Visual Studio 2010

Taking the big step of moving to VS2010/Silverlight 4 today. I've been using VS2008 with Silverlight 3 for some time now. Upgrading is always fraught with danger. Will the third party components I use still work properly? Will my code still compile? However, there are enough new features in Silverlight 4 to make the effort worthwhile. Here's hoping for a smooth transition...

thepowertool powers on

Well, we've been doing lots of demos for thepowertool. We've concentrated on the legal firms, who handle construction companies and disputes, and building associations. We need their endorsement so that if someone asks 'have you heard of thepowertool?' they can immediately say 'yes, its great!'. So far their support has been overwhelmingly postive, which bodes well for the future. Now we turn our focus to actual sign ups!

thepowertool is live

Over the last six months we've been working on a new product called thepowertool and we've just gone live. thepowertool is a construction payment system which links the claimant (the company wanting to be paid) with the respondent (the one doing the paying). The claimant uses our browser-based Silverlight program to define their clients and contracts. Each month they will create a payment claim which is emailed to the respondent. The respondent can click on the email link to approve/adjust the payment claim. The system provides the easiest way yet for claimants and respondents to process payment claims using a strict process that conforms to the security payments legislation which has been introduced in most Australian states, New Zealand, Malaysia and Singapore.

For any project to be successful you need the right mix of people. We've provided our technical expertise while others have provided their expertise in the construction industry and the application of the legislation. We've been showing it off to a number of industry bodies and they are very excited by what they have seen. I think we have a winner here!

C'mon Steve!

The battle between Apple and Adobe is heating up with some collateral damage. With Adobe about to release CS5 with a Flash-to-iPhone compiler, which would have flooded the app store with tons of crappy flashware apps (to match the tons of crappy Objective-C apps), Apple have made a change to their developer agreement. Section 3.3.1 now states programs must be 'originally written' with Objective C or C++. No Flash. So much for Adobe spending all that money on their compiler technology. Unfortunately, the same clause prevents programs being written in Monotouch, Unity3D and a number of other similar languages.

Various reasons have been suggested for the change:
-Programs won't play nice with the new multi-tasking in OS4.0. Pity one of the programs Steve Jobs specifically demonstrated at the OS 4.0 release was written in one of these now banned languages.
-Cross-platforms apps don't provide the look and feel of the native apps. Monotouch used the specific Cocoa API's provided for the iPhone to generate the UI. So its UI is exactly the same as apps generated using Objective-C. And games don't count since they have their own UI anyway.
-Relying on another layer between the Apple API's and other tools will slow down the adoption of new API's. Monotouch had a new version out supporting the new iPad API's within 24 hours of the dev-kit being released by Apple.

If Microsoft tried to pull this same crap, there would be a massive uproar. But it seems its ok for Apple to do it. It might be argued that Microsoft has a monopolistic grasp on the PC market that Apple doesn't have. But in terms of smart phone applications it could easily be argued that iPhone has the dominance and near monopoly. And it looks like they will do all they can to keep it that way.

Basically the only good reason I've heard so far has been that Uncle Steve wants to lock developers into developing for the iPhone. A cross-platform tool can make it too easy to develop an app for multiple phones. Having the same app appear on different app stores simultaneously dilutes the value of the iTunes app store.

In general, I'm quite happy to be developing just for the iPhone - the handsets seem to be everywhere. This latest move by Apple leaves a sour taste though. I would have preferred to be working on iPhones because they were simply the best not because Apple put up artificial technical obstacles to limit competition.

And it would be easier to live with, if Apple actually updated Objective-C to have many of the features modern languages have. In my opinion, Objective-C doesn't really cut it. Our first couple of apps were using Objective-C, so we have some idea what we are doing. However, using MonoTouch provided a big improvement in productivity, especially when the app links to a web back-end using C#.

For the moment, we'll be watching events unfold over the next couple of weeks before making a decision on what we do with the tools. Our apps won't be too hard to back port to Objective-C, I'll just miss memory-management, a decent XML parser, Linq, etc.

Interesting times...

An Exciting New Year

Well its back into it for a new year. 2010 already! Where did that decade go?

It was quite a long break over December and I'm all nice and refreshed. Clients are just starting to get back into work mode so we should see some things ramp up. My Delphi work continues to pay the bills. I've been working for a client adding functionality to a shed design system. Quite a bit different from retail. Lots of number crunching and engineering. Makes for a nice change!

There are some other projects in the pipeline which I should be able to blog about soon. We are aiming to launch a new system in late February. This is a mixed Silverlight/ ASP.NET MVC project I have been working on over the last few months (as time permits). It should be quite exciting as we believe its got some good potential. I've quite enjoyed working with these newer technologies. Silverlight took some getting used to and I had to pull a framework together for it, but I've got a system I am pretty happy to put my name to. If it works out as expected, there will also be some iPhone integration added later on, which will add more value to the system.

There is also another Silverlight/iPhone project I am working on. This one is early days but there seems to be some interest in it. If we can translate that into some funding, work will start on it soon.

Speaking of iPhone, I'm looking to change from Objective C to Monotouch. I've found Objective C to be ok to work with (although memory management is a bit of a pain). As a techie its always nice to learn new stuff. So why change? Monotouch provides a C# programming model for iPhones. What it means is I can consolidate the languages I'm using at the moment to Delphi and C#. I also get nice things like memory management and Linq and I can share business logic/ code across my iPhone/Silverlight/ASP.NET apps. Cool!

Looking forward to a big 2010!