By Roy Lawson on 4/22/2009 10:16 AM

At last nights user group meeting which David Hayden spoke on, we got into an interesting discussion regarding TFS, Subversion, and ultimately TRAC.  My main concern with TRAC was that it wasn't integrated with the IDE where you are able to manage work items quite easily in TFS.

There may be a solution to this problem.

Read More »

By Roy Lawson on 3/17/2009 6:28 PM

The March Lakeland .NET User Group is off to a great start! I've decided to live-blog our meetings so we retain a history. Please add comments to this blog entry if you would like to continue the discussion offline.

Why Care About Parallelism aka The Inevitable Shift Download the Slides

Abstract Examine the drivers behind the current drive toward parallelism and multi-threaded programming -- from hardware considerations to user-experience demands. Find out why parallelism is a growing trend in application development and how upcoming changes in .Net and Visual Studio will make implementing these features easier than ever.

Bio Paul Jackson has been a professional software developer for almost twenty years, starting with Visual Basic 1.0 and then defecting to PowerBuilder and Java before returning to the Microsoft fold and .Net. His current focus is building line-of-business, composite client applications.

Here are some more...

Read More »

By Roy Lawson on 3/15/2009 11:35 AM

Florida, and especially Polk County, is home to some really good lakes and if you know when and where to go the fishing is great. My brother Travis and I set off fishing at 6am Sunday morning with canoe, paddles, and fishing tackle. The great thing about a canoe is that you can get in places that other boats can't – places that bass like to hide. They were hitting hard at the time we arrived, and by 9am the biting came to a stop. This trip we did catch and release.

Travis – paddling out before first light. I help. My paddle is connected to a battery.



Roy lands the first fish, a large mouth bass. $1 spinner lure does the trick.



Who's the chunkiest?



Roy lands his second large mouth bass. Not as chunky as the last one....

Read More »

By Roy Lawson on 3/14/2009 2:11 PM

One thing I feel we (the developer community) do is focus heavily on the more advanced topics. After all, he who speaks on the latest and greatest tools and advanced patterns gets the most attention and praise from fellow developers. Since moving our user group to USF Polytechnic and being forced to contemplate how to best serve those new to our field and get them more interested, it has occurred to me: we have ignored those new to .NET and are doing a bad job reaching out to them.

I would like to encourage everyone in the community (especially MVPs and User Group leaders) to provide more for the people who are the future of our profession. That's not to say that you should abandon advanced topics and the technologies that are of interest to you – but do just a little for those who are not at your experience level yet. It doesn't make you less of a developer or speaker to do 100 and 200 level topics.

In the spirit of the comments above, I'm starting a thread in my blog on basic topics. If you have a blog that covers this type of stuff please let me know and I'll use the RSS feed to integrate it into our site. Joe Healy gave me a great book to get me started – this one is Microsoft .NET: Architecting Applications for the Enterprise (by Dino Esposito and Andrea Saltarello). There are advanced topics in the book, but I'm going to focus on some of the basic topics. I'm not going to tackle the broader architecture issues – just enough to help developers build better applications....

Read More »

By Roy Lawson on 3/11/2009 9:51 PM

Unless there is a twinky taster out there, I would venture that software developer tops the list of unhealthy jobs – simply because just about everything we do is sitting down. Growing up, I was always very slender. Then I made a life choice (perhaps it should be called a death choice) to start smoking during my late teens and early twenties.

The good news is that I have been smoke free for years and no longer desire the product. The bad news is that smoking was replaced with snacking and when combined with years of IT work my body is now unhealthy. I've packed on some pounds, get winded when walking up steps, and my energy level is really low.

I don't think of myself as a big person (well didn't anyways), but it was when colleague Jeff Odell sent off some photos of our Tampa Firestarter event that I spoke at yesterday that, it hit me like a brick. I'm getting big and I've got to do something! So, I headed off to Lifestyle Family Fitness...

