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A couple of weeks ago I happened to stumble onto a treasure chest of insider Microsoft information through something they call Channel9. It’s Microsoft’s attempt to provide some transparency into their development processes and demonstrate some new technologies that will be coming through the pipeline in the future.

Personally I’ve become quite hooked on all the videos they have posted, it’s not all codemonkey stuff either. For example here’s some of the topics that I’ve really been enjoying:

• Windows Vista – All kinds of stuff here, especially since PDC, demos of new features and tech.
• Going Deep – Advanced topics, Vista Transactional File System, Windows Memory Manager Design
• Visual Studio – Neat features and tips for current and future versions of Visual Studio
• Microsoft Partners – Visits to Microsoft partners for demos of new apps and tech.

Most of the videos range in length from 15 minutes to an hour and aren’t just canned press releases, the format is very much ‘in your face’ with the interviewer using an amateur handheld camera in a one-on-one situation with the people directly responsible for the product being featured. I love these videos, especially from a developer point of view, it’s a great opportunity to see how software development is done at a huge corporation like Microsoft. They’re also really cool because I’m now very excited about what I’m going to be able to do when Vista ships next year, both from a user perspective and from a developers. After watching many of these videos I have a greater understanding for why certain things were done they way they were at the Windows architecture level even though it might not have made sense from a user’s perspective.

I strongly recommend any developers, and especially .Net developers, head on over to the site and check out some of the videos. There’s also a fairly active forum commmunity with developers and users from all over the world talking about technology.

Go Channel9 Guy!

Over the weekend I was giving a lot of thought about whether or not I was going to release an application I’m working on as an open-source project. Then I got a little off track thinking about how to monetize the thing if it ended up being of that quality and popularity. Eventually I came to the following point: most open-source software companies charge their customers for customization and support, this led me to the following question:

Is it in the developers best interest to create reliable and stable software when their key source of income is supporting said software?

It’s an interesting paradox, if a software vendor writes an application that is intuitive and easy to use, and also stable and correct, how will they make money if they’re giving it away for free? The ease of use would eliminate most of the need for installation assistance and general operations. Having the software be stable and reliable will reduce the amount of support required for application problems, thus again reducing the vendor’s primary revenue streams.

This makes me wonder if perhaps one of the big things holding back open source is that it is difficult to make money off of well designed and implemented open source software that is easy to use. Maybe I’m way off track here, so please correct me if I am missing any information or if my understanding of the problem is incorrect.

Well, it’s been a couple year hiatus, but it looks like I might be getting back into the world of web site development/design. The potential opportunity was presented by a buddy of mine who’s employer suddenly needs a bunch of web stuff done. The last time I did professional web development was right in the middle of the dot-com boom of the late 90’s where most web content was still static and mouse rollovers were the sign of a talented developer.

If I do end up going ahead with the project things will definitely be different with this go around. I’ve learned tons about back-end web programming in PHP and ASP.Net with all sorts of database systems. More recently I’ve gotten into XML and RSS Feed generation (all for a Top Secret app I’m building) which has shown some really cool abilities. Now that web development is more of a programming function than simple graphic design I am actually looking forward to getting back into the game again. There’s so many cool things that can be done in the web environment right, even the PostNuke system that runs power-coder.net does some cool things that I have really been able to learn from.

I’ll probably be doing most of the work in Dreamweaver for page layouts, then the PHP work will most likely be done in VI. It’s so much nicer to do the backend programming directly on the server instead of writing locally and FTPing up with every change (which is irritating as hell).

So, wish me luck, I’ll definitely be posting links to anything I create here for you all to see (and to send some traffic to my new clients). I have also recently posted links to some samples of my previous work in the Web Links/Sample Sites section.

As I’m sure most of the developer viewers are aware, Microsoft has officially released Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005. I watched the Launch event and even though it was packed with buzz words and jargon ‘work faster, better results’, the demos were quite impressive.

The greatest thing to come out of this as far as I’m concerned are the express editions of each package, a completely free, even for commercial use, version of the software that are available now. I took some time last night and downloaded Visual C# 2005 Express and I have to say I’m very impressed in what it offers for a free software. I know I’m gonna get flamed for this, but I still say if Linux (or any other OS for that matter) offered a development suite as quick and powerful as Visual Studio, Microsoft would be in a much worse position than they are today. Anything that lets me work smartly and saves me time is good for me, plus the new refactoring tools are pretty sweet.

My current project (damn, far too many of those…) involves writing a DirectX app using C#. I’ve started moving it over to 2005 and .Net 2.0 and I have to say it works flawlessly. IntelliSense is much improved and much quicker to help you out without getting in the way, plus it seems to have a better understanding of code context which makes it freaky accurate, at least from my exprience so far.

I definitely recommend that anybody that does .Net development check out these packages, you’ll be happy you did.

PS: I’ll have some C# 2005 code samples coming soon!

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been getting started on the design for a project that buddy and I have been thinking about for some time. I’m not going to go into the details of what the project entails, for there’s potential for some commercial opportunities when it is finished. One of the serious challenges facing us with this project comes from designing a fully modular solution.

Most of my effort has gone into thinking about the best way to put together a modular piece of software, specifically in a web environment. The ultimate goal would be to have a module handler that will allow new modules to be installed with a single click, all the necessary tables would be created and the module is instantly available in the user experience and from an administration standpoint. It sounds very similar to how the module system works on the PostNuke CMS that runs this very website and who knows, maybe that’s someplace to start.

I’d love it if somebody out there could forward some suggestions from their experience building modular software for the web, I’m sure the visitors of this site would appreciate the helpful information as well. I guess what I’m really looking for is a point in the right direction to get me started. I know that if I spend some time on it I will come up with something on my own, but I’ve always been the head of any project I’ve worked on and I just want somebody to say ‘hey, how about you try doing this instead?’

Please let me know if you have any thoughts/suggestions, post as comments if you like.