Preface

After completing my master’s degree, I moved from Poland to Germany and began working as a .NET developer for a company full of experts in ... Clarion. The Clarion folks were developing the company’s flagship—very successful leasing software—and I was left to do “the rest”: a bit of interfacing with web services (no way to do it from Clarion at that time), a rewrite of a Pocket PC leasing calculator, a piece of a website for a customer in Switzerland, and so on.

Over time, I was given more and more small software gems to manage. “How about introducing a source-control system?” I thought. I was uneasy about the “zip and store on a share” method my old friends were using. Fortunately, my bosses were open-minded, and I was given a free hand. I could do whatever I wanted to make my work life easier. And believe me, there was a lot to change! I started with Visual SourceSafe and a plug-in for Visual Studio. This made a difference, but I didn’t stop searching.