Small Business Developer Center on MSDN
When I talk to developers working on projects and solutions targeted at Small Businesses, here is a set of common themes that I hear from them:
- Simplicity is the name of the game
- No spare time to learn – it is done through on-the-job research, online materials, samples, etc.
- Good enough is really good enough
This basically highlights the fact that some of the challenges that these developers face tend to be different than what developers in large enterprise development shops might face.
To help address the needs of the small business developer, we designed a web site based around the top tasks that these developers are faced with regularly: integrating data between systems, building reports, building small web and windows LOB applications. The Small Business Developer Center is focused on providing practical, actionable platform guidance for developers working with small businesses.
The site content is anchored by a small business sample application and hands-on-labs - WingTip Toys is a small toy vendor with several remote sales people. The site shows how to integrate sales data using a Windows application, build reports for both the sales people and the managers using Office and SQL Server, create a public web presence and then extend the public site with a reporting section. We also added a deployment section to help show how to get the finished solution published.
Namaste!
