Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Success is relative.

I have found out that the success of a project is relative to expectations. Some might say that success can be measured in money. This is also true for long term measurements... For short term money is a bad unit for measuring success. Some sales people think that money is the way to create success, which leads to over selling instead of thinking long term success.

I have always thought that sales is the tool, not the goal.. The goal is to deliver something our customers like and would like to have more of. Or put in another way: deliver what the customer expects. The only way to be able to do this is by knowing the customers expectation, and at an early stage adjust them if we can't deliver what they expect.

Monday, July 17, 2006

VS.Net is for Mort

I have read the blog of Scott Bellware about the issue of MS targeting development applications towards the Mort personallity of their user stereotype. (Mort is the: don't think, just implement type). I came up with some thoughts.

It doesn't come as a surprise to me that this is what they are doing with their development tools. To me dotnet has always been the point and shoot version of Java. They have added some syntaxes that don't add any functionality, and they have removed some so that the developer is not bothered by the compiler when using exceptions (for me personally I would rather have exceptions syntax errors caught compile time than runtime).

VS.Net is not a bad tool, but it is not directed towards my needs. I like to focus on structure and maintainability. I like to be in control because thats the only way I can be creative.

VS.Net is like a DSL for programmers that are not too sure of them selfes. In 10 minuttes you can create a brand new application using technologies you never heard of before. You probably won't know what is going on in the program, and you will have a hard time maintaining it. Perfect for the Mort type :)

I have been concerned with making a standard product extendable, and to this VS.Net could be great. I though of creating a DSL so that the programmer doesn't actually have to focus on what is happening, but just drag a few boxes together and thereby extending the product. But if functionality is served like this, is there any need for a developer? Wouldn't a Mort like sales person be sufficient?

For me there is no real alternatives for programming .Net. I have only tried CSharpdeveloper which seems great. But it doesn't support ASP.Net :( Until ASP.Net and Windows.Forms is opened up like the CLR and C#, the open source community will have a hard time keeping up with MS changes in technologies (I still haven't found any technical reason to why they changed asp.net compilation completely in asp.net 2.0).


What I like about Eclipse is that it helps me do what I need. Refactoring is a essensial part of working in eclipse. I'm never suprised while working in eclipse... It doesn't copy things around. I'm always aware of what classes I'm using.