16 May 2007 in Business, Events | Comments (2)

This evening I went along to the Unlimited Potential (UP) event entitiled “Angels & Demons” which informed people about various financing options that are available for new (and not so new) businesses. I’ve been to several UP events before this one but I can say with certainty this was one of my favourites. The format was great, I always enjoy it when there are several speakers talking for a short period of time, perhaps I’m too easily distracted but it just keeps me interested.

By far a huge value of these types of events is the networking afterwards. It’s very enjoyable chatting with people about what they’re up to as well as catching up with old contacts and seeing how their businesses are growing. I always leave inspired and amping to take things up a level.

At one part of the evening I was somewhat shocked in myself when I found myself talking with Andrew Mayfield (from Spikefin). How is it that it took an event like this for me to actually engage with somebody that has his office about 15 paces from mine? It was a bit of an eye opener to needing to add an extra element of networking to my day to day business activities.

The presentations were also useful – informative, amusing in parts and genuinely interesting content. All the presenters delivered well and I’d strongly encourage any other ITC professionals out there to come along to the next event. It is an asset to Wellington having such a vibrant group of people who have shared interests getting together to meet.

http://www.up.org.nz/

- JD

15 May 2007 in Business, Mindscape | Comments (0)

I’ve just finished posting about how Mindscape has become the exclusive New Zealand partner for CastleStronghold. For more information about the arrangement then check out our formal announcement at our blog.

I welcome any questions regarding this.

- JD

11 May 2007 in Mindscape | Comments (2)

Phew! We got our first Beta release pushed out to our beta testers today and what can I say – it’s a real buzz to be pushing products out to people even at this stage of the development cycle! It got me thinking about the school of thought that shipping early and often is important for ensuring a great product in the long term. There are additional benefits than just a great product, it gets the team buzzing that their hard work is being put to use.

What is LightSpeed?

LightSpeed is a domain modelling framework that is built on best practices and aims to enable users to get up and running with their domain models fast and easily. Our primary goal was to reduce the effort required to develop solutions that require a domain model. I’ll be posting more about this product in the next few weeks. I know I’m bias but this is one framework that I know I would personally use even if I wasn’t involved in the development, it really saves time and is easy to get working with.

LightSpeed’s design philosophy is centred on:

• Convention over configuration.
• Support idiomatic .NET domain models: (Data binding etc.)
• Highly usable API and low barrier to entry.
• Internalizes best practice patterns: Session per request, Unit of Work etc.
• Testability built in.
• Small, lightweight and performant.
• Solve the 95% case – i.e. more like Rails than NHibernate.

Can I be a beta tester?

If you are interested in joining our Beta it’s not too late, email me and I’ll arrange for you to be added to the list.

I’m off to my brothers engagement party this weekend for a bit of a break. We have a whole pile of announcements to make next week, keep an eye on the Mindscape Blog to see them

- JD

10 May 2007 in Events, Microsoft, Mindscape | Comments (0)

I’m really pleased to have been given the opportunity speak at Remix in Melbourne in late June. Clearly Mix07 in the US was pretty huge this year (so huge I’ve not added to the echo chamber about the cool announcements, everyone knows already and it’s great to see Microsoft creating an event down under to bring some of that vibe closer to home.

The event has two tracks, a developer and a designer track. It seems this year is all about focusing on bringing those two camps closer (about time I say!) so if you’re a developer you should bring your designer friends along with you. I’m delivering a presentation to each track, one on standards and the other on pushing your applications further.

Seats are limited so I’d strongly urge anybody who is interested to go and sign up. It’s inexpensive for a two day conference and you get a free copy of Expression Web for attending.

Click here to visit the Remix 07 website.

