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Scott Guthrie at North Dallas .NET User Group

Scott did an awesome job last night at the North Dallas .NET User Group. He started with a great Tips & Tricks talk and finished with a talk on LINQ.

The Tips & Tricks were great, lots of little cool features that are in .NET but most people don’t know about as well as some sweet new AJAX functionality and controls. He then went into LINQ and I think everyone’s jaws hit the floor (including mine). LINQ is probably going to be the most revolutionary new developer technology to come out of Microsoft since .NET. It’s simple and its data source independent, for example you could write a LINQ statement that combined XML and SQL Server data together in a join. Wickedly cool stuff — although I still think the select statement needs to be first, instead of last, in the statement definition.

Scott said he would post his slides to his blog, so stay tuned – and thanks for coming to Dallas, Scott!

Way too many cats

Yes, another cat is out of the bag.

Shane shares some details on JobBurner.com. We partnered up with Shane in a similar way to what we did with CodeSmith Tools.

Unfortunately JobBurner.com is just a teaser site right now, sounds familiar, right? We'll be sharing more details on JobBurner soon…

We're actually getting a lot of feedback from entreprenurial minded software developers and later this spring we're going to roll out something we call "Funding Fridays". Once a month we'll take submissions from people that have ideas for software products, our team will review the ideas and when appropriate pick an idea to help fund. More on that later, but if you're interested now don't hesitate to drop me an email.

Which is more difficult?

Somewhat of a continuation of this thought, but really which is more difficult: building scalable well designed software or writing simple, easy to use software?

My answer: Building software that is simple and easy to use it much more difficult than building scalable well designed software.

Building scalable well designed software really isn't that hard any more. A lot of the important things that you had to do or know (like C++) really isn't a factor any more. The base technology has improved so much that even poorly written code on top of a great platform (like .NET) can perform exceptionally well or can iteratively be addressed as problems show up. Furthermore, at least as it related to public web applications, the number of exceptionally high traffic sites (>250mm impressions/mo) is relatively small.

It seems there are 2 ways software gets written and marketed: inside-out development which places the emphasis on the technology, for example describing itself as follows, "…Implements Microsoft Enterprise Library…", "…uses AJAX everywhere…", and "…abstract data access APIs…". This is contrasted against outside-in development which places emphasis on the problems the software solves, using descriptions such as. "…simple to use, get started in less than 5 minutes…", "…intuitive screens with simple step-by-step wizards…", and "…works with your existing data…".

Building simple and easy to use software is hard because is forces you to make choices. Instead of adding features and making that the selling point (quantity of what the software can do) you instead focus on writing features that solve the problem in the simplest possible way. It sounds like it should be simple, but it's really not.

We've applied this line of thinking to our newest product that we're rolling out on November 7th, blogmailr.com, as well as several other new products we'll roll out in 2007.

ComponentArt starts blogging

ComponentArt has a blog, Miljan announced it here, and it's built on Community Server v2.1.

Community Server uses ComponentArt Web.UI controls for a lot of the more advanced grids and AJAX enabled features. This should be a great way for ComponentArt customer's to get an even deeper understanding and insight into the plans of ComponentArt — I know they are doing some really cool and cutting edge stuff for .NET developers and can't wait to read about it on their blog.