Read More »

By Roy Lawson on 3/10/2009 9:36 PM

Thank you Microsoft (Joe Healy) for the I.M. Wright's "Hard Code" book which is probably going to become a bloggers best friend simply because I can switch to just about any chapter and have something edgy to blog about. That's much better for my career than picking fights between Netflix and Microsoft ;-) (reference previous blog)

What is interesting about the book is that it represents 49 "Hard Code" opinion columns written by a Microsoft development manager Eric Brechner, who used the pseudonym I.M. Wright. Buy this book and you get to share the wisdom (or rubbish, depending on your perspective) with thousands of Microsoft developers internally. If you don't want to buy it, attend a user group meeting and you run a chance of winning one.

Because it's spread over time, it is interesting to see how the authors views changed progressivley, even if slightly. Because his comments could have been construed as disrespectful of Microsoft management, one wonders how he retained his job. I wonder if his comments were more tongue in cheek than serious....

Read More »

By Roy Lawson on 3/9/2009 7:36 PM

In an interesting twist, American CFOs appear to favor American outsourcers over foreign firms. The lay person may expect offshoring to become more prolific during a time of economic contraction – after all offshoring is cheaper, right? Perhaps not. Surveys have indicated that the cost savings offshore are not as large as advertised, and that large numbers of projects have failed because of communication issues and other challenges faced in offshore projects.

According to an InformationWeek article released today on the BDO Seidman 2009 Technology Outlook Survey of 100 CFOs, "62% of CFOs at leading American technology companies outsource services or manufacturing" with 22% planning to leverage American companies, 16% in China, and 14% in India. Because the survey includes manufacturing, the results appear to hide the fact that India is the favorite IT offshoring destination. Manufacturing is the most common function outsourced, followed by IT services. Based on the millions of American jobs lost in manufacturing, this is clearly an issue that American IT workers need to be thinking about.

...

Read More »

By Roy Lawson on 3/4/2009 11:39 PM

First, let me say that I am a big fan of Silverlight. It's a great technology and in my view it is going to change enterprise application development as we know it (eventually – say version 3 or 4).

OK, now it's truth time. I am a recent user of NetFlix and I have come to enjoy their on-demand service more than the DVDs themselves. I've watched titles that are classics that simply are not found at the video rental store. Their collection is vast. However, unless the (perceived) Silverlight issue I (and many others) am experiencing is corrected Silverlight will suffer a black eye. We all know how important first impressions are. Already people are reportedly canceling their Netflix subscriptions because of this very issue. I don't work for the company so I can't say how many – but anecdotal information (blogs) seems to suggest a substantial amount.



...

Read More »

By Roy Lawson on 3/4/2009 9:44 AM

After my last post, I wandered over to Brian Noyes' blog and read some of his comments from earlier this year on the short term forecast for .NET. He had some interesting comments overall, but what stuck out in my mind was his comments on the use of REST over SOAP and how the hype of REST will lead to people making the wrong choice. As with most emerging technologies we must avoid hype from influencing our decisions. In my view, REST is the better choice than SOAP in some situations, and not the best choice in others. So how does one make that decision? Read Brian's comments below for that answer:

http://www.softinsight.com/bnoyes/2009/01/02/NETTechnicalForecast2009.aspx

(Regarding REST): Unfortunately, I predict that more people will end up using that model instead of SOAP-based messages than probably should, just because it has the hype right...

Read More »

By Roy Lawson on 3/3/2009 11:06 PM

How can you identify the best software developer in the world (or at least your office)? Truth be told, you probably can't. Some of the best developers I know are humble, helpful, true team players, and their actions speak much louder than their words. These guys (or gals) have been tested. They have made their mistakes, resisted repeating them, and are fully aware of the fact that they can't possibly know everything there is to know. They may even use certain hair products that are just for men (or at least consider it).

I can however help you identify the absolute worst developers in the world. These are the developers with the biggest egos and unfortunately they just might be the ones sitting in a corner office – the one with a door (which is usually closed). The dangerous thing about these developers is that they truly believe that they know everything, and even scarier is that they believe everyone else is a mental case. They see themselves as the company's brain-trust and they probably have enough people fooled that they retain that corner office – for now. When they read the title of this blog – "Who is the Best Developer in the World?" – they will immediately think of themselves.

...

Read More »