rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
Archive for Miscellaneous
July 31, 2006 at 6:13 am · Filed under .NET, Miscellaneous
Many have written on the transition of TestDriven.NET from freeware to a per-seat license. My sense (without any numbers to back it up) is that TestDriven.NET is the leading unit test integration with Visual Studio. It has had two things going for it: it works quite well and it was free. The former is still true, and the latter shouldn’t make much of a difference. The new prices seem reasonable (anywhere from $95 to $105 depending on license and quantity). I wish Jamie Cansdale luck with his product, though I suspect the transition to a profitable product will be challenging.
We (at Digipede) have long been users of both TestDriven.NET and the JetBrains product, ReSharper. In addition to tremendous refactoring, analysis, and searching functionality, ReSharper 2.0 also supports running and debugging unit tests (though I had not been able to get this to work). The transition in the license for TestDriven.net forced this issue: a quick trip to the JetBrains forum and I found out was wrong. Now that we can do all of our test-debugging in ReSharper we have uninstalled TestDriven.net.
I quickly found that I greatly prefer the user experience of ReSharper: it is more tightly integrated into Visual Studio. Most significantly, it has rich UI to visualize and control the unit tests across the solution. This UI is presented in menus, a dockable view (somewhat like the Nunit GUI), as well as with unit-test indicator buttons in the left bar of the source-code window. This makes it easy to select tests and run or debug them. I can easily visualize the test results, view stack traces for failures, etc, and trivially navigate to the failing source code. This is undeniably richer than TestDriven.NET (i.e., with menus and results relegated to the Visual Studio output window). In addition, ReSharper integrates its unit testing with their dotTrace performance measurement tool.
TestDriven certainly offers a different set of features than ReSharper (e.g., support for more test frameworks, compatibile with Visual Studio Express, NCover integration). I suppose it comes down to individual choice as to which integration a user prefers; however, the excellent refactoring support provided by ReSharper makes it a better value (at $199 per seat). My guess is that Jamie will begin pursuing tighter UI integration with Visual Studio. Once this is done, Jamie may end up with superior unit testing; however, I suspect he’ll have to find ways of delivering more value (maybe outside of running tests) for his product to be a financial success.
Tags: .NET, Resharper, TestDriven.NET
July 14, 2006 at 11:09 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
While my post is a little late in coming, I want to thank Don Canning for the nice words about Digipede. And Kudos to John, Nathan, and Dan . . . their efforts partnering with the Microsoft Financial Services group are bearing fruit.
It is official, we are a success!
July 14, 2006 at 10:19 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I’m sure this will result in my subscriber numbers going down further, but:
Every time I don’t post for a week I lose 20% of my subscribers.
Are my subscribers so fickle? Do the numbers get inflated when I do publish? Is this some side effect of aggregator cacheing? Is this a bug?
Just wondering.
June 30, 2006 at 8:09 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I was at the Users in Charge session of BloggerCon IV the other day led by Chris Pirillo (Dan Farber has a good write up here). Good topic, though I had hoped it was going to be more about how users can insert themselves into product development versus how it turned out: (mostly) complaining about specific applications / hardware. As a developer I was supposed to sit quietly and listen . . .
Anyway, in the spirit of that session, here is something that really drives me crazy: I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The company that sells this is Nuance. They sell some other products. I don’t want them. I don’t want emails from them about these other products, but I do want upgrade information for Dragon. It appears that I have to get emails about all of their products to learn about upgrades. Not so uncommon, but annoying.
I have easily seen 100 of these emails over the years. Certainly irritating, but not that big a deal. I don’t bridle at this like some do. Apparently this isn’t enough though, they have integrated these offers into the Dragon self-update feature. So every once in a while I get a dialog box that pops up. Presumably, it is checking for updates (i.e., bug fixes) for NaturallySpeaking. Even when it doesn’t find any, it tries to sell me other products.
Can I update without self-update? No, that isn’t actually possible. Can I turn off the promotions in self-update? I can’t figure it out.
What does the user-in-charge do? Complain, certainly. Stop using the product? Not upgrade next time? Maybe.
June 22, 2006 at 7:48 am · Filed under .NET, Miscellaneous
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the Microsoft ISV CTO Summit. While little of the content is new to me, the opportunity to meet with Microsoft product folk as well as network with other CTOs has been well worth the trip. Every CTO I have talked to at this event is very qualified, though some are more deeply knowledgeable about the newest Microsoft technologies. As a result, it is a challenge for Microsoft at these kinds of events to provide the right level of information for everyone.
