Canadian developers and independent software vendors traveled south to Microsoft Corp.’s Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles this month, looking for the latest word on where the software company is going and for tools to make their jobs easier.
Joe Bains is senior software developer for Squirrel Systems, a Vancouver-based developer of IT systems for the restaurant industry. Since many workers in the sector do not have a large base of computer experience, and since high turnover rates make extensive training infeasible, Squirrel focuses on making its systems as user-friendly and intuitive as possible. Bains said he sees Vista’s visually appealing graphical user interface (GUI) being a help there.
On the programming side, Bains said a lot of development time is spent reinventing things that should be included in the development suite or OS, or sourcing and configuring third-party applications to do the job. That was a problem he wanted Microsoft to solve.
“I think Microsoft is finally starting to address that, and they’ll get a lot more support in the community if they make the programmer’s job simpler, so we can concentrate on the business needs of their customers,” said Bains. “Let us hone in on quality.”
Patrick Lok, a senior technical specialist with Habañero Consulting, a Vancouver Web design and application development firm, was also excited about the Vista and Office GUIs. He added that the tools to improve collaboration between design and development teams will be a big help for his company. “There’s always been some integration issues there,” said Lok.
The designers have their own requirements and tools that in the past haven’t worked well with Visual Studio, which is used by the developers. Lok said the situation meant that the developers had to rebuild the designer’s GUI to fit their development tools.
“I really see this integration alleviating a lot of those process problems we’re challenged with on a daily basis; it’s money, time, and it’s aggravation,” said Lok. “We’d like to promote stronger ties between the two, and focus more on delivering solutions.”
Kate Gregory, a programming consultant with Peterborough, Ont.-based Gregory Consulting Ltd., said she’s very excited about the workflow announcement, and sees it providing great value and cost savings for her clients.
“When clients ask, ‘Is it possible?’ I always say, ‘Well anything is possible, did you bring your chequebook?’” joked Gregory. “This moves things in from the realm of the possible to the realm of feasible in terms of possible.”
She said a lot of her enterprise clients have adopted ways of meeting their business needs that don’t have a workflow component yet, and they’ve been looking at some expensive custom applications, especially to layer workflow into Share Point.
“Taking all of that and saying it’s a service the OS provides across applications consistently is a huge deal,” said Gregory.