Materials Data Centre

We've been using a wide variety of tools for teamworking and software development. These are:

www.huddle.net - a great Web 2.0 collaborative teamworking site. Very usual given that the team is spread across 4 buildings at Southampton and Tim Austin in Amsterdam. Huddle was started by a Southampton graduate too!!!

EPrints. Great repository software - need we say more!

Microsoft SharePoint. Here we've used it for the Materials Data Centre back-end. Provides lots of out-of-the-box functionality, and the new version is even better!

Visual Studio 2008 and 2010 Beta. The MDC software has been built on .NET, coded in C#. So Visual Studio is the natural IDE of choice. We love it for its productivity benefits.

SVN. The University of Southampton centrally hosts our SVN server, meaning we don't have to worry about it. We're using the AnkhSVN plug-in for Visual Studio, so our version control is truly seamless.

Skype. Great for video-conferencing, particularly between the UK and Holland. Means we don't have to cancel/postpone meetings when people are out of the office. Works a treat :)

XML validator - www.validome.org - used to check out our XML schema validation. MDC uses the built-in XML validator in SharePoint, but we used this tool to double-check the validity of our MatDB schema.