I finally spent some time to upgrade this blog to Community Server v1.1 and deleted all the spam old .Text blog had collected. To prevent SPAM, I have set comments to be moderated. I wrote a small ASP.NET app to re-direct the URLs to this new site. Hope that works for everyone.

These folks have done a great job in documenting how VSTS helps the SDLC process. If ever there was a picture that was worth a million words, this is it. Microsoft needs to use this picture for their VSTS marketing efforts and hire these folks.

Eric Sink has a great article on Tenets of Transparency for ISVs. You can extend this to individuals in any job role. The more transparent you are, the faster you can get your work done. Start with a simple exercise, before attending any meeting, send an email documenting your expectations for that meeting. You will be amazed how quickly the...

Along with Comega, the MS research folks have come up with Spec#, which is oriented towards developing higher quality software by adding features like non-null types, checked exceptions, method contracts, model-based testing, etc. The great things about these two research projects are that they extend and build on C#, which increases the...

One of the reasons projects spin out of control is poor estimation and scheduling of work. There have been tons of material on estimation but scheduling has not got the same coverage.   One of the common pitfalls of scheduling is mapping a project plan estimated numbers to a team member at 40 hours a week. Let’s run though this with...

One of the points raised by the NIH (Not Invented Here) folks is Reusing software artifacts does not encourage innovation. The fallacy with the argument is that if there is already a reusable artifact, then by definition your artifact cannot be innovative. You are just reinventing the wheel and trying to claim that your wheel is better than all...

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QuikChannel was my second product concept. It was conceived in 1997 during the IE 4.0 beta, which came up with the concept of channels using a format called CDF. The problem I had with the Microsoft channel concept was that publishers control what you see and I wanted to transfer that control to the end user. The idea was to create aggregate...

Looks like Som and his team finally heard Developers and .NET 3.0 will ship on XP with Avalon and Indigo support. Linux Desktops must be doing really well for MS seems to feel the pressure to ship Longhorn without WinFS. This is a good decision for .NET developers as it gives them a wider market for Avalon and Indigo. Now that this...

Charles Petzold's Programming Windows book, First Edition helped me to write the first Circuit Schematic Editor for Windows 3.0 as my college project. This interview with Charles brought back a lot of memories. I am happy not to be the only one who used the 4.77Mhz PC or ran Windows 2.03 using only two floppy...

Eric Sink has a good article on product pricing strategies on MSDN. It is a must read for anyone in the software business. If you are developer and don’t understand software pricing you will have no idea how commercially viable that widget you are developing is. Pricing is a complex issues and this article covers that all the main points...

Avik Sengupta has a good introductory article to IKVM, which can be best described as a Java Virtual Machine for the .NET CLR. So if you are creating a .NET application, but want to use that cool new Java library that doesn't yet have a .NET counterpart, here's a solution for you. Conversely, if you are a Java developer who wants to call a .NET...

The Java world has portal standards called WSRP and portlets. Major Java portals seem to support it. It allows you to write a portlet using web services and defines standards for local portal component behavior. It's high time the .NET world adopts some standards in the portal market segment. For example, if I want to write a component to a...

The biggest mistake a product manager can make is not understand the difference between the problem and a solution. For example, Jill knows that Mark’s birthday is in a few days and she would like to send Birthday wishes. She can send a greeting card, email or call Mark. All these are different solutions to the same problem – Jill...

Peter Donker has a good article on the difference between tacit and explicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge denotes the knowledge embedded in artefacts such as documents and databases. Tacit knowledge refers to the knowledge in people’s heads.The usefulness in this distinction lies in the fact that explicit knowledge is easily duplicated...