Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Playing Tetris while coding?

As many of us, I had to work on code that was created by someone else. In my case, it was even code wrote by multiple persons. My mission was to refactor and improve performance.
I found it interesting to compare that task to playing Tetris. First of all, reading thru the code was literally like a puzzle. The next part of the game, refactoring, reminded me a lot when you start a Tetris game with a screen already filled at 75% and you slowly start to “fix” the underlying structure to remove holes.
In the end, I had to stop playing Tetris on that one and completely rewrote the code. Not that I don’t like mind games but time is money and it was definitely faster to rewrite than try to “fix”.

Monday, October 13, 2008

Silverlight 2 to be released tomorrow

A few week after the Release Candidate, Microsoft announce the final release of Silverlight.
Tomorrow, Oct 14th the final release will be available for download on the official Silverlight website.

We are all eager to see that final release...

Thursday, October 2, 2008

EC2 Will finally support Windows

Amazon announced that they will support Windows operating system later this fall. This is indeed great news for ASP.net developers. It will give them a chance to leverage the rock solid infrastructure of Amazon.
EC2 has been continuously improving, adding static ip addresses, Multiple Locations and more recently the long awaited Elastic Block Store (EBS). They've also expanded the number of instance types available, adding High CPU instances for computer intensive applications.
All those features made EC2 "ready for prime time" when using a *NIX OS and it is not surprising to see that Oracle recently announced its partnership with Amazon and allowed migration of existing licenses to EC2.

Amazon is now going to compete with other Cloud providers that were supporting Windows OS such as FlexiScale, Mosso or GoGrid to name a few. We have yet to see how Windows will perform on EC2 and especially how it will connect to EBS. Some will argue that Windows was already supported by using QEMU, however everyone that tested that configuration will agree with me in saying that it was not suitable for production use.

Saturday, September 27, 2008

Silverlight 2 Release Candidate 0

Silverlight 2 RC0 is available for download for developers that want to start migrating beta 2 applications.
Scott Guthrie has a good post if you want to look at it in more details.
Please note that this build is only for developers to get prepared for the final release which is supposed to be presented during Microsoft PDC on October 27-30.

Happy Coding !

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Yet another player in the PaaS battle field

Wolf Frameworks started the beta for his PaaS (Platform as a Service) offering.
Earlier this month Laird released an updated version of his Visual Map of Cloud Computing/SaaS/PaaS players where you can get an idea of the various companies trying to enter the PaaS market.
So if you still think that Force.com is your only option, you should have a look at that map that is now quite popular.

Monday, August 4, 2008

Why SaaS needs RIA

Softwares sold under the SaaS model are usually web applications. I say usually because it may not always be the case as SaaS vendor Entellium demonstrated recently.
One of the things that SaaS vendors use to sell is the fact that the software is immediately available and that no install is needed. However desktop installs are now easier than ever and if the desktop application of your competitor is better in terms of UI and/or functionality, the choice will be simple.

Not only your UI should be Rich and easy to use to compete with the desktop equivalent but also to keep support costs as low as possible. Additionnaly, moving some of the processing to the client machine is a good thing in general, it makes the app more responsive and will save cpu cycles on the servers to keep hosting costs down.

Lately a lot of people are saying that SaaS is not a profitable business. It's partially true. Some vendors think they can build any software and sell it under the SaaS model and that it will work. Believing in this is like thinking that SaaS will turn any software into gold. However, take it the other way if your software is gold then you can potentially sell it under any model.

Saturday, August 2, 2008

Welcome

As you may have have noticed, SaaS is becoming increasingly popular even though it's not really new. I've been working with SaaS for quite some time now along with Rich Internet Applications using all sorts of technology (Ajax, Gears, Flex, Air and more recently Silverlight).
Just following the trend, I am going to create yet another acronym "RIAaaS" which stands for Rich Internet Applications sold as a Service in the hope that this term will one day become popular just like SaaS, PaaS or DBaaS.
This blog is going to talk about RIA, SaaS and how they work together.