Sri-Lanka, Software DevelopmentJune 19, 2008 4:11 am
Firefox 3.0 localized for Sinhaleese
The latest version of Firefox 3.0 has a localized version of Sinhaleese. This is still in beta. Download from here.
Software DevelopmentJanuary 3, 2008 6:26 am
How to enjoy a Software Development Career!
Just like any other career, Software Development does have it’s pluses and minuses, but how to minimize the impact of those minuses and thrive on the pluses?
Well! it mostly depends on the individual and his/her attitude. For me the best reason to be in this profession is the sheer diversity of things. In a given day I get involved with many technologies and domains, fixing even a minor issue gives me great satisfaction. I’m someone who easily gets bored by doing repetitive stuff. So Software Engineering keeps my adrenaline flowing.
For those of you who needs some motivation to keep you going in this profession, here is some great advice.
Hope this will keep you in the right mood for the rest of 2008! Have a great year!…………………………..
Microsoft, Software DevelopmentNovember 30, 2007 5:42 am
Using Microsoft Case Studies in Guiding your Solution
During the last couple of weeks, I was involved in some work which in my opinion is highly interesting providing me with a wealth of knowledge and opportunity. Basically, it was about proposing Software solutions for Client RFPs. Having to put forward solutions in different business domains with varying complexities was challenging. Yet again i find myself in a similar situation and yet another new domain with quite complex business requirements.
So how do we go about proposing a solution for such a project? As a Microsoft Gold Certified Company we are always on the look out for better ways of doing things and naturally i started looking at Microsoft solutions to tackle the various problems head on. But yet again there is a problem! Microsoft being the company it is has a myriad of products to suit quite different technology scenarios!
So how do i know which products to look for! and more importantly what were the ROI on those products? How they were typically pieced together to provide the final enterprise solution? Are’nt these valuable questions!
I doubt even a Seasoned Software Architect would know all these various Microsoft Products at his/her disposal, and how they were applied across various domains successfully!
So if there is a typical one stop shop to get this information from! Bingo!!!!!
Microsoft Case studies is a must for anyone who is looking for better information on Microsoft Products and their usage. These are very well written summaries of Past Experinces from the global Microsoft Partner Community on Solutioning their client requirements using Microsoft Products.
Please visit here for over 300 case studies. This is a better tool to search for the same information according to various criteria. These are Canadian Case studies, I’m looking for other country case studies as well, which if found will be posted here.
Microsoft to release .NET framework sourcecode !
It seems as Microsoft is planning to release the source code for the .NET framework libraries pretty soon. This is in more detail.
Software DevelopmentSeptember 24, 2007 4:39 am
Embracing Changes in Business Processes with Enterprise Architecture - From a SOA standpoint - II
Service Oriented Architecture could introduce a new dimension to the whole business of Software Services. SOA has the potential to changes the idea of Total Cost Of Ownership for Software as companies no longer has to actually install and run their applications on site or host them with a Hosting Service provider, but simply subscribe to one or more of these services on Subscription basis.
Now, Software companies will not be actually selling software but actually the service where as the Service Consumer has the liberty to always change mind and pick another company which provides the same service with more value addition, better functionality and technology. This is nothing new but SaaS.
This is like having a mobile phone and picking a Mobile Services provider based on Rates, Services, and Availability of Service. If one is not happy with the current Mobile Service Provider he can always look for another.
A Service consumer could develop and run certain services in house while it might decide to subscribe with another party (Typically Software Company) for certain other service. Now it’s up to the Software Company to keep innovating and improving the services it provides to its clients in order to keep its ‘Subscriber base’ or else loose out on competition.
Software DevelopmentSeptember 19, 2007 4:07 am
Embracing Changes in Business Processes with Enterprise Architecture - From a SOA Standpoint - I
Software provides the very foundation for businesses to function in the way most of them are functioning now, in the sense that their overwhelming dependency on data capturing, processing and transferring into information makes Computer systems the nerve center of a modern day organization. Most of these organizations are operating in a world which has become ever more competitive and quality conscious. Companies have to keep on coming up with ways and means to increase production, sales volumes, market share while there are concerted efforts to cut down on cost and be more efficient.
Mergers between global organizations are here to stay as companies drive for market dominance and cut down on cost. New marketing strategies must be rolled out in minimal time with maximum effectiveness. It is also of paramount importance that the nerve centers of these modern day organizations are geared to adapt to these changing times.
As an industry we keep on developing Information systems for most of these organizations without identifying these ground realities. Most of the systems are too rigid (highly coupled) and accommodating changes to these systems need colossal amounts of money and resources. The most disheartening fact is that organizations identify these issues at a very late moment when they are about to do something extraordinary in the sense something which the Enterprise Architects never saw coming, or some change in business direction and strategy which needs quite big changes to current systems.
I think, as a mature industry it is more of a moral issue to charge our clients on these quite big changes to their systems, especially if we have overlooked or ignored the business realities of our clients at a very early stage of our engagement with our clients. We as the technical consultants must have been in a position to guide our client on these impending business realities and provide them with service which is of real value for their money.
As mentioned in the book Web Services and Service Oriented Architectures – The Savvy Manager’s Guide, its high time that ‘Form Follows Function’.
In this case, the “form” is the enterprise architecture. The “function” is the needs of the organizations that should be met by this architecture.
