Then again, as I got even closer to product release, even MSBuild and .proj files (in their vanilla release states) fell short of my needs. The MS development docs give lots of info about writing MSBuild extensions for satisifying every development need. But sheesh… that is TIME CONSUMING. And with a big list of tasks to complete just to release my software products I was not willing to take on yet another time consuming project (that is, writing MSBuild extensions).

Enter pwelter ant the msbuildtasks project. This is a collection of custom msbuild tasks for just about every need from FTP to VSS to Zip. I downloaded and installed them and started using them right away.

Later I needed other things setting environment variables and code signing. msbuildtasks doesn’t do either of these. So I set about writing batch files and cussing at Microsoft for, yet again, removing features, shuffling things, and hiding useful stuff in documentation.

Then, by happenstance, I came across another MSBuild tasks project. I could have sworn that I did a thorough Google search for another project back when I found the original from Tigris. But, oh well. This new project, written by Mike Fourie and hosted as a CodePlex project called the MSBuild Extension Pack, handles both environment variables and code signing, as well as a host of other nice things.

There is some overlap in both of these projects, but they are both useful in their own right.

Not true for software programming jobs.

Lots of jobs have been lost in the last few months, yes. Even several software programming jobs. But there has always been a shortage of programmers in the enterprise and many of those programmers leaving small and medium sized companies are landing in larger companies, healthcare, and government.

Another reason put forth is the growing number of expert software programmers coming online overseas (India, China, Middle East, and the Eastern Bloc). Some believe that competition is growing as American companies move software development offshore.

Not true for American programming jobs.

Offshore development is notoriously difficult. Even ONshore development is difficult. But contrast the trials of writing software with a team of people whom you share language, culture, slang, TV commercials, and cartoon experiences with to writing software with a team with whom you share NONE of this. Yes, exactly. It’s super hard. Much offshore development devolves into programmers writing “exactly what they are told to write” and no more, just to get something right! Offshore development is getting better, so we always hear, but it is not all its cracked up to be. And software programming jobs are not moving overseas in droves.

The real culprit is Microsoft.

Microsoft is in the business of democratizing access to software technology. In other words, they are constantly looking for ways to get more software into more peoples’ hands. As such, they lower the bar to writing software, thus making software cheaper. And, by extension, making software programmers cheaper as well.

This is a good thing, by the way.

By lower access to better software Microsoft is constantly increasing productivity. Contrary to what some would have us believe, money doesn’t grow on printing presses. Money is an exchange medium for productivity. In other words, we create money by creating useful stuff. Great software helps us create useful stuff more quickly for less. The problem is that real income for software developers has not increased in 10 years. Instead, incomes have remained steady while productivity has increased.

Oh, you may say, “Microsoft isn’t the ONLY company making great software.” And you would be correct. But the Microsoft Difference is that they are democratizing software. They consistently take expensive software (operating systems, database servers, web servers, etc) and make them inexpensive and easy to own.

“Yeah? What about the Open Source software movement?”

Don’t you mean Linux? Without Linux there would be no Open Source software movement. And, in case you didn’t know, without IBM there would be no Linux movement. IBM used Linux to lower the cost of Non-Microsoft operating systems in a bid to sell IBM Services. It was a huge investment for IBM that worked like magic. Linux spread like wildfire while Linux enterprise services companies like Red Hat reaped the benefits. So, the Linux Movement wasn’t a movement at all. It was a corporate plan hatched by IBM to keep IBM growing and profitable.

Now, as a result, more software programmers are hitting the market, younger, and better prepared for the enterprise. They are also less knowledgeable than before because they don’t have to know the “deep things” of software programming (memory and pointer management, storage management, drivers) required by earlier software programmers. Thus productivity is increased keeping software programmers prices steady and helping to create a shortage of jobs.

So thank Microsoft for both a thriving economy (in the thriving days), and a shortage of programming jobs (in scarce days).

And they’re not done yet. What Microsoft is unleashing on the software industry right now will not only increase the number of truly great software programmers, but will also cause far more competition for programming jobs than we see even now.

But now Apple is in on it.

I’ll write about that later.

There are a great many Twitter Super-Experts on the young web service who have it all figured out. They tend to interrupt conversations or take it upon themselves to right the wrongs here and there of those uneducated fools who would dare to Tweet something that is, just quite simply, unacceptable for Twitter.

Not wanting to miss out on the Grand Epiphany that is Twitter I searched the great web temple archives for the phrase, “Twitter is about” and “Twitter is all about” in the hope that I too would Get It. But the search resulted in many tweets that went something like, “I’m just trying to figure out what twitter is about.” Not very useful to us: the unwashed.

So I decided to do a search on “Twitter is not about”, thinking if one could only seek out what a thing is not then, by deduction, he shall know what a thing is. Holmes would be proud.

That search uncovered, according to the Twitter Sages, what Twitter is NOT about:

• Twitter is not about selling stuff
• Twitter is not about the individual
• Twitter is not about Edgar Allan Poe
• Twitter is not about being followed and not following back
• Twitter is not about automatic updates
• Twitter is not about paying for Twitter
• Twitter is not about purposeful, systematic Tweets
• Twitter is not about spam
• Twitter is not about AllTop

Ok, so now we know what Twitter is not about. Not very satisfying, really. It doesn’t tell us a thing about what Twitter is about. Where oh where can one find the light?!

However, hidden deeply within the Tweets I studies were a few cryptic hints that might help us unravel this great mystery. Here they are for your perusal. See if you can deduce anything from them. Note, they are written in purely raw form. I chose not to try and interpret thus polluting the awesome wisdom within:

• CON-VER-SA-TION!
• POOL OF MINDS
• the peeeepooolllllll!!!!!

