Ted Neward, whom I’ve known for about 4 years now, wrote a piece calling out all the complexity that is in the line of business software space these days.
This post is not to say that I agree or disagree, but it is a refreshing blog post to read. I love discussion like this. As the CTO of a consulting company that embraces Extreme Programming for project delivery, I’m continually trying to get better at delivering high-quality, maintainable software.
When reflecting on what Ted calls out that is necessary for my people to know, I’ll quickly add to the list:
- · 7zip
- · aspnetmvc
- · AutoMapper
- · cassini
- · castle
- · CruiseControl.NET
- · exceptioneer
- · FxCop
- · gallio
- · msdeploy
- · mvccontrib
- · naak
- · nant
- · nantcontrib-0.85
- · nbehave
- · ncover
- · ndepend
- · nhibernate
- · nunit
- · rhinomocks
- · SourceMonitor
- · structuremap
- · subversion
- · tarantino
- · watin
The funny thing is, we are building tools to make delivering software easier, so we have other things added to the .Net framework. At some point, Microsoft and Oracle need to take a good look at .Net and Java and see how they can raise the abstraction level a bit so that the technical business analyst can have a hope of a small program.
Just like DRM in the music business has found (>80% of music pirates could not be forced to pay for the music), >80% of technical business analysts will not use .Net or Java for their small little app. They will walk away and not write the app. They will instead add just a few more macros to that huge Excel spreadsheet.