SBC DotNet Weblog

Wild Bill Simser has a most interesting post about 'The Sad State of Groove add-ons'. I couldn't agree more with Bill. Seeing Groove development for nearly 5 years now and much has changed. The Groove Tools SDK is very much missed by the Groove development community. There has not been much Groove tools (these add-on to the Groove space itself) over the years but the few that were, were quite exceptional. A notable example is CompuTact-Apwiz (a company that I am associated with) - over the past 5 years we have had more tools than Groove Networks itself! As mentioned by Bill - other tools came from Information Patterns & NetSender. There were others (TeamDirection another exceptional one). Groove space add-ons were a very innovative (& much loved) way of enhancing the Groove client. The Groove add-on SDK (with the Visual Studio integration) had won the famed Jolt Award (& Sam Gentile was part of that effort.. :-)

I picked up this trail from Fabrice's posting that pointed to this article in TheServerSide.com. One cannot ascertain what is the size of the company that the writer (Neil Chaudhuri) belongs to. Size matters - larger companies (Fortune 500 onwards) that have hundreds (& perhaps thousands) of developers can afford the luxury of choices (as described in the article). What is interesting is that smaller companies (say less than 80 developers - I mean developers and not including thescaffolding crew of analysts, tech writers, DBAs, etc) can do better if they pick one development environment, be it Java or .NET or the Mac! A choice not easily made but is paramount that it be done. For a productive development environment, like good wine, takes time to mature. Quite a few smaller companies make the mistake of having a 'heterogenous' environment - spattering of Java with sprays of .NET (that too with constraints - ok with VB.NET but C# is verboten). The key here is to pick a development environment with its portfolio of tools & libraries and let it grow along with the developers!

Groove 2007: Software Development Kit is here...

Reading Plip's posting about 'tags' that are needed for appearance in the main feed -

User Group Leaders today faces many challenges such as promoting your group, financing, engaging existing members, recruiting speakers, finding new sources of content, leveraging local Microsoft relationships; etc. The New England INETA user groups along with INETA, in hopes of building a more close knit community, invites you all to join us on Sunday June 11th, prior to the start of TechEd 2006 to explore, share and learn about what has worked and what resource are out there. You are not alone, we know your pain!

As a follow-up to last year's hugely successful INETA User Group Leadership Summit, the New England INETA User Groups will host this event in the hope of that we can all learn from one another to improve the user group experience for our attendees as well as ourselves. The sessions are open to all leaders, both local and afar. If you are currently involved with a user group, in a leadership role or not, want to get involved, or even looking to start one then you will get powerful direction in the course of the sessions.