I look forward to seeing you there,

- JD

1 May 2007 in .Net, Mindscape | Comments (0)

This is a bit of cross pollination but we are currently looking for beta testers for our first product. If you’re keen then head over to my post about becoming a beta tester on the Mindscape blog.

http://www.mindscape.co.nz/blog/?p=20

Thanks,

- JD

27 April 2007 in .Net, Mindscape | Comments (0)

Recently it seems local .NET developers are picking up parts of the Castle Project (Monorail, ActiveRecord etc) and there has been a bit of discussion going on regarding how certain things should be done. It’s great to see this framework being picked up, it really does aid creating more robust and maintainable solutions. As with anything new that you’re learning it can sometimes be daunting and challenging though.

So where should you turn if you need guidance with using parts of the Castle Project? Mindscape.

We have really smart people here who not only know how to leverage it effectively but have also contributed code back to make the Castle Project better for everyone. If you’d like to talk to us about getting some guidance or help then contact us or contact me directly.

- JD

12 April 2007 in .Net, Code | Comments (1)

I’ve always been interested in writing very small and efficient code. There isn’t much need for coding in C or Assembler these days (which I used to like playing with a few years back) so I really enjoy finding new ways of making .NET code smaller and faster. I thought I would share one inexpensive trick for making your assemblies just that bit smaller on disk.

• Bring up the properties to your C# project file.
• Click on the build tab.
• Click on Advanced.
• Set the File Alignment value to 512 (it will default to 4096 for C# projects)

For some reason Visual Basic solutions will default to 512 and C# projects seem to default to 4096. This affects how the MSIL code is written in the assembly and appropriately pads the file with zeros if required to fit code neatly into the file alignment size. Reducing this value has negligible or no affect on application start-up but can reduce your assembly size by a noticeable amount. Likely in the 10 – 20% range in terms of savings.

Always nice to get a free saving on assembly size!

- JD

11 April 2007 in Business | Comments (1)

Almost every software developer you talk with will be able to tell you that their company has some software, usually a framework, that they use internally to help develop solutions. The view is that this is done to gain a competitive advantage by enabling faster, smarter development. Companies are often hugely protective of these frameworks, many see them as containing their trade secrets, their intellectual property that nobody else knows about.

I’d argue that this business practice is coming to an end, especially in the software market. Software evolves at such a pace that maintaining these frameworks is often a forgotten task or, at the most, poorly done.

We end up with many software companies, both service and product houses, investing in themselves to build new frameworks, “better” frameworks and to up-skill staff on a non-exportable skill set. Perhaps management thinks spending money on such development doesn’t seem so bad if staff can’t use that skill to market themselves to competitors? This, of course, is a poor investment as it doesn’t only hurt your staff but makes your company less appealing to prospects as well. The market doesn’t care if your staff are efficient at using your internal framework. This clearly affects services organisations more but the message is the same.

So lets recap:

• Many companies are developing their own frameworks
• These frameworks cost each company to create, educate and maintain
• These frameworks have no exportability because they are often seen as trade secret

But wait a minute, surely this is a bad cycle for everyone? No developer wants to work at the company that uses no framework or guidance. We’re all having to keep up with each other. So how can you be different?

Flip the problem around.

Take your internal framework, make it open. Allow anyone to download it, including the source. Maintain it but also allow outsiders to submit patches. Spread the word effort outside your company. If you do it right you can reduce cost and deliver large gains to your organisation. What a difference to the way most software companies operate these days.

Look at 37Signals – this company opened up their internal framework (Rails) which is possibly the largest factor in their world wide fame and success – leading to more subscribers to their software. 37Signals can now leverage resource outside the company to further develop their framework while maintaining “editorial control” over it as they get the final say on what goes in and out. They also gain because they get thousands of people suggesting features they may never have thought of as well as reviewing the code for bugs.

Clearly not every company is in a position to do this, if we had as many open frameworks as we had software companies the problems would still persist. There are many other examples of frameworks that exist that are already open (for virtually every technology platform) so before digging deep and starting your own evaluate what is already available, if nothing exists then you have a far greater opportunity than just building an internal framework – leverage it publically!

Many many software companies sit on internal frameworks as their “competitive advantage”. A competitive advantage every single company has is no advantage at all.

- JD