Microsoft and Black Marble present Visual Studio 2010 and Managing the Application Lifecycle

Visual Studio 2010 is being designed inside and out to give developers and development teams every advantage in getting the next ground-breaking application to market – quickly. The upshot is that your business gets to reap the rewards of tomorrow’s efficiency today. Find out more at Black Marble:

Black Marble Events

Stop Trippin’

If Chess were Played like Some Companies do New Media Marketing

I suck at chess. I thought we’d just get that out of the way up front. You see chess is a game of both strategy and tactics. Strategy deals with the longer term aims of the game, positional or material advantage for example, whilst tactics cover things like the short number of moves taken to capture a more valuable piece during an exchange.

Now the tactics are easy, I can handle that. Once you know the rules of how each piece moves around the board, formulating tactics based on that is pretty straight forward. It’s different with strategy though. A good chess strategy takes a lot of knowledge to formulate. It means studying the voluminous text on openings and end games and the like; and although I like the game, the cost of the time involved to study it far outweighs the benefit to me of knowing how to play well.

It turns out that being good at new media marketing is very similar to playing a game of chess. In other words… you can’t rely on tactics alone, you need a good strategy too. As an evangelist for DevExpress, I like to watch how other companies handle their new media marketing. Some of the companies I see flit from one new media tactic to another (from Facebook to Twitter to blogging etc) without any clear idea of what they want to achieve in any given area.

Much like chess however, formulating a good new media marketing strategy takes effort. You have to be confident that you know where you stand in your market in a virtual sense. This may not be be (and in fact probably wont be) the standing that you have in the real world. For example, in the real world, you may be a small company with a niche product in a much larger market, dwarfed by your competitors. However, in the virtual world, you may have many hundreds of vociferous customers who are incredibly passionate about your product and who blog and evangelise about it whenever and where ever they can.

Knowing where you currently stand in the market, you can then decide where it is that you want to take your product to. Having decided this, you can then workout the milestones along that path and these milestones can be reported against for auditing purposes.

Once these steps are completed you may feel that your new media marketing strategy is complete, but it’s not – what we’ve got is only half the story. No company succeeds in the virtual world alone, and your company probably has a traditional (or main stream) media strategy too. It would be counter productive if these two strategies were pulling in opposite directions. Having put together the bare bones of the new media strategy its then time to sit down and examine the MSM strategy and tweak each so that you end up with a holistic strategy that your marketing and evangelism teams can drive forward. Of course, in an ideal world, you would be able to formulate these plans in tandem but, in reality, you will most likely already have an existing MSM strategy; at least when you first come to formulate your new media strategy.

Only now, when you know where you are, where you want to get to, and how it will work with your MSM strategy is your new media strategy complete. Only once complete can you start to look at the tactics you are going to use to bring your strategy to fruition; Twitter for this thing, Facebook for that thing, wikis for the next thing.

There is an almost hidden benefit to ensuring you have a new media marketing strategy and that is that it helps you to monitor the impact of new media on your marketing effort. This is very important. Let’s imagine you don’t have any sort of strategy in your company for new media marketing (dumb I know but let’s imagine anyway ) and your boss says to you “this Twitter is a waste of time, it’s for losers, it’s just noise”. Its going to be pretty hard for you to prove otherwise, cos we all know how hard it is to measure the ROI on social networks and the like. However, imagine that your company runs some sort of annual competition and until this year you’ve only publicised it via your MSM marketing outlets. This year your strategy says that you want to increase the entrants by 20% and, tactically, you’ve decided to use Twitter to spread the word. Once the final entrant numbers have been collected and you discount any increase caused by the tactics used by the MSM marketing team, you can then see exactly what the ROI of using Twitter is.

Okay, I’m going to end now, as I started, by imagining that chess was played like some companies do new media marketing. If it were, I think it would go something like this:

White: “Okay, I need to get into this chess thing. I want to start cautiously though as I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m going to move this pawn, way out here on the left, forward one square. Let’s see how that works out for me.”

Black: “Did you see that?! My competitor is in the game; I need to get in the game too, and fast. Okay, okay, what to do? Well he’s started off small, the pussy, so I have an opportunity to dominate here. I’m gonna move my knight right into the middle!”

White: “Holy Moly! He moved a knight! A knight I tell you! Knights must be the thing to move, not pawns. I’m moving my knight in there too, that’s what all the smart kids are doing!”

Black: “Yes, I was right! I knew it! He moved his knight too, knights must be the way forward in this game, everyone’s into knights at the moment, I better move my other knight too and not get left behind!”

