July 2009 - Posts
I love Wired Magazine so when I saw that editor-in-chief Chris Anderson wrote a book called “Free: The Future of a Radical Price”, I immediately ordered it because I wanted to learn more about that free economy.
The Good
Anderson describes various business models that involve something that has to do with giving away stuff. It is quite interesting to see how a company can generate profits by giving away stuff. If you’re involved in an Internet startup, this is a must read.
The Bad
Even at 275 pages, the book is way too long and I was bored to death for half of the reading because Anderson repeats himself continually. I kept reading the same concepts and ideas over and over. At around 100-125 pages, it would have been a fantastic book. Also, some of Anderson ideas are also quite extreme so you take whatever feels right for you and leave the other stuff.
In summary, this is a great book for anyone involved in an Internet startup to help you understand how you can make money even if you give your app away. Just be prepared to be bored by reading the same stuff over and over.
The Microsoft/Yahoo search deal makes front page news here in Montreal with content in pages A2 and A3 that I can summarize with this: “So what?”. I don’t think that people yet realize how Google has become an advertizing monopoly.
http://technaute.cyberpresse.ca/nouvelles/internet/200907/29/01-888378-guerre-ouverte-contre-google.php
This morning, a Visual Studio security patch was waiting for me, thanks to Windows Update.
I launched the installation and everything worked fine, no errors. Wait! Windows Update prompts me again to install it. Strange but lets do it. No errors. What? Windows Update prompting me again? Lets reboot, install again and, oh well, same prompt.
Lets now look at the update’s details.
Wow! A 365.2MB patch! There’s a link to get more info, click! Ended up here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971092
Looks like there’s a link for a direct download. Lets try that. Merde! It’s a dead end.
Lets search a little bit. Bingo! A direct link to download the patch:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=294de390-3c94-49fb-a014-9a38580e64cb
Lets download and install it.
Doh! Anyone found a solution? I guess we’ll have to wait a couple of days for Microsoft to fix that fix. BTW, I’m running Vista x32 SP2.
[EDIT: The pattern looks like the installation fails if you don't have C++ installed. BTW, this Connect page has a workaround. Thanks Tatworth! ]
[EDIT #2: Microsoft has now fixed the fix and published and updated version. Download it here]
While speaking at the USI 2009 conference in Paris, I attended Todd Zaki Warfel’ paper prototyping session. The purpose of paper prototyping is for a team to create screen mock-ups with simple tools like paper, scissors and Post-Its. Team members would consist of graphic designers, engineers, marketing people and stakeholders. The goal is to produce the mock-ups without relying on software tools because clients often focus on non important stuff instead of functionalities at that stage.
I must say that I was very impressed at how effective the process is. The workshop style session had 3 teams of 6 people each and Todd asked us to produce mock-ups of some fictional software in mere minutes. Each team produced great designs complete with paper animations to represent on-screen objects, AJAX interaction and screen transitions. This is a great technique to get the functionalities out of the clients’ head.
Todd is currently writing a book about prototyping called Prototyping: A Practitioner’s Guide To Prototyping that should be published later this year.
With the release of Expression Blend 3 comes a fantastic tool called ShetchFlow that let you build fully functional mock-ups with controls skinned with a sketched look.
ShetchFlow benefits are:
- Prototyping - quickly and efficiently experiment with the flow of an application UI, the layout of the individual screens and how the application will transition from one state of the application to another.
- Interactive Review - the SketchFlow player engages clients with working prototypes, collects annotations and feedback which get displayed directly on the design surface within Expression Blend.
- Documentation - Quickly create detailed project documentation for your prototypes.
The first part of this video shows how ShetchFlow works:
There you go: One great technique to gather information from the client and one great tool to test the concepts and get clients’ feedback.
The ADO.NET team blogged about it a month ago but I just saw it. In .NET 4.0, the System.Data.OracleClient will be deprecated. It will still be there and apps using it will still work but warnings will be generated at compile time but no errors will be generated at runtime.
So what do you do if you used this provider? Well, keep your app as is, it will still work, or change the provider for the Oracle one or for a third party one.
Oracle : http://www.oracle.com/technology/tech/dotnet/msoc/index.html
DataDirect Technologies : http://www.datadirect.com/index.ssp
OpenLink: http://www.openlinksw.com/
Devart: http://devart.com/dotconnect/
The Oracle one (Oracle Data Provider for .NET) is available for free. Lets hope it will stay free ;-)
ODP.NET vs OracleClient
How to migrate to ODP.NET
Code Camp Montreal 2009 was held last May 30th and I thought I’d do a quick organization retrospective.
