May 24
Microsoft offers a generous program to help new independent software vendors (ISVs) develop and launch their products faster and cheaper.
The Microsoft “Empower for ISVs” program offers software, support, and additional resources designed to help ISVs reduce development costs, test their software on multiple Windows platforms, and improve time-to-market. Empower is a one-year membership for $375, with an opportunity to renew for a second year, and it’s available only once per company.
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Tags: Business, Development, Empower, ISV, Microsoft, Software
May 08
I started my professional programming career over 20 years ago on the Commodore Amiga. The Amiga was a state-of-the-art personal computer, with a proprietary operating system, windowed GUI, and dedicated sound and graphics chips when the IBM PC was still saying, “C:DOS RUN.”
The Amiga computer was fast for its time, but maddeningly slow in hindsight: 5-10 minutes to compile a typical development project. Hard drives were still external, bulky and expensive at $500 for 30MB. The Amiga system APIs were plentiful, massive and complex, like the Win32 APIs that followed. I wrote software in C, using a programmable text editor and the “Make” tool to build projects.
A lot has changed in two decades. As with most things in this business, software development tools and systems are now better, faster, and sometimes cheaper. But what are the most important changes?
In the spirit of David Letterman, following are my “Top 10 Advances in Software Development.” These are the things–from my perspective, in increasing order of importance–that have most improved software development and entrepreneurship over the past 20 years. I encourage you to reply with your own Top 10 list.
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Tags: Business, Development, Software
May 08
Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Adobe Flash.
Officially, “Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET based media experiences and rich interactive applications for the Web. Silverlight offers a flexible programming model that supports AJAX, VB, C#, Python, and Ruby, and integrates with existing Web applications. Silverlight supports fast, cost-effective delivery of high-quality video to all major browsers running on the Mac OS or Windows.”
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Tags: .NET, C#, Development, Flash, Silverlight, Tools, Web
