Craig Bailey

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February 4, 2008

ELCOM: Career Plans for Developers – Part II

By Craig Bailey
3 Min read
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04February

Further to my post about career plans for developers at Elcom, I wanted to mention the approach of encouraging staff to build their personal profiles. It can be summed up in this attitude: Your job (as a developer and employee) is to be so good that you are being chased by head-hunters all the time. My job (as Technical Director) is to make the work environment so good that you don't want to...

February 2, 2008

CLARITY: VSTS, VSTO, VSTA, VSX

By Craig Bailey
4 Min read
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02February

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...

January 10, 2008

CLARITY: Thin, Thick and Smart clients

By Craig Bailey
2 Min read
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10January

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...

November 28, 2007

CLARITY: Flash versus Flex versus Silverlight

By Craig Bailey
2 Min read
10 comments
28November

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...

November 26, 2007

CLARITY: SharePoint – WSS versus MOSS

By Craig Bailey
5 Min read
12 comments
26November

There's still plenty of confusion out there about SharePoint, particularly around what is included in WSS versus MOSS. Part of the problem is that there is soooo much information about SharePoint that the simple details get lost… So, let's go through the various options, comparing WSS with MOSS Standard and MOSS Enterprise as simply as possible. I'll exclude technicalities (eg...

November 24, 2007

CLARITY: Microsoft is a marketing company

By Craig Bailey
2 Min read
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24November

Not wanting to be too much of 'well duh' post, but I thought it was worth reminding ourselves that in software we need to be focusing extensively on marketing and sales. It all too easy to get caught up in the development, to the detriment of the marketing. I've (finally) finished 'Partnering with Microsoft' by Ted Dinsmore and Edward O'Connor. It's a little dry, and...

November 23, 2007

CLARITY: SaaS versus S+S

By Craig Bailey
1 Min read
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23November

If, like me, you'd just assumed that Software + Services (S+S) was Microsoft's way of trying to take over and re-brand an existing concept – namely Software as a Service (SaaS) – then the following diagram is a helpful corrective. It's taken from page 18 of Issue 13 of the Architecture Journal (download here), and is a nice overview of how S+S and SaaS relate to each other...

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