Website
I didn’t want to receive the session proposals by email, because that would mean to take some time to merge everything in a Word or Excel document and sent that to the committee so instead, I used a Wiki so people could enter their proposals directly. I found a nice open source Wiki called ScrewTurn Wiki that runs on ASP.NET and doesn’t require a database. It works very well however there’s a small problem with this Wiki. It’s not the functionality; it’s the name! Some people reported that their Web filtering software at work would block it because of the term “screw”.
http://www.screwturn.eu
Registration
Registration is always a big problem. How do you get people to register? How do you collect the registration info? How do you send email reminders? How do you print the registration list? A quick search lead me to EventBrite.com. It’s a SAAS registration site that doesn’t charge a dime for free events. It worked like a charm and the only downside I found was that It does not support multi languages.
http://www.eventbrite.com
Dropout Always expect at least 30% drop out when the event is free.
Location
Finding the ideal location is always hard. Downtown hotels are great because they are located well, downtown. Renting the conference rooms is not very expensive, it’s the food and drinks that are because you can’t bring your own drinks; the hotels are making their money on the drinks they sell you. You can buy 24 cans of Coke for $7-8 at the grocery store but the hotel will charge you $4.25 a small bottle of Coke. Yikes! So it’s a matter of compromise: great location + expensive food or less ideal location + the hassle of bringing your own cheap food. We went for the downtown hotel + drinks only (coffee + juice in the morning and sodas + chips in the afternoon) concept.
Lunch
The restaurants around the hotel weren’t ready to receive around 300 people. Subway went out of bread and there was only one waiter at St-Hubert. Next year, we’ll try to get a deal with St-Hubert.
Sponsors
In these tough times, I thought it would be hard to get sponsors but it wasn’t that bad. I think that the trick is to go with small sponsorship fees so it’s a no brainer for sponsors. For payment, I set the whole thing so that sponsors could pay via PayPal. Everyone except one paid that way. Why do we need sponsors? Well, we needed to cover for the location of 3 conference rooms, 3 giant screens + 3 projector podiums, coffee + juice in the morning, sodas + chips in the afternoon, photocopies and 100 T-Shirts. The whole thing ended up costing around $5,200, drinks representing half of that.
Sessions length
This year, I wanted more sessions and more new blood presenting. My first thought was to have 30 minutes sessions but after much deliberation, I settled for 40 minutes. The goal was to have speakers presenting a problem and the best practice to solve that problem. Easy concept but not easy to execute; the speakers being more familiar with 60-75 minutes sessions hated it. It’s also very hard for speakers to cut the fat because we have a tendency to always have too much material. The attendees’ reaction was mixed. I’d say that it was 50%-50%. Next year, we’ll do 50 minutes sessions ;-)
Non technical content
I wanted to try something different: having a non technical session. One speaker presented on how to speed up your reading. A great skill for anyone in our industry since we have to read so much books and documentation. Well, attendees liked it a lot!
First time speakers
Code Camps are ideal for first time speakers but I think it is very important to tell the attendees that some speakers will be speaking in front of an audience for the first time and that they should write constructive comments in their evals.
That’s it! Hope this helps.
Expression Studio 3 is now available for MSDN subscribers.
One thing you may notice is that Expression Media is longer bundled with Expression Studio 3 so if depend on it, make sure you don’t uninstall it when you uninstall Studio 2.
Microsoft has released a new Azure SDK CTP. Basically, workflow is gone.
What’s new in the Windows Azure SDK?
- The Windows Azure SDK supports developing and deploying services containing multiple web and worker roles. A service must include at least one role, of either type, and may include zero or more web roles, and zero or more worker roles.
- The new PowershellRole sample hosts the Powershell runtime within a Windows Azure role. It demonstrates a simple remote console web role as well as a worker role whose implementation is a Powershell script. The host also includes the CloudDrive sample snap-in to provide access to Windows Azure Storage from script.
What’s new in Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio
- New project creation dialog
- Support for developing and deploying services containing multiple web and worker roles. A service may contain zero or more web roles and zero or more worker roles with a minimum of one role of either type.
- Ability to associate any ASP.NET Web Application project in a Cloud Service solution as a Web Role
- Support for building Cloud Services from TFS Build
- Enhanced robustness and stability
http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsazure/archive/2009/07/20/july-ctp-of-windows-azure-sdk-released.aspx
Download it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8d75d4f7-77a4-4adf-bce8-1b10608574bb&displaylang=en
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