Skunkworks Project? What in the World is THAT?!
Ok imagine this: you gather the world’s best and brightest engineers, physicists, chemists, and other professions of high end science and place them into a large warehouse. Now that you have them all gathered into this warehouse, you give them a TON of research resources and funding. Finally, you tell them to come up with something radical or revolutionary with the resources you have just provided them. Well my friend, you just launched your very own “Skunkworks Project”.
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Marketing as a Tool to Support Software Development
Say we have a Software Development Department at ACME Company. They are tasked with creating and maintaining all the software that ACME sells. The bulk of their daily work is adding new features to current product lines and working on bug fixes. Now and then this Software Development Department has an idea that they think is fantastic. No really, this idea is a real heck of an idea! They attempt to persuade management in investing development hours into their idea after having put together a small prototype for demonstration. However the issue at hand is management does not have full confidence that ACME clients will want such a new and different product. What can the ACME Developers do to prevent their idea from dying on the table? Why they can utilize Marketing as a tool to grow their idea!
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Two Camps of Thought
When it comes to running a business the driving factor in many decisions is the “bottom line”. The easiest way to express that is with the equation Revenue – Cost = Profit. Now in order to increase profit you want to minimize your cost and maximize your revenue. Actually doing that is a different story. Making changes to your product line is one way to bring in more cash, either by improving your current stuff or adding new products. However, there are generally two camps of thought when it comes to approaching this possibility.
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Inking in Silverlight
Users with touch screens, stylus-enabled screens, or USB stylus pads appreciate the ability to write and markup documents and files. Plenty of modern applications today support inking natively (Example: OneNote 2010, one application I use in conjunction with my Lenovo tablet as a digital notebook on most days of the week) for a variety of purposes and actions. You may not know it already, but Silverlight has all the required libraries in place to utilizing inking on screen. So today I’ve put together a little Silverlight web app to demonstrate.
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Success Through Innovation
Without creativity, thinking, and even daydreaming some of the best products and applications would have never seen the light of day. Sure you can floor the world with a fantastic new software library, but if you cannot keep it updated or begin development on the next version you can expect to lose your edge in the market. I came across a fantastic quote today that one of my coworkers had thrown up on their whiteboard.
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Write to XML with C#
So we can read XML in a variety of ways (one example here, and another here). So can we write it in C#? Of course we can! So lets jump right into shall we?
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Solution Folders in Visual Studio 2010 Explained
If you are new to Visual Studio, you may not be familiar with how “Solution Folders” work. Visual Studio allows you to group together any number of sub-projects that your root solution may contain. However, what is strange about Solution Folders in Visual Studio is that they do not create the same logical structure on your disk. Solution Folders will not create a mirror on your hard drive. They just create a logical grouping inside your Visual Studio Project. They will not move files around, or create directories for your projects when you create Solution Folders and place your projects inside them. It is a good practice to have your logical project structure to have a one-to-one relationship with your physical directory structure, and the behavior of the Solution Folders do not follow this. But there is a way for Visual Studio to create the physical structure on the disk when adding projects to the solution.
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Give Me the Stats, Jack!
Sometimes you need to take a specific set of data, crunch some numbers, and base selections on a normal distribution. Well there are plenty of equations and mathmatical processes to determine if and where `Object A` may fall. Is it close to the mean of a given dataset? Or is it so far out there it really does not fit the curve?
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