Tag Archives: Microsoft

User Interface Smackdown 2007

Explore Google's GWT, Adobe's Flex, and Microsoft's WPF for creating user interfaces

Registration is now open for the User Interface Smackdown 2007, being held April 4, 2007 at the Ann Arbor ITZone (Spark Central). The user interface toolkits that we will discuss and work with include (at least) Google’s GWT, Adobe’s Flex, and Microsoft’s WPF.

I’ve had a lot of fun doing Open Spaces events that Bruce Eckel has hosted in the past year. I exposed Bill Wagner (my business partner and co-founder of SRT) and our consultants to Open Spaces at CodeMash and they all enjoyed the experience as well, so we decided to start doing them locally, and we hope to do about 1 per quarter. Hopefully we will have the next one planned by the time that this one takes place (teaser: we already have some ideas in the works).

We believe that these events benefit the developer community. Not only are they an efficient and interesting way to bring timely knowledge to programmers, but they also bring the community together in a way that fosters continued communication and builds community. This helps everyone.

We believe that innovative user interfaces will be a key differentiator for software offerings in coming years, and learning how to use modern toolkits to build them is essential. We hope that we have a great turnout for this event and that it provides us with the motivation and interest to do more of these in the future, on different topics.

Cost for the event is $75 before March 26, or $90 after March 26 (and at the door, if space is available). Registration also includes continental breakfast and lunch.

This event is sponsored by Adobe, Microsoft, and SRT Solutions.

Hope to see you there!

Announcing CodeMash 2007

Ohio … where you need to be January 18-19

What? January in Ohio?! That’s always the first reaction. But … once I tell them what’s going on (and that it’s at an indoor water park), the tune changes to, “Really? Cool!”.

I’ve been involved with the planning of CodeMash, a 2-day conference for developers, to be held in Sandusky, Ohio January 18-19. 2007. It’s a conference for developers of all flavors: Java, .NET, Python, PHP, Perl … you name it! We’ll have some Ruby on Rails and some TurboGears, some Oracle and MySQL. The goal is to all get together and learn from one another. We all benefit from advances in other languages and platforms.

We’ve scheduled some really cool keynotes. Bruce Eckel is going to talk about issues of design in software development, from a philosophical standpoint. Neal Ford is planning a talk about the evolving programming paradigm. Scott Guthrie will also be doing a keynote.

We’re accepting abstracts right now, and conference registration will be open really soon (you can reserve a spot now, though!). The pricing is phenomenal … early bird price of $99 for the 2 day conference, if you stay at the Kalahari Resort (conference hotel, discounted room rate of $88/night). The regular price for registration (after Nov 30) is $149.

I think it’s going to be an amazing event.

CodeMash – I'll be there!

Code Mash Conference Page

Josh goes to Microsoft

Josh Holmes, a partner in SRT Solutions, has decided to take a position at Microsoft. He is the Architect Evangelist for the heartland region. It’s always rough to lose a business partner, but if we had to, I guess it’s not so bad to lose him to The Big Guys.

Josh isn’t leaving the area. He will be working out of the Southfield, MI office. He will remain as President of the Ann Arbor Computer Society, and a good resource in the area of .NET, Compact Framework, and C#.

Bill and I started SRT Solutions in 2000. We brought Josh on in 2004. He’s contributed a lot, and he will be missed. Fortunately, over the past several years, we have experienced a significant amount of growth both in terms of customers and consultants. We’re really pleased with the quality of the consultants that we’ve been able to find and hire. While I’m pretty excited about the opportunity that this presents for Josh, I much prefer this route.

Energy Builds After Conference

Energized and Ready to Get Back to Work!

It’s amazing what a few days at a conference can do! It’s been a while since I’ve been at a conference. The past few years have seen me “stuck” in town with family responsibilities. It was really great to get away, and I really forgot how energizing getting out among different people can be.

A lot of the topics discussed at Bruce Eckel’s “Programming the New Web” conference weren’t really things that I use in my daily life. I don’t use ColdFusion or PhP or Python. I mainly live in a .NET/Java world. But I love to hear and talk about technology and solutions as much as the next guy, and so even the topics that weren’t directly related to what I do offered insight and grabbed my attention. The advantage of only having one session at a time is that I felt free to attend these talks, and of course, I learned a lot there too!

And, one thing that pretty much everyone agreed on was that innovations like Ruby on Rails has really driven updates in Java tools!

We even had a session on Java vs. .NET programming that turned into an entirely non-technical talk, about how Microsoft has built up a support structure that really helps business like mine, while Sun has pretty much ignored the Java community. Upon my return, I was amused to see a (totally coincidental) email soliciting Java Champions, which might help to achieve at least part of what Microsoft does with their Most Valuable Programmer and Regional Director designations. I’m looking forward to our local Java user group meeting (next week), and I’m hoping that I can become more involved with that.

Next entry will be on tools!

Why I’m the Company Curmudgeon

Why does SRT have 2 resident Microsoft experts and a non-Microsoft holdout?

SRT Solutions consists of 3 partners: Bill Wagner, Josh Holmes, and myself. Together, we mentor developers, working with them on projects so that they become self-sufficient in new technologies. Bill and Josh are particularly adept at Microsoft technologies, while I have made a name for myself embracing the “other” camp: Java, Unix, you name it. While we are all quite capable in both arenas, we clearly have our own pet languages, utilities, and programming environments.

Bill and Josh anxiously await the MSDN updates and install the latest and greatest betas of tools, languages, etc. I seek out alternate utilities, like Mozilla’s Firefox (web browser) and Thunderbird (email reader). I rarely use the DOS prompt, preferring instead the MKS Korn Shell and the Unix utilities that ship with MKS. I’ve been known to freak out my business partners a bit by editing something quickly in “vi” instead of notepad or another Microsoft utility.

I’ll be the first to admit that Microsoft has wonderful tools. They have the insight and the resources to put together a group of tools, especially for programming, that work great and make coming up to speed with their product very easy. This relieves their developers of having to choose a development environment. The Unix/Linux world does NOT have the same mentality. Instead, “you can use anything” is seen as an advantage. In truth, it may yet lead to the downfall of the “other” side. Programmers scramble to find tools to use together, and team discussions about “standardizing on tools” often turn ugly. Microsoft programmers who might be doing a simple project in Java, for example, are turned off by the whole thing and often never write another Java program. On the other hand, I have also been stuck using Microsoft tools, where the tools do some “black magic”, generate code, and it’s hard to know what they did or to undo it. This is not as much of a problem in the “do it yourself” camp.

So, are those small incidents why I persist in my quest for good Unix/Linux/Java tools rather than “joining the Dark Side”? Not really. The truth of the matter is that our clients are diverse. Sometimes a Java solution is what they want, either because of legacy issues, or because their application has a particular need that warrants something other than a Microsoft solution. In striking a balance between Microsoft technologies and non-Microsoft technologies, SRT Solutions can choose the right programming language for the client based on business needs rather than shoe-horning every problem into a Microsoft-based solution.

Also, it’s good for someone to remain Unix/Linux-literate, since we do have clients that are multiplatform. And if you look deeper, you will notice that at the core of every decision that we make in staying on top of technologies, Bill, Josh, and I are more alike than different.

Of course, it IS fun to tweak Josh and Bill every once in a while.