The Agile Micro ISV Blog

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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