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October 27, 2005
New version of Swoosh
I finished up the latest version of Swoosh today. Not a whole lot made it into this version but one important thing did. I changed how subs are made. In my tests it's quite a bit faster. Hopefully there will be time to make more of the changes I want during this upcoming basketball season and release another new version next fall. If you need some basketball statistics software, check it out.
Posted by mikel at 10:05 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 25, 2005
Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?
Petzold has an interesting article about VS where he points out lots of little annoying things about VS. Lots of stuff that I've noticed but never really thought about before.
http://charlespetzold.com/etc/DoesVisualStudioRotTheMind.html
I think it all can be summed up by this line
But Visual Studio is not interested in having you write good code. It wants you to write fast code.
Posted by mikel at 10:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 20, 2005
Products vs. Contracts
Good advice from Venture Voice
We determined that the profit level we were generating at 20 people, well, if we grew to 40 people we’d obviously double the revenue, our profit would probably be exactly the same.via Joel
Posted by mikel at 05:43 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 16, 2005
Server costs of a popular web app
Both desktop and web apps have their place depending on lots of things. One thing I hadn't considered as a small ISV though was the cost of getting popular. Nick Bradbury has a good quote.
As an aside, keep in mind how expensive it is to manage a web application. Think of all the great shareware programs you've used that were developed by one person, and then consider how that one person would handle the server costs of a popular web app. As it stands, the investment required to maintain a web-based app is greater (often far greater) than it is for a downloadable shareware product.http://nick.typepad.com/blog/2005/10/web_201_release.html
Posted by mikel at 01:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 14, 2005
IBM to open source Rational Software
IBM is submitting a good amount of its Rational software process platform and related material to the Eclipse Foundation, the first step toward open-sourcing that material.http://crn.com/sections/breakingnews/breakingnews.jhtml?articleId=172300361
How will IBM make million dollar donations to CPT in the future if they are now pricing the software at $0? Of course, I agree with Eric Sink about RUP.
Posted by mikel at 03:32 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 13, 2005
CultureInfo.InvariantCulture
There was a bug in Swoosh found by a user in Belgium. I wasn't correctly handling the different decimal seperators and date formats for the different cultures. The easy fix was to add CultureInfo.InvariantCulture to the .Parse methods. Here's some more info on storing DateTime values in .NET
http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/programming/bcl/faq/DateAndTimeFAQ.aspx#Question9
Posted by mikel at 05:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 12, 2005
Setting Priorities
Another good and timely article from Joel.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/SetYourPriorities.html
Maybe I'd do better though if I didn't procrastinate by reading Joel on Software the instant it comes in instead of writing or selling software :)
Posted by mikel at 10:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 10, 2005
BlackBerry
Kyle found some resources about BlackBerry development and encouraged the CPT 355 students to look into developing for the platform. I've never used one, but lots of people seem to have them. Just saw this on slashdot though.
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/05/10/10/0654239.shtml?tid=155&tid=215&tid=193
Posted by mikel at 08:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack