’s as low impact as possible.
By that I mean that it just augments what I’m attempting to do as a developer. Using Visual Studio is a really boring (and some would say even arduous) task without JetBrains’ brilliant ReSharper tool. Likewise, I appreciate the benefits of having the ability to run my unit tests without leaving the code view, or even having to run a build myself. Just right click on the test or fixture, and “Run Tests”.
Nowadays I develop Rails stuff almost exclusively on the PowerBook using TextMate (as seems to be the defacto standard for Rails developers). Tests are a cinch to add, and run (either by using the rake task, or Command-R inside TextMate itself).
The reason I bring this up is because I’ve been trying to get a decent process and tooling setup for developing in a TDD way with Flash. For anyone who’s not tried, it’s an absolute nightmare. For those who have, I feel your pain and seek your guidance.
Flash just doesn’t make a developers life easy, partly because it’s always felt a kind of bolt-on addition to make animation easier, but its just so painful trying to accomplish anything. To the point where I’ve spent a few hours trying to get AsUnit with Flash Authoring working that I’ve kind of given up. I’m sure it’s not AsUnits fault, but Flash just is not a nice place to be.
I’m hoping that someone who’s done/doing something similar can help?
Essentially I want a decent way to author some ActionScript classes that I can test with AsUnit. Or perhaps someone could suggest how to get Flash 8 working with AsUnit 2.7 on OSX?
My install seems to try and create an `AllTests.as` file in every possible place, other than my project folder—including OSX’s Applications’ pseudo-folders. When I create a test class it just seems to hang and Flash asks if I want to stop a long-running script.
Until then, I’m just in awe of how Subversion just works, and how low-impact tooling makes my coding life a more happy one.