The Agile Micro ISV Blog

It’s been about 10 months since Home Document Manager made the transition from project to product. Looking back on those 10 months I can level a couple of criticisms at myself; the main one is that I haven’t iterated aggressively enough. The other is that I’ve ignored some customer feedback because it didn’t gel with my vision of where I wanted Home Document Manager to go.

Something happened in the last month that has injected a bit of pace into my development. I started considering a closely related, although entirely seperate product. Where HDM is a desktop document management tool, the new product was an advanced PDF Viewer/Editor/Annotator.

Part of the dance that micro ISV‘ers do when conceiving a new product is to evaluate competition, see what they do, see what they don’t do, see if they alleviate the particular pain that you’re trying address, and why, or why not. In short, we try to find our Unique Selling Proposition. I looked closely at a number of big names in the document imaging and PDF worlds, products like Acrobat Professional, Abbyy Finereader and the like. Not only did I find my USP within minutes, I’ve found a wealth of new user interface ideas and major bits of functionality that would slot right in to Home Document Manager.

I’m already a decent way through coding for the new product and have had so many a-ha moments for version 2 of HDM too.

Choosing WPF was a mistake. I love WPF. I work for Microsoft writing WPF. But for this particular project, it was the wrong call. The new project I’m writing uses Windows Forms. It’s been a while since I did WinForms, but my WPF experience is illuminating my UI architecting in new ways. I also really don’t miss the WPF cold start times. I’m certainly more productive using WPF, but let’s face it, in the B2C world, your customers really don’t care about that. Version 2 of HDM will use WinForms.

I haven’t paid enough attention to minimising the clicks my users have to go through in order to perform common tasks. This was immediately apparent when reviewing the competition for my new product, so version 2 of  HDM will have a much improved UI.

The deployment mechanism I use for HDM (ClickOnce) has its advantages. I can update end user installs easily, but serious B2B is a struggle because of the lack of Proxy support in ClickOnce. I also fell into the self signed ClickOnce bootstrapper trap, which effectively brought iterations of version 1 of HDM to a premature end. Bog standard installers from hereon-in.

One of the things I have to consider is whether or not to bring two such closely related products under the same umbrella on the same website. This has obvious advantages for marketing and SEO, they are both paperless/PDF/document related products.

A lot to mull over, but for me, speccing and developing a second complimentary/related product seems to be a good thing so far. I know the arguments about laser-like focus for micro ISVs, and I’m hoping that I’m not stumbling into a heffalump trap. But having two related products, particularly on the same website, should add credibility, and the 2 products can also have a beneficial effect on each other. Time will tell.

p.s. I’m writing this on Christmas day only because I’m standing in the kitchen with our latest edition (Eli Benjamin, 6 weeks old) strapped to my chest while I wait for the turkey to cook. Happy Christmas everyone.

A year or two ago, trusted Micro ISV‘er Andy Brice posted an article entitled The Great Digital Certificate Ripoff? It’s well worth a read as it underlines some of the apparent anticompetitive aspects of this particular market.

I’m very happy to say that the ground is shifting – something interesting is happening. Internet Explorer is pretty much universally despised by tech-savvy users, but its sheer market slice means that only a fool would ignore it. As of now, Internet Explorer (and by extension, Windows) will have a new root certificate installed. The root certificate will be that of StartCom Ltd. Why is this important?

StartCom is the only public certification authority providing digital certificates for free!

The implications for security on Windows are profound. No longer will SSL and code signing certificates be expensive commodities for the little guy. Firefox and Apple have supported StartCom for some time, but thankfully us Windows developers can now get in on it.

The SLL certificates are free and provide:

• Web server certificates (SSL/TLS)
• Client and mail certificates (S/MIME)
• 128/256-bit encryption
• US $ 10,000 insurance guaranteed
• Valid 365 days (1 year)

The code signing certificates require a verified account, but still cost a measley $39, and boast:

Web server certificates (SSL/TLS)

Wild cards (*.domain.com)

Multiple domains (DNS Alt Names)

128/256-bit encryption

Object Code Signing (beta)

Client and mail certificates (S/MIME)

US $ 10,000 insurance guaranteed

2 Years validity (730 days)

Well done to StartCom, and well done to Microsoft. Check out the certificates on offer here.

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Have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything.

Sydney Smith
English essayist (1771 – 1845)

Although it didn’t happen by conscious effort, I have managed to steer myself through a decade of software engineering whilst remaining largely ignorant of a great many areas of what many would consider my trade. Although this could be construed as self criticism, it has actually served me rather well. Although I’ve dabbled in various areas, Windows desktop applications have been my main area of focus, and in the freelancer market, this is very much a niche that I am happy to occupy. Being in this niche, and also being one of the most experience WPF freelance developers in the country has not only shielded me (thus far) from the recession, it has also led me to the Mecca of .Net developers: Microsoft itself, where I am a very, *very* happy chappy.

Whilst this laserlike focus is benefiting freelancer-Tim, it might also be hurting micro-ISVer-Tim. I am at the point where Home Document Manager is a solid 1.x product, its traffic share is increasing, as is its customer base. I’ve signed a partnership agreement with a UK startup (the founders of which are friends and ex-colleagues) to rebadge and push Home Document Manager in to document management resellers, and that is starting to get some traction too.

As my main areas of interest revolve around document management in its many forms, my attention has started to shift a little to what I could do in the web-based arena. I have no intention of going up against Google Docs or Zoho (rest easy boys), they aren’t really document management tools; certainly not in the sense that people who work in document management would understand. So when my B2B partners asked if I would develop a web based offering, I was more than a little interested.

Although I toyed briefly with the idea of taking this as an opportunity to play with Ruby on Rails, I put my business head on and decided that I would be far more productive by staying in my comfort zone, i.e. .Net.

Some fantastic things have happened to desktop apps in recent years; Adobe Air and WPF both spring to mind. The web has also seen its fair share of advancements. After considering all, some or fewer of the competition, I’m taking a tentative step towards the ASP.Net MVC framework. Its simplicity, power and convention based strengths were immediately apparent and its inherent unit-testability makes it very appealing to me.

The Model View Controller is not new, but the very mature framework that comes with the download makes for easy development. I like easy development.

Being the methodical soul that I am, I’ve scouted out the best book on the subject and am merrily plodding my way through it. I chose Professional ASP.Net MVC 1.0, by Conery et. al., and can certainly recommend it thus far. The samples and walkthroughs are well thought out and the rate of progress is just right for me and I would certainly recommend it.

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