Considering this, they have done a very good job.
Anyway, aside from the content, I planned to make the most out of trip to Seattle by connecting with some people outside of the Summit. And aside from a false start — a missing mystery guest — have a good trip so far. Among other people I’ve met with, I:
- Bruce Kyle, our ISV DE — very helpful. I still owe him countless Airframe ports.
- Caught up with Savas Parasatidis. I have followed his blog for some time. He is a brilliant guy. I appreciate his perspective on the OGSA/OGSI/WSRF/WS-* as it relates to Grid and the GGF (search his blog).
- Met Jeffrey Snover and talked about PowerShell. You can tell he is really excited about his product — as he should be. I’m a big fan of this product — especially the productivity gains it gives ISVs — and will likely blog more on it. Mostly we talked about support for ISVs and the future of PowerShell.
- Met Shy Cohen, a WCF Community Program Manager. He has already given me some performance ideas related to the future WCF-enabled Digipede architecture. We plan to drill down more today.
So far, so good.
June 20, 2006 at 8:32 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
This afternoon I will fly up to Seattle for the Microsoft ISV CTO Summit. I hope that this is more than just an opportunity for Microsoft to market to CTOs. I am hopeful that it will be more since (I believe) that most of the content at this event is under NDA.
Tonight I will be having dinner with J. LeRoy and, I think, one guest to be named later.
June 15, 2006 at 6:20 pm · Filed under .NET, Miscellaneous
I attended the Windows Vista Partner Marketing Day yesterday. This is the formal kickoff coordinating worldwide launch events with partners. This is another way that Microsoft is doing a good job engaging its partners — and an indication that this will be a very big launch. Yesterday they demonstrated many features of Vista — I have seen a lot of this before, but I have to say: It all looks really cool.
I left there with a copy of beta 2 on DVD. I have avoided downloading it as I don’t have the time to install it and really use it. From my perspective, there is no real value in my just installing it somewhere — I need to install it on my main laptop. Of course this isn’t recommended.
But now that I have the beta, it is just begging me to install it . . .
June 12, 2006 at 5:27 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Congratulations, Robert. I agree with the masses that you did a great job in opening up Microsoft. I’ll miss your angle on Microsoft and your ability to bridge the Microsoft / Web 2.0 world. Of course, I’ll probably run into you more now. Especially if you listen to Dave Winer — the East Bay is a great place to be.
June 8, 2006 at 9:16 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
If you are an ISV interested in partnering with Microsoft, I recommend John’s post, Partnering with Microsoft. His advice is top notch.
He follows it up by railing on the Microsoft partner Web sites in Part Deux. This post had me laughing out loud; however, you might not truly get it unless you’ve experienced the pain yourself.
Tags: Digipede, Microsoft
May 31, 2006 at 8:55 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
At the Dow Jones Enterprise Ventures conference in San Jose today. John will be making a couple of presentations later today.
The opening panel consisted of Jason Maynard (Credit Suisse), Douglas Kehring (Oracle), Terry Garnett (Garnett & Helfrich Capital), and David Skok (Matrix Partners). The overall topic was consolidation, business models, etc. and how these changes effect startups.
I don’t think I disagreed with a single thing except for something the Oracle guy said. Frankly, I found it odd to put a guy from Oracle on the panel with these other guys. He did a good job certainly; however, he (i.e., Oracle) ended up being ganged up on a bit as an obvious target. You can guess how it went:
- How do the changes in business models effect the incumbents?
- Well, lets take Oracle as an example . . .
Anyway, Mr. Garnett mentioned that large enterprises are tired of paying the large maintenance / support fees to the incumbent database companies. Mr. Kehring noted that the price / performance and capabilities (i.e., features) of Oracle continue to increase greatly; making the maintenance worth it.
Right, but a very many of these big enterprises don’t want the new features and new performance. Their Oracle install licenses already do what they need. They aren’t upgrading. They don’t need the new features — they don’t care. Mr. Garnett made this point, too, that a large percentage (I think he said 33%) are still running Oracle 7.
This is something that we all have to understand as vendors: many customers don’t upgrade.
Most of them do value maintenance and support for a time, but don’t actually want or need the new features. Driving upgrades is important for vendors for a couple of reasons. More on this later.
« Previous entries ·
Next entries »
About me
Main feed
Email subscriptions