Imagine of an ERP Solution which a company X Co have bought for a hefty amount thinking that it enables X Co to function better in terms of Enterprise Resource Planning. The ERP vendor and X Co both overlooked a possible take over of another competitor Y Co by X. The take over forces X and Y to streamline their Information systems for enhanced access and communication, only to find that the recently acquired ERP cannot be customized for this business requirement, and thus could delay the possible take over of Y by X with a huge opportunity cost for X due to the delays caused by incompatible Systems.
Alternatively if both X Co and ERP Vendor had correctly evaluated this scenario before hand, X Co would have decided on a loosely coupled Service based Software opposed to the tightly coupled ERP Solution which now stands in the way of a possible acquisition by X Co. Thus the opposite ‘Function Follows Form’ has taken place. The advent of SOA software design promises a more flexible and adaptive application architecture in this scenario for X Co.
I’ll drill this down a bit more in my next post…………………………..
Software DevelopmentAugust 14, 2007 3:13 am
A good book on Service Oriented Architecture and Web Services.
This post is comming after a significant delay as i was busy with my work and did’nt have anything worth mentioning here. Anyway I have managed to find a good book (ebook rather) on Web Services. I know that there are thousand and one books already on Web Services and any one can easily figure out how to go about writing a simple Web Service.
Most of these books addresses the typical ‘How to………….’ type questions and are targeting web service developers. But very few books actually discuss the more interesting design and architecture issues of web services and the ‘Why……………..’ type of questions.
This book is an interesting one in the sense that it actually looks at the whole issue of SOA and Web Services from a Business, Design and Architect perspective. The book is Web Services and Service Oriented Architecture The Savvy Manager Guide .
A good starting point for those who want to think beyond the programming aspects of SOA and more.
SQL Server, Software DevelopmentJune 12, 2007 3:36 am
How to exactly diiferentiate between a NULL value and a Zero value in a DataBase table? Good Question ! Think lke this……………
Null is like not having a checking account, and Zero is like having a checking account with a zero ballance. Not much of a difference other than conceptual……………………..
This interestingly came in a Book I’m reading these days.
Technically NULL stands for a Data value which is Unknown in SQL.
Software DevelopmentMay 16, 2007 3:46 am
M-Commerce from a developer + thinker’s perspective.
E-commerce had its success and failures and its not a buzzword anymore. Actually, lot of people looks towads amazon.com or ebay for some e-commerce inspiration. So we can come to a safe conclusion that e-commerce will continue to be a growth area if applied carefully in a correct business context. I think the same thing applies to m-commerce as well.
We developers are empowered with myriad technologies to make your mobile devices do all sorts of things for you. But due consideration has to be given to the various limitations pertaining to mobile devices such as small screen size, battery power to name a few. Also why exactly do we use mobiles? I think its mostly to cater to emergency and ‘then and there’ situations. Then its clear that a particular idea which was very successfull and attractive in the e-commerce context will not reap the same expected results in a mobile context with quite a few limitations.
A tour operator can inform the status of a tour package to a client via an SMS message. Its a small bit of information. But will it be worthwhile to try and create a mobile application for tour quotation building? I’m taking a trip to Asia from USA once a year and am i in a real hurry as such that i want to do this with my mobile phone. I’ll prefer to take time and look for a better package and most probably like to see some videos or pictures of the hotels, places etc. So, can my mobile phone browsing a WAP site really beat a nice cool AJAX powered web site with flash presentations of my hotel room.
True that I can develop a ‘mobile tour planner’, but is it really worth the trouble?
So…….I think mobile applications have its own place, a right place in the current buiness context, and you need to be just more than a good Software Developer to carefully select the right business domain which suits best for a small device. Or else we will see a Mobile Bubble the latest equivalent of the e-commerce/Internet Bubble of 2000.
Microsoft, Software DevelopmentApril 11, 2007 5:41 am
My Current Software Related Learning
I was afraid at the beginning that my Short stint at a Consultancy would have had a negative impact on my technology skills. But thank god it has not happened as I’m still eager and hungry to go after anything new or interesting to learn. Naturally I’m a good reader and when a requirement comes for me to grab a new idea i never looked back.
So these days, I’m reading a good book by Ingo Rammer at Thinkteckture on .NET Remoting, and another book is yet to be started on Advanced Threading. Both these are on the Job Requirements at Zone24x7. Apart from that I got involved in some Unit Testing work as well which requires me to learn more on NMock. So has some reading to be done in there as well. I think It would be very difficult to move forward in Unit Testing some of our Mobile Applications without a proper understanding on Mock Object Utilization as the code is heavilly interacting with other classes. So testing in Isolation is never gonna be easy here.
Since I have explained my on the job reading/study assignments let me tell you what I read/study for sheer enthusiasm. First I want to get deeper into the .NET Micro Framework which so far is an ellusive target due to lack of reading/study material. So my random playing with the Micro Framework SDK is not currently taking me anywhere. But I’m happy to continue until such time I come across a book.Then I want to know more about Workflows. There should be a good reason for Microsoft to go bang bang with WWF, WCF(Indigo) and WPF and I need to find why. These are part of Vista and .NET Framework 3.0 as well. So I have an Idea to deep dive into WWF and see for myself and I have the book with me. Knowing the future directions in my industry is a must and when a company like Microsoft pours millions into something, it’s worth noticing that.
So here I am. I have got a hell of a lot to do and before everything I need to manage my time. But I truly enjoy what I’m doing and as hungry as ever.