If you know anything about chess, and even if you don’t,  I’m sure you can see that a game played like this is sure to be a disaster. Don’t let your new media marketing effort end up like this. Get a strategy now.

Digital Nomad – What’s in your Mobile Toolbox?

The best thing about working from home is that you are at home. The worst thing about working from home is… well…you are at home, and that is especially true during the school holidays. With my wife also working at a school it means the house, which is normally empty and peaceful is suddenly filled with the noise of battle as two teenagers, a pre-teen and a frazzled mother “debate” the important issues of the day; like who’s turn it is to walk the dogs or do the dishes.

[A DevExpress blog post]

Landing a Parascender on Obzor Beach

Cameron and I parascending in Obzor, Bulgaria.

Chrome OS – A new Operating System from Google

I go away on holiday, not turning my back for five minutes, and what happens? Google go and announce a new operating system (Chrome OS). Can I not leave you alone for two minutes? You’re worse than the kids! Seriously though, what is this Chrome OS then? Well, it’s an operating system that will be “initially targeted at netbooks”, but Google hope to roll it out to desktops too. It will be open source, based on the Linux kernel and Google are already working with technology companies (Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, HP, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Toshiba) to ensure that it will be available on netbooks when it ships during the second half of 2010.
[More on my DevExpress blog...]

XAF – Distributed Pair Programming and Fast Prototyping

Using XAF recently reminded me of my Smalltalk days in the early ‘90s, more on why that was at the end of the post, but for now let’s talk about pair programming. You know about pair programming right? It’s a practice in eXtreme Programming whereby two programmers sit at the same keyboard and work on the same programming task. One concentrates on the strategic purpose of the task, the other (normally the ‘driver’) concentrates on the tactical aspects of getting the task done. Working this way, the theory goes, both together can be more productive than two programmers working separately and, to be fair, this is generally true.

[A devexpress blog post]

How to Increase your Number of Twitter Followers

Recently a friend of mine (@Ben_Hall) noticed that I’d increased my number of followers on Twitter and asked me how I had done it. I replied that although what I’d done was simple I couldn’t explain it in 140 characters and that I’d write a blog post, so for Ben (and for you if you are interested) here’s what I did:

1. Assume that people following you (with the exception of spammers) are interested in what you have to say.
2. Assume that people following your followers *might* also be interested in what you have to say.
3. For each of your followers…
   1. look at what they have twittered most recently
   2. If it is representative of what you want to say
      1. Look at their first page of followers (they are the most recent followers and are most likely to interested in what has most recently been said)
      2. Follow each (non spam) follower there
4. Do nothing for 48 hours, to allow those that you have followed to reciprocate.
5. Run a script to unfollow those who have not followed you (cos you can’t have a conversation with someone who isn’t listening) with the exception of those who’s views you are interested in regardless of if they follow you or not.

Okay so this is a pretty general solution and YMMV but it works for me. It increases my number of followers but still keeps them relevant to what I have to say and what I am interested in hearing about.

Hope it helps you!

Removing Slowness from Visual Studio 2010 (Dev10)

Yesterday I downloaded Dev10 from the MSDN site and installed it on my Win7 VM on my Mac. The first thing I noticed was that it ran like a three legged dog – that is to say, it was slow.

Hmm, I thought (I actually make that noise when I think) I have this VM set up to provide the maximum recommended RAM and yet this is still soooo slooooooow; I know it’s a beta product but even so, surely it shouldn’t run this slowly. And then I remembered… Dev10 uses WPF heavily. I remembered Oliver had had a performance issue with WPF and he had solved it by (counter intuitively) turning off the 3D acceleration on the VM he was using. So I tried the same thing and lo and behold, my Dev10 installation is now running at a sensible speed.

So if you are using Dev10 on a VM (and if you aren’t why not, it’s beta don’t you know) and you are having performance issues,  then try disabling the 3D acceleration on your VM and see if things improve.

NxtGenUG Manchester you Say?

NxtGenUG are again well chuffed to announce the start of the seventh UK region, this time in Manchester. The group is being run by local developers Steve Robbins and Andy Wilkinson .  The group will have it’s first meeting on 20th May 2009 between 7.00pm and 9.00pm in the  Pennine House, Carrs Road, Cheadle SK8 2BL. The headline speaker is to announced but the subject will be as topical and exciting as the other NxtGenUG events that are held monthly around the country.  There will be the usual NxtGenUG activities of eating Pizza and Swagging-out.  To book your place goto http://www.nxtgenug.net/ViewEvent.aspx?EventID=210 where registration and meeting is free.  Come along and enjoy yourself and get involved in the growing UK Community in the North-West of England!