March 2007 Entries
The Windup... A month or so ago I was delivering a design/architecture review along with a code walkthrough for some software I wrote. Basically, a VB6 application needed updating to support cryptography (through a third-party tool) and FTP. I distributed the cryptography services to account for licensing constraints. Since the shop is migrating to .NET I wrote .NET assemblies to support the cryptography, data access, and file transfer functionality. I then wrote a COM-Callable Wrapper (CCW) to expose...
I am so silly and naive sometimes. I have been struggling with the fact that people in the US (and possibly elsewhere) don't want to pay appropriate prices for software (or technology in general perhaps). Today I finally realized why...or at least one big reason for it. They don't care about quality. Or, more accurately, they care more about short-term costs than long-term costs. People in the United States (not you and me of course) are addicted to instant gratification. We want it now and we want...
A colleague was discussing with me a scenario related to managing expectation levels with business units. Essentially, a business unit requested a change which, to them, seems like a simple change. However, to the developers it is a pretty significant change. The reason is that the change is applied to an enterprise domain entity. As such, the change has significant ripple-style impacts throughout the organization. A domain entity is some thing in your software system that represents the business...