Now, as I ponder these clues hoping that my mind would produce that delicious fruit known as Understanding, it has occured to me that the Sages of Twitter are trying to say something. Let me take a stab at just what it might be:

Twitter is about people, not technology. It’s about communication with your fellow human, not marketing at them. It’s about the great social blah blah blah… 

Oh just stop it!

How can a one year old technology website have spawned so many pontificators, social media mavens, and Internet Marketing Experts; all of them vying to explain to us just what this nascent technology “is all about?”

One thing is for sure, Twitter had better be about making a profit for its stakeholders, and soon, or Twitter will be about a great experiment that didn’t work.

Hansson didn’t know he was creating a replacement for VB6.

It is counterintuitive to think that a UI-centric, inflexible, memory hogging, butt-simple dev platform could actually fill the gap for VB6, a um … UI-centric, inflexible, memory hogging, anybody-can-do-it, development platform. One would think that a VB6 replacement absolutely must run on Windows. But, when you really think about it, anything that would replace VB6 would have to have the following qualities:

• It must be easy to pick up and very forgiving
• It must have a large set of code snippets to pick from
• It must support real-world applications
• It must be web-based

Why must it be web-based? Well, because the Internet is the new Windows platform. Eventhough I like to poke fun at Internet Pontificators I am going to make a wild and outlandishly obvious prediction: within 100 years 80% of daily use software will be web-based. I didn’t mean web-enabled, but web-based. iTunes is web-enabled. One day it will be web-based. Technologies like Google Gears will make that possible. Once Gears-like functionality is the norm, there will be very little reason to distribute software that requires an install program to run.

Enter RoR.

The trend towards all-web-based-all-the-time (AWAT) was going to happen, but RoR is going to get us there much faster. By making web dev as easy as VB6 dev, RoR is giving all those old VB6 programmers who had to leave the development market a new lease on life, and accellerating the proliferation of the AWAT. Now you don’t have to learn all about OOP and MVC and other stuff like that. RoR takes care of all that stuff in the background; just like VB6 did.

Welcome back VB6 guys.

Check out this article over at Ship It On the Side talking about the timeliness of Flowerpot and online sales software.

If Agile isn’t promising success without planning then what is it promising? If you can’t answer that then welcome to Earth.

Why is this a problem? Because Agile is selling a promise to developers that must be fulfilled by architects and designers.

Yes, the Agile practices of 2-week timeframe’s, daily stand-up meetings, pair programming, etc, depend on the simple fact that SOMEONE is keeping a clear vision of the end product in mind.

That sounds like BDUF (big design up front). Someone has to do it. It’s not the developer’s responsibility, it’s the architect’s.

So successful Agile development requires an architect to succeed.

A techtalk video of Hubert Smits, the Agile Guy, inspired this post.

VB6 was taken off of the market in an attempt to keep software development costs high. –see, told ya… but it’s still a nice hat.–

If you wrote Windows software during the massive Y2K software update you likely knew someone who became a Windows programmer after learning Visual Basic 6. I admit, I thought VB was a toy language until I did wrote some software for a company who sold the it and made millions. Later my company built a video streaming server product using a VB6 front end (the back-end was in C++). Customers loved it! Not because it was written in VB6, but the fact is VB6 didn’t hurt it at all. And, by the way, much of that software was written by a VB6 programmer with less than a year of experience.

Now VB6 is essentially gone. Dot net is here (if you write Windows software) and Microsoft is not looking back. Even a massive online petition did nothing to sway MS.

Why?

VB6 introduced tons of new programmers to software development. Many of these new guys were not formally trained. They wouldn’t know O(n) from O(scary). They knew nothing of data structures, formal sorting and searching algorithms, and didn’t give a rip about optimal code performance. But what they did know was how to make Windows do what they wanted. They knew how to listen to their bosses and make forms and add buttons and get code snippets from all over the Internet written by other untrained programmers and, best of all, they knew how to spend all that cash they were making as new programmers. I knew a few guys who went from $30Kish to $80Kish nearly overnight. And on top of all that, they were cheaper than “classically trained” developers.

It was enough to irritate a classic programmer with all his knowledge of Knuth and Bubble sorts and COM/ATL internals. Classically trained developers saw a stagnation of income. Before these new fly by the seat of the pants VB6 programmers came along Windows software development hourly costs were skyrocketing. Then the great income gains slowed to a crawl, and then it all stopped.

And here you have a couple of problems: 1. programming was no longer the bastion of the “classically trained” programmer, and 2. with all these new guys jumping into the foray there was price competition. And we couldn’t have that. So, how do we solve this problem? Take VB6, with its easy programming paradigm off the market and keep it off.

As crazy as this sounds it all begs the question, why hasn’t someone filled the void left by VB6?

The podcast is aimed at would be software entrepreneurs who are, or want to, build profitable software, on a limited budget, while holding down full time work. We would love to hear from you!

A prolific and highly creative buddy of mine, @UMLGuy, has created what I think is a terrific way to grok the basics (and not so basics) of UML (the Unified Modeling Language). He’s written a COMIC, and it’s pretty good.

Ulterior Motives Lounge is an adventure story with a large cast of characters and several set locations. Oh, and you get to learn some UML, if you’re paying attention. Prior knowledge of computer programming is not necessary since the creator of The Lounge abhors the idea that UML is for programmers and computer people only.

Martin, the creator of "The Lounge" is the author of two books on UML and has taught the subject all over the country for years; including at Microsoft.

Check out the Lounge to laugh and learn.

So if you don’t wanna buy a phone with keyboard now you have something that’s even more, um… instinctually adept? … to let you keep using that cheap phone!