JasonMcC's WebLog

Developing Applications for Small Business

My job has changed recently to focus on the needs of developers who service small businesses. I can now talk about some of the work I've been doing with the launch the Small Business Developer Center.

I've been looking at this space for about a year now with a view to better understanding their needs and requirements. I've found that often our MSDN content and the scenarios we target for Visual Studio are a little too complex for the needs of this market. I've developed this new MSDN property initially to provide a clear and general overview of the Microsoft tools and products that can be used to build cost effective solutions for cash constrained small businesses.

If you are new to the Microsoft platform having come from a PHP or even VB6 development environment, then this site is for you.  We built the content (articles, videos and hands-on-labs) around the needs of a fictitious small business called WingTip Toys. A fully working sample is built from what I've heard are common needs for these small businesses, build reports, integrate data between different systems, build a web presence and manipulate data using Windows applications.

I'd love your feedback! Remember that this site isn't intended for the Microsoft developer that is already very familiar with our technology platform, rather for developers new to Microsoft's platform stack looking for an on-ramp. I'll collect feedback here on my blog for now and will have a forum created within the next few weeks.

If you are a consultant and provider of development services for small businesses and have any suggestions for what you'd like to see, please let me know!

Jason

Dynamic Languages on the .NET Framework in Silverlight

I’m sure you’ve all been drinking the MIX from the conference that’s going on in Vegas at the moment, but in case you haven’t I wanted to call this out. Dynamic Languages are becoming an important new RAD tool to be familiar with, especially when consuming and aggregating web services.

 

We announced at MIX a Dynamic Language Runtime that will be shipped as part of the .NET Framework inside Silverlight. That means multiple dynamic languages supported by the .NET Framework in multiple-browsers – really amazing.

 

The mechanics and design goals for the DLR are discussed by one of the lead architects, Jim Hugunin over on his blog. You should check it out. He’ll be updating the series over the coming weeks, now that the wraps are off.

 

Well done Jim and the whole DLR team.

Visual Studio 2005 Keyboard Shortcut Posters

Visual Studio 2005 keybaord shortcuts help make you more productive by giving quick access to common and not-so-common functions within the IDE. I've had wall posters designed for each of the popular langauges in Visual Studio 2005 for you to print out locally. Best when printed on paper sized A3 or larger.

Print ready poster PDFs are now available at the Microsoft download center. Happy coding.

Visual Basic 2005, Visual C# 2005 and Visual C++ 2005

 

Use Visual Studio to host your development language

The 3rd Visual Studio SDK release is cool for many reasons, but mostly because it's the first release of the SDK that allows developers to use Visual Studio to host any language targeting any runtime. Now you can take advantage of intellisense, syntax checking and the project system to host any type of programming system you chose to build support for.

Check it out at the VSIP Members site.

This will be made available on the MS Downloads site shortly which will avoid the registration process needed at the VSIP site. Oh, and we've posted the VS SDK docs into MSDN online. Very cool to see the team opening this up to a wider audience.

Functional programming for the .NET Framework

Our Microsoft Research team in Cambridge, UK have recently spoken with the kids over at Channel 9 about their functional language, F#.

If you're interested in programming in a functional way rather than imperative (looking a the world through function-coloured glasses!) then you should check out part 1 of this 2 part look at F#. It's given by Don Syme, the guy who put generics in the CLR. Part 2 should post within a day.

Generate MSDN style documentation from your code

This looks very interesting and still has a cool name!

Sandcastle

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=E82EA71D-DA89-42EE-A715-696E3A4873B2&displaylang=en

Documentation Compilers For Managed Class Libraries
Enabling managed class library developers to easily create accurate, informative documentation with a common look and feel.

 

Language-Integrated Query and ADO.NET Futures discussion on Channel 9

Anders Hejlsberg (.NET Language innvoation) and Sam Drucker (Data access programmability layer) got together to discuss the new Language-intergrated query (LINQ) as it relates to ADO.NET on channel 9 this week. A theoretical overview of LINQ and how LINQ applies to ADO.NET (Datasets, SQL/relational and Entities) is covered.

 

Manage many Windows XP machines with new tool

If you are involved with setting up or administering computers in a shared network - like an internet cafe or a community computer centre - then you'll be familiar with the difficulty in trying to maintain a consistent look and feel to each of the PCs. To help do just this, Microsoft downoad centre notified me of a new utility for y'all - the Microsoft Shared Computer Toolkit for Windows XP

New mice and keyboards announced

I particularly like the raised front of the new ergo-keyboard. Check out some photos here and the info here.

Juicy XBOX 360 details

Give me one - now! http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=60737

Performance Advisor for Windows Server 2003

I'm sure most of you would've seen this before but I thought it was useful. Download this free tool to capture detailed performance counter information and produce reports to help do root-cause analysis on your Windows Server 2003 machines. It's the Microsoft ® Windows Server ™ 2003 Performance Advisor

MSNs Virtual Earth video

I found this quite amusing take on how information is collected for MSN's Virtual Earth service and thought it blog worthy.

Next generation windowing system demo

The guys at Channel 9 have come up with another brilliant video interview - this time one of the developers on the Avalon team (Daniel Lehenbauer) walks us through what Avalon is and how you would assemble and render a 3D enabled windows application. Avalon will ship as part of WinFX and will be available on Longhorn, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003. If you've got 25 mins and wanted a primer on 3D modelling and our support for it I'd highly recommend this video.

NT Kernel design whiteboard sessions on Channel 9

I had to post about this. I'm sure it's been seen on blogs.msdn but I just finished watching the Channel 9 four part stream with NT Kernel Architect - Dave Probert. Check out the parts here. He gets deep into the guts of the kernel including the object manager, scheduler, registry NT APIs vs Win32 APIs and the history behind the kernel's design. Great stuff.

Funny Geek-Shirts

I was in a meeting with our VS Team System devloper group and had to quickly post about a "geek-shirt" I saw there. I'm sure you've all heard of the famous manly S.S.S. morning ritual of "Shi*, shower and shave".

Here's the product developer equivalent I spotted on the back of a t-shirt today:

"Ship, shower and shave - the second two will have to wait" - I laughed out loud.

There was the famous "Drag me, drop me, treat me like an object" shirt about ten years back and more recently "My compiler compiled your compiler - Visual C++"

Who says geeks aren't cool?!? ThinkGeek has a tonne of this stuff but I thought I share the particularly funny ones to brighten your day.