Developers

As developers, we always want more speed in our development environment. While adding more RAM and getting a faster CPU will always help, there are things you can do just within the OS and on your hard drive that will help you extract every bit of performance from your computer.

What makes some programmers stand above the rest? How can some programmers create wildly new and useful algorithms while others struggle? What are the important traits that make an exceptional programmer? Your answers will be different depending on whether you are a programmer--OR someone who hires and manages them. In this article, I’ll explore some of these questions and pose answers that will help make you a better –and more valuable—programmer. If you hire programmers, you’ll know a good one when you see them.

When most developers talk about Architecting they are typically referring to the way their Data Tier and Business Tiers are structured, or how they put their services together. While this type of architecture is very important, how about the architecture for the user interface (UI) layer? It should be given the same thought and design process as everything else in your application.

Are you or your developers writing stored procedures by hand? Are they creating duplicate CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) logic in multiple places? If so, you should consider a code generator. The benefits of using a code generator to generate your data access logic are huge! If you are not using one, you need to ask yourself why? If the answer is because you think no one else can write code the way you can, that is not a good enough reason. When you consider how long it takes you to create, test and debug data access code, and how much time you put in when the schema of a table changes, you will soon find out that you are wasting a lot of time.

Almost every business today needs to communicate information, not only to their customers, but to their employees as well. Employees also need to be able to collaborate on documents, schedule meetings, and have discussions with other employees. An Intranet site is an ideal place to accomplish each of these. In the past, creating an Intranet meant a lot of programming time, a lot of changes, and a lot of money. Now, you can use Microsoft SharePoint to create an Intranet with all of these features right out of the box!

As developers we are constantly thinking about how to solve a problem for a user. However, should you be thinking about programming all of this yourself, or using an existing product? While we all like to program, sometimes we just do not have the time to create every solution that needs to be written. Maybe we should spend a little more time learning what Microsoft has to offer instead of coding so much. Below are just some of their products and a brief overview of what functionality they can deliver. For full details on these, and other Microsoft products, visit www.microsoft.com.

Do you store information about your customers, clients, suppliers, vendors, and your employees on a computer system? If so, you need to be aware of different movements that are happening, at least in the United States, about keeping that data secure. Many states are enacting legislation that is going to require businesses to not only safeguard that information, but also force those businesses to notify those people if such information becomes compromised. For example, there is a new bill, Senate Bill 1386, in the state of California that amends existing Civil Code to provide Californians immediate notification, when confidential information about them has been compromised due to a breach on any computer system that stores such information. Many other states are also enacting similar legislation. If you think this bill will not affect you; think again. Any business, government or non-profit agency, or individual that stores confidential information about California residents on their computers is impacted. If you are interested in reading the original text of the Bill, it can be found at the website of the California State Senate (http://info.sen.ca.gov/cgi-bin/postquery?bill_number=sb_1386&sess=PREV&house=B&site=sen).

Many of you have remodeled a kitchen sometime in your lives. When it came to the cabinets, you probably didn’t have a carpenter build them from scratch out of raw lumber. If you’re like most of us, you chose them pre-built from a cabinet store. Why? Because it was quicker and cheaper to do so, and you didn’t have to give up any quality. In fact, the quality was likely better than if the cabinets were custom built, because all the little mistakes in cut angles and nail positions and hardware choices had been worked out in the design phase. You didn’t have to pay for those mistakes, but you benefited from the results. The same goes for software development. If you can purchase portions of your application that have already been built and tested many times in other applications (in the form of a good Application Framework), you can build your application faster and cheaper. And it will work better. Read this report to see why a good Application Framework is worth the price.