IT Shopkeeping

The first publication in my QuickNotes series is  Agile Development in .NET.  Most Agile methodologies used in .NET shops nationwide are variations of Scrum and Extreme Programming(XP). This booklet covers these tools and techniques: Test-driven Development (TDD), Behavior-driven Development (BDD), Continuous Integration (CI), and Refactoring to Patterns.  The QuickNotes series covers relevant topics in software development to provide the reader with a swift overview of important trends, terms, and concepts.  This book is available at Amazon.com.

We bring our phones to work now and use them for everything.  Facebook, Candy Crush, and Twitter are a great use of a smartphone but these devices are also helping us become more productive: email, file and document handling and editing, as well as contacts, calendars and integration with sales, financial, and other third-party business apps.  This creates two things:  opportunity and challenge.  We want to seize upon the opportunity of best utilizing these devices to do our jobs while addressing the challenge of the resulting exposure of company data …

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 …

Lexicon Systems was named a Xamarin Premier Consulting Partner for mobile application development.  Using Xamarin product suite, Lexicon Systems provides a cross-platform solution for mobile development using Microsoft technologies.   Built upon the open source Mono and MonoTouch for iPhone projects these technologies allow .NET developers to create mobile apps portable to Android, iOS, and Windows phones. Microsoft partnered with Xamarin in the Fall of 2013, a crucial backing for this direction. We offer guidance, training, and development using Xamarin, and assist businesses nationwide with their shift to mobile.

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 …

A company in Beverly, Massachusetts is contemplating a move from their successful enterprise desktop application to the web. Requiring .NET expertise, they called upon Lexicon Systems to help them chart their course. Dan Hermes taught a one-day workshop on Web Application Development, covering topics such as Desktop vs. Web Apps, Smart and Rich Clients, AJAX, and web services and a two-day workshop on .NET development using ASP.NET and C#, ADO.NET, IIS Configuration, and web security.
He worked closely with lead managers and developers to help the company …