The best time to rewrite your products.
The most important key of any success is timing. Good manager always feels when the right time and place to initialize and run the business processes. In R&D world the timing playing critical role, because the technologies coordinal updates every few years, when the customers always seek for the best standards in performance, communications, security, integration and other characteristics in your product. It is dramatically important, for the business success, to have competitive and technological updated products. The other important point is the development cost; new frameworks usually decrease the cost of the development, because they include new concepts, technologies and the best practices implementation.
In Q4 of 2007 we can feel the massive wave of new technologies from Microsoft which will wash all of us in 2008. Today is the best timing to take one or more R&D teams and to start planning and write prototypes for the next generation product. Let's start with few steps on how to kick off the new project.
Step 1: R&D Environment
- Chose Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) support systems and define process methodology. I'm recommending to start with TFS from Microsoft, if you don't use the other products (advise: wait for Rosario release)
- Start coding with VS Orcas 2008 Beta 2.
Step 2: Product Architecture
Today when we are talking on architecture we are talking about SOA. As a start point I'm recommending to understand and to learn the next projects:
- .NET StockTrader Sample Application from MSDN
This application is an end-to-end sample application for .NET Enterprise Application Server technologies. It is a service-oriented application based on Windows Communication Foundation (.NET 3.0) and ASP.NET, and illustrates many of the .NET enterprise development technologies for building highly scalable, rich "enterprise-connected" applications. It is designed as a benchmark kit to illustrate alternative technologies within .NET and their relative performance.
I really hope this project will be updated to .NET Framework 3.5; the strong part of this project is a .NET StockTrader Sample Application Configuration Service , its shows how to implement centralized configuration management of clustered service nodes.
- NServiceBus from Udi Dahan- The Software Simplist blog.
NServiceBus is an open source communications framework that makes building enterprise .NET systems easier. By providing scalability critical features like publish/subscribe support, integrated long-running workflow, and deep extensibility NServiceBus provides a solid foundation for any distributed system.
Step 2: Define Server & Client environments
- Use Windows 2008 Server as your server application OS.
- Stay with Web Client only if it possible.
Step 3: Use new technologies
Hope it will push you, to start rewriting your product from scratch, because it is really the best timing to do that and to keep the old problems behind you ;)