IT Shopkeeping

We take this for granted now but there is an important historical fact in the development of websites and web applications:  They were originally designed for use on desktop PC monitors and laptops. The design of the website accounted for the size of the screen and the user interface (a mouse).   So why do our apps and website need a different design today? Because people are fleeing in droves from desktop PC browsers and using their mobile phone for internet use instead.  The older design accounted for the user making …

One of the most interesting trends in years is emerging now: the notion that the things we use and live in everyday will be online, watching us, hearing us, talking to one another, and communicating with us via our phone.  By ‘things’ I mean our car, our house and its thermostat, lights, and appliances such as refrigerators, exercise equipment, and coffee makers, streetlights, stores and their retail displays and cash registers, museums displays, corporate lobbies, meeting rooms, tourist information booths, buildings, cities, and towns.  This is called the Internet of …

This year mobile is expected to cross the line from trend to paradigm shift.  No longer just for kids and games, mobile phone use is becoming the norm for online access in the US and worldwide.  This means the first choice device for searches, browsing, shopping, and media.  Here are the facts:

What do you need to know to build native mobile apps using C#? Phone and tablet operating systems and programming models differ from web and desktop development. There are many options available for mobile events, threading, and services, but what are the best ones when coding in C#? Featuring the Xamarin product suite, this talk covers the fundamentals of native mobile development in iOS and Android, including:

A flurry of writing this year leaves me with three little software books to offer you.  One on teamwork, one on communication, and the last on Agile in .NET.
All three will be available on Amazon.com and the Kindle store soon!

Coding, testing, and releasing at breakneck speed.
What could go wrong?
Technical Debt
Constant changes to a system lead to disorganized code, which is fragile and costly to maintain.  Each feature we add without spending an equal amount of time reorganizing the code accrues some measure of technical debt.  Agile’s fast pace and change-orientation raises the risk of bringing about the early demise of a system through this process.   So how do we pay off that debt before it accrues?
The lifecycle of software is well-established: Enhance the code until it becomes unmaintainable, then …

I recently spoke at SharePoint and .NET Saturday Bermuda,  a one day conference co-hosted by the Bermuda SharePoint Users Group and the Bermuda .NET Users Group. The keynote by Joel Oleson focused on the trends of mobile and tablet use in the enterprise, and ways that Sharepoint development addresses this trend. Responsive Design is the order of the day.  Enterprise web applications must be constructed in a flexible, adaptive manner that detects and responds to the device type.  That is, the web pages should look different and display appropriately different content depending on whether they’re …

When it comes to native mobile development, .NET shops are in a pickle.    Mobile and tablet use is estimated to make up 90% of new device adoption by 2015 (Gartner).  Steve Jobs saw this coming and had this to say:
“When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm, but as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular.

It is a mistake to think that Agile is merely a project management methodology or worse, a buzzword.