New Bridges,a new Internet, and Software Projects

By

There’s no question we need new bridges and road infrastructure in the United States. But how about a new Internet?

There is a massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch that is  inching along with $12 million in National Science Foundation funding and donations of up to 40 gigabits of network capacity by the Internet2 organization and NationalLambdaRail. That's enough bandwidth to run 30 high-quality movies into your house -- simultaneously! Construction on "GENI" could start in about five years and cost $350 million - if Congress approves the funding.

You could consider emailing your Senator / Congressperson telling them you think it’s a good idea.

On Software Projects

Have you ever been involved in a software development project that is simply, well -- dysfunctional?  I have, and it is not fun, especially when time starts to run out and then people start looking for somebody to blame. There are certain ingredients that I've learned need to be in every software project for it to succeed. I call it “RPARL” – Requirements, Plan, Architecture, Resources, Leadership:

  1. A complete description of the Requirements of the project.
  2. A project Plan (yep - forget about those index cards, guys) with a realistic timeline.
  3. UML / Sequence diagrams for Architecture - or at least, "some form" of architecture (to build a building, you need blueprints, remember?).
  4. Resources (people) who understand what they are working on and what their part is in it.
  5. Leadership. A project manager who understands the effort and is not in a "State of Denial". Somebody who knows how to steer the ship!

Oh, there is more, but the above are the main ones I can think of.

The software development process is a science; it deals with facts, figures and arithmetic. If you see that the ingredients aren’t there, get out if you possibly can. I’ve been developing software on my own or in a group of developers for probably 15+ years now, and it never ceases to amaze me how many companies – both big and small, can’t seem to “get” the importance of these ingredients for success in their software projects.

Factoid:

Ittyurl.net now sports nearly 450 Silverlight Links!

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Dennis Gorelik4:58 PM

    1) Are you saying that the idea to increase government spendings in the area where government has very little expertise (Internet) -- is a good idea?

    2) Good leadership and good resources are important for the project. Some set of clear goals are important.
    But everything else -- not so much.
    UML / Sequence diagrams are optional, detailed project plan is optional, complete description of requirements is optional.

    ReplyDelete
  2. peterbromberg6:01 PM

    The current Internet was born out of DARPA, which was a government funded project for the military. The people who contributed to it, such as Vincent Cerf, were of the highest caliber, as are the current participants in the GENI project for "Ineternet 2".

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous7:52 PM

    Peter, do you have any experience with Agile? If so, how does that fit in with your recipe?

    ReplyDelete
  4. peterbromberg9:58 PM

    @matt,
    I am familiar with Agile, and I endorse it. Agile is a group of software development methodologies that promotes development iterations, open collaboration, and process adaptability throughout the life-cycle of the project. They genrally fit in well with the observaions I made in this post.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Some observations on Script Callbacks, "AJAX", "ATLAS" "AHAB" and where it's all going.

By
I've taken a more than cursory interest in the whole Remote Scripting (.NET species) vs. AJAX and now ATLAS discussion, mostly because I started using Remote Scripting since Microsoft first released it, and because I continued to refine it after seeing Brent Ashley's excellent work with JSRS, which was one of the first "real" cross-browser solutions back in 2000 (that's the turn of the Century for you history buffs). Now Bertrand Leroy, a Microsoft guy whose work I like , has authored some very interesting ASP.NET 2.0 script callback stuff that he points to on his blog, and he is obviously (at least, to me he is) involved quite heavily in the development of this new ATLAS infrastructure that they'll preview at PDC. Leroy's most recent post brings to the surface what I agree are the major differences between the "AJAX a - la .NET" approach as popularized by Michael Swartz with his AJAX.NET library, and Leroy's RefreshPanel, the ASP.NET 2.0 b...
Read more

IE7 - Vista: "Internet Explorer has stopped Working"

By
Image
This one was a bitch. All of a sudden for no reason at all, out of the blue, I get this dialog "internet Explorer has stopped working". I didn't install any new software, crap- I didn't do anything! So here I am using FIREFART to go on the internet and find out what to do! Damn! Good thing I've got the sucker on the same machine (I'm not "anti-Firefox", i just don't use it that much except to check my page renderings). The Fix The fix (at least for me): 1) Go into Control Panel, and choose "Internet Options". 2) Under the "Advanced" tab, press the "RESET" button at the lower right: Don't ask me why this happens, or why the fix works. That's a BUG, D00D - I don't care how you slice it!
Read more

FIREFOX / IE Word-Wrap, Word-Break, TABLES FIX

By
One of the most annoying things a developer (who would normally delight in writing code, not futzing with markup) can have is getting rendering issues between different browsers. The two biggest players are of course Internet Exploder and Firefart (as I lovingly like to refer to each). In most cases that's going to take care of 98 percent of your total site traffic. IE has had a proprietary "word-break" style attribute for a long time, and this made it into the CSS 3.0 spec. But that doesn't necessarily help you with Firefox right now. Firefox literally - (and I consider this completely idiotic, since it's been in their bug database for FIVE YEARS) does not have a reliable CSS style element to force table cell content to break in the middle of a word in order to stop the content from expanding your table / div off the page or over other content on the page. Here's a partial fix, which will work for most tables and browsers. The style declaration (I call it m...
Read more

System.Web.Caching.Cache, HttpRuntime.Cache, and IIS Recycles

By
Recently I chimed in on a newsgroup thread to an OP (Original Poster) who was questioning why he was losing Cache items. This individual would load a dataset from the Cache object into a local object to use to perform processing. He had been using httpcontext.current.cache and noticed that sometimes he was not able to get the dataset out of the cache. He tried switching to HttpRuntime.Cache and it seemed to help. The OP claimed that the application is under heavy hits, and once or twice every month he would see this error. He wanted to know why does the HttpContext.Current.Cache call work sometimes, while some other times does not. A couple of posters replied, one of whom is a respected MVP who usually makes very astute, high-quality posts. He posted," The cache is only valid during the life of the request. how is you[sic] code using the cache?" Somebody else (also pretty astute, usually) responded, "Cache is valid during lifetime of application not request.....". W...
Read more

FIX: Requested Registry Access is not allowed (Visual Studio 2008)

By
Symptom: in Visual Studio 2008, you attempt to add a new WebContentForm and associate it with a MasterPage. You receive an error dialog "Requested Reqistry Access is not allowed". Don't ask me what caused this; I'm guessing that the registry keys involved had their access denied due to removal of a previous version of Visual Studio, leaving the new guy (Visual Studio 2008) in the lurch. Here's the fix: Download "subinacl" here . This is a command-line tool that enables administrators to obtain security information about files, registry keys, and services, and transfer this information from user to user, from local or global group to group, and from domain to domain. After installing subinacl.exe (it will be in the C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools folder.), drop to a command prompt and run the following batch file, which you have saved in the same folder with the filename "FIX.bat": subinacl /subkeyreg HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\VisualStudi...
Read more