Austin .Net User Group Bloggers

Jeffrey Palermo: Party with Palermo: MVP Summit 2010 – Red Robin, Bellevue, Feb 15, 7pm

Jeffrey Palermo — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:54:18 PST

zainnab: CodeCast Episode 66: SOLID with Claudio Lassala

zainnab — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:56:46 PST

Jeremy D. Miller: More signs of FubuMVC getting real

Jeremy D. Miller — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:52:00 PST

zainnab: LinkedIn .NET User Group (LIDNUG) Presents Scott Guthrie Thursday 2/11 10am PT

zainnab — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:05:00 PST

zainnab: Using the New IntelliSense: Pascal Case -- vstipEdit0017

zainnab — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 01:00:00 PST

zainnab: Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate is Available Now!!

zainnab — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 16:41:35 PST

Jeffrey Palermo: Code Magazine article on ASP.NET MVC 2 source code download

Jeffrey Palermo — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 20:33:00 PST

zainnab: Using the New IntelliSense: Keywords -- vstipEdit0016

zainnab — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:00:00 PST

zainnab: Version Information is Coming.

zainnab — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 01:05:00 PST

Joshua Flanagan: Adding variable output behavior to your FubuMVC actions

Joshua Flanagan — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 19:34:34 PST

Jeffrey Palermo: Windows 7 brings new life to devices that don’t have Vista drivers

Jeffrey Palermo — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 18:28:14 PST

zainnab: Setting a Tracepoint in source code -- vstipDebug0010

zainnab — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 01:00:00 PST

Christopher Painter: Looking back, nothing has changed.

Christopher Painter — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 18:18:00 PST

The other day I was reading that Martin Fowler will be visiting Austin giving a presentation on "What Agile really means to the future of software development".

I'm sure Martin is better then most ( he did after all sign off on a Continuous Integration book written by a good friend of mine - Paul Duvall ) but most evangelists and developers that I've met think very little of setup.

This reminds me back to something that Bob Baker wrote over 10 years ago in the Official InstallShield for Windows Installer Developer's Guide book.

"The main problem that is faced by the setup developer is that he creation of the installation for an application is normally left to the last minute just before the product has to ship. This is because setup is not considered part of the development process."

It's now the year 2010 and this is still true now more then ever. I've been doing setup development since 1997 and the one thing that is a near constant is that developer always treat setup related tasks and the setup developer himself as second class citizens. They assume that because your working on the install that you must be a development flunky. This is probably because that's the way it's been everywhere else they have ever worked.

Frankly it's really annoying. Seriously, just how many times can you take some new developer coming into your office, looking at the setup problem domain from 50,000 feet, claiming that it's easy in a condescending tone and then refusing to provide meaningful participation in solving the problem? BTW, can you get this done by tonight's build? That would be grrrrreaaaaaat.

These guys can talk a mean talk about Agile, Scrum, Lean, TDD, IoC, MVVM, ASP.NET MVC, Separation of Concerns, Single Responsibility ( and so on and so on ) but they always wait until the last second to come to you to get their install done and God forbid you see a problem with their design that effects setup because frankly they just won't care because 'it's already done; this needs to ship next week'. If you try to explain to them that they should learn setup and include it in their Agile and Lean believes they suddenly become very disinterested.

Since your bothering to read this I'll assume your a setup guy and have already witnessed this. But let's assume for a moment that your not and you don't believe me. To date, 500,000 questions have been asked on StackOverflow. Here are are the top 10 tags in popularity:

c# 61927
java 34410
.net 32759
asp.net 28696
php 27893
javascript 25159
c++ 24402
jquery 18771
python 17964
iphone 16413

This is a total of 288,394 question or apx 58% of the total. Now lets see how many questions have been asked about setup:

msi 469
wix 439
installshield 142
installaware 5
wise 15
installer 763
windows-instaler 357
install 231

This represents a total of 2421 questions or 0.5% of the total. Truly sad IMO.

Then there is a dearth of interest at code camps and conferences. For example, someone recently told me that at a recent Microsoft PDC they attended a deployment focus group. He indicated that it looks like they had swag for 12 people and that 4 people actually showed up.

Think about that. Of all the thousands of developers who attended PDC, only 2 of them had enough of an interest in setup to attend a focus group.

However, there is a bright side: Setup isn't going away. Projects of all sizes continue to need deployment solutions that work. Yes, this is a niche field with little respect, but there is some real good money to be made if you are willing to commit yourself to learning everything possible and become the world beater that can make things happen. You will have so little competition from your peers because they don't have a clue just how important setup actually is.

zainnab: Setting a Tracepoint in the Call Stack Window -- vstipDebug0009

zainnab — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 01:00:00 PST

(Mitch Fincher): EventBrite Integrates Amzaingly Well With Twitter, Facebook, and Calendaring

noreply@blogger.com (Mitch Fincher) — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:03:00 PST

zainnab: Setting a Breakpoint in the Call Stack Window -- vstipDebug0008

zainnab — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:00:00 PST

Jeremy D. Miller: StructureMap 2.6 (and 2.5.4) is Released!

Jeremy D. Miller — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 07:14:00 PST

zainnab: Adding comments to a DataTip -- vstipDebug0007

zainnab — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 01:00:00 PST

Jeremy D. Miller: Getting StructureMap off SourceForge, Thoughts?

Jeremy D. Miller — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 14:29:00 PST

chadmyers: Thinking about sessions for Pablo’s Fiesta

chadmyers — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 08:59:27 PST