A handy analogy to use next time you’re trying to remind someone about tactics versus strategy.
Strategy is the recipe
Tactics are the ingredients/utensils
When you’re asked what your strategy is for the year ahead, tell them about the cake you’re baking, not the spoon and flour you’re using.
Hat tip to Chris Voss and Never Split the Difference for this reminder.
In the spirit of using completely arbitrary ways to categorise people, I'd like to suggest that there's 3 types of people.
You know when you read lazy tech reporting and it just wastes your time? Yeah, I hate that. People who don’t really know much, but are more than happy to share their ill-informed opinions. Or worse, they’re a walking case study for ignorance parading as opinion… yeah, we all hate that. So, why do I feel the need to contribute more of the same? Well, basically, I find that...
After chatting with a few people about Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) recently, it’s clear that the technology is not that well understood (even though, in my opinion, Microsoft have done a pretty good job of articulating it – much better than say OBA for example). So in this post I’m aiming to give a high level overview of VSTO and clear up some misconceptions. As usual this is...
Office Business Applications is a term getting bandied about a fair bit these days. What is it exactly? Well, answers differ, and you’d be forgiven if you thought it was as simple as using Office to build Applications for use in Business. The purpose of this post is to try to get some simple high level understanding of OBAs. In later posts I’ll be digging into resources and also covering VSTO...
One of the problems we often encounter is information overload. There’s no shortage of great articles, examples, podcasts and webcasts on every conceivable technology. Microsoft’s products are no different. Thus, the following is comprised of numerous sources easy to find online – there’s no special insight here. Rather, I’ve just simply tried to distill a product to...
The main interest in this article from Mary Jo is not about CRM (who cares about a name change after all) but rather how Microsoft are clarifying their terms: Live: Consumer focus Online: Business & Enterprise focus, hosted by Microsoft Hosted services: hosted by Microsoft partners And don’t miss the revenue sharing snippet at the bottom – Microsoft will share 10% of the CRM Live...
Seems like Microsoft is having a V Day, every day. Here's a run down of the main V technologies/tools: VSTS (Visual Studio Team System) Firstly, Visual Studio. Visual Studio 2008 (the current version) is Microsoft's IDE for building .NET based applications, be they Web, Desktop, Device or Microsoft Office based. Visual Studio comes in a number of different versions, grouped into three...
The term Smart Client is probably the most often misused of the three, and there always seems to be a little bit of confusion as to where Thick stops and Smart begins. But, yet again, The Architecture Journal (Issue 14, p10) guides us with a simple and helpful summary. Some will no doubt disagree (since the issue is focused on connectivity and mobile devices). I've summarised them here: Thin...
Summary: Flex is to Adobe as Silverlight is to Microsoft Silverlight is often referred to as Microsoft's version of Flash, however it is more correct to say it is Microsoft's version of Flex. You could say the following… Silverlight 1.0 = Flash Silverlight 2.0 = Flex [UPDATE: Silverlight 1.1 has been re-branded as Silverlight 2.0] Here's a very basic comparison of Flex and...