What Others Are Saying About Software - 1/28/2009

BizSpark - Free Software and Production Licenses for Startups in the Startup Phase
A nice option for service or product oriented start-up companies. And it is a smart move by Microsoft. A profitable company using your software is always preferred to the bankrupt company who cannot afford your software.

Programming By Numbers
Great article about the architect and developer roles in software organizations. I think a good rule of thumb is, All architects should code, and all developers should architect. And I don't mean spending 5% of your time as a meaningful cross discipline effort. John Lennon tried to imagine a different world than our own. I would like to imagine a future where there are no developers or architects, just expert software producers.

File Transfer Manager in VMWare = poof

Ok, admittedly, this is an unusual configuration. But in the event you find yourself needing to download ISO images from MSDN in a Windows 2003 OS running in a VMWare virtual machine, beware.

The File Transfer Manager performs a brief file validation at the end of each download. On my virtual Windows 2003 machine, this validation step maxed the CPU and RAM. Within about 5 seconds, my virtual machine locked up and my host machine blue screened--forcing a reboot of the host machine.

That's a serious memory leak.

What Others Are Saying About Software - 1/13/2009

Give and Take in the Software Industry
"Four-walls and a door might be too much to ask, but at least organise the open spaces in ways such that the shouty/squealy-teams are separated from the thinky-teams."

Introducing HNibernate Auto Mapping
James Gregory has published a series of blog posts on the new NHibernate auto mapping features. Basically, you can wire up your domain to your persistence medium without the use of configuration. Additional posts:

Auto Mapping Conventions

Auto Mapping Type Conventions

Auto Mapping Entity Conventions