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Micro ISV - From Vision To Reality Review

Micro ISV (independent software vendor) is a term for a small 1 or 2 person software company. If like myself you already run a micro isv or are planning to start one up, then think of this book as the owners manual for you new venture. Micro ISV - From Vision To Reality is jam packed with useful information and tips for you to get the most out of your company. The book covers everything from how to develop your ideas and turn them into a product, through too marketing yourself and presenting your product to the customers via your web site.

One part of the book I found particularly useful, was the discussions about different tools that are available to make your job easier, especially with regards to testing your product.

Toward the end of the book, there are a series of interviews with other people who run small ISV's, these range from people who have just started out, through to people who have been doing it a while and are quite successful, most notably Fog Creek Software.

The book contains the following chapters.

1. Having a Vision
2. Developing the Micro-ISV Way
3. Presenting the Product
4. Business is Business
5. Focusing on the Customer
6. Welcome to Your Industry
7. What Happens Next

Micro-ISV From Vision To Reality was written by Bob Walsh from Safari Software, and is published by Apress books.

NewsAware Author BETA Released.

Today we have released a free beta version of our first product NewsAware Author. NewsAware Author is a program that lets you create, publish, and manage RSS feeds for your website. You don't need any programming knowledge at all to create RSS feeds with NewsAware Author. Below is a list of some of the features:

• Full WYSIWYG Html Editor so you can professionaly format the content of your RSS feeds.

• Load HTML templates so you can give your news items a standard look and feel each time.

• Library Window which lets you manage all your RSS feeds from one place.

• FTP client enabling you to upload your RSS feeds to your website.

• High quality user interface with dockable toolbars and windows.

• Saves RSS version 2 feeds.

• Supports applying Cascading Style Sheets to you content.

• Wizards for easy feed creation.

• Handles all date and language standards format conversions for you.

• Easy to navigate tree view thats breaks down the RSS feed information.

For more information goto our products page were you can also download a copy of the program.

Unit Testing for .NET Developers.

This article is the first in a series of articles on software testing. When releasing any kind of software to the market, it is very important to test your product as thoroughly as possible. There are many types of software testing that you can utilize. You have functionality testing were you are testing that the features of your application actually do what you claim they do, and do them without crashing. You can also utilize the end user by performing beta testing. This is where you release a preview version of your product and ask the users to report any defects to you. Then we have unit testing. This type of testing is very developer centric. Unit testing is where you test smaller units of code. This testing normally runs through an automated testing framework, and that is what this article us about, unit testing. More to the point this article is about using a unit testing framework called NUnit.

NewsAware Author Tutorial 1: Creating a basic news feed.

The next few articles will contain some of the tutorials for NewsAware Author. In this tutorial you will be shown the basic steps to creating your first RSS News feed. Creating a basic feed is very easy with NewsAware Author using the built in wizards.

NewsAware Author Tutorial 2: Uploading a news feed.

In this tutorial we will show you how to apply FTP settings and upload your RSS feeds to your web site from NewsAware Author.

NewsAware Author Tutorial 3: Using the library window.

The library window allows you to have all your RSS feeds available to you at all times. This is very useful if you maintain lots of news channels for your web site. Each RSS feed in the library window can have different FTP connection settings applied to them as each feed might have to go onto a different web site. So far in the previous tutorials you have seen how to add new RSS feeds to the library from the new feed wizard. This tutorial will show you how to add already existing feeds from your hard drive.

NewsAware Author Tutorial 4: Turning off the HTML editors.

By default, when you create a new RSS feed, the application is configured to allow you too use HTML editors to format the text for your channel and news items. This is a very powerful and useful feature. But there may be times when you just want to provide unformatted plain text in your feeds. This could be because you have a content management system that handles formatting and styling for you. This tutorial shows you how to create a feed without using the wizard which will have the html editors turned off.

Loading Images in .NET

I was working on a project today that needed to load various different image formats. Everything was going ok until I tried to test the code with TGA files. Basically .NET doesn't support them out of the box. Eek. With a deadline looming I loaded up ye old faithfull Google. I found some links to an Image library called DevIL, which is a native code library that supports lots of different formats, including TGA. I also found this link to a managed wrapper that will load image files with DevIL and put them into .NETs Bitmap object. 

Busy Busy Busy

The past month has been incredibly busy so I have not had a lot of time to add to the blog, but I can assure you things have not died down. I have a whole load of new articles in development for this site about software development that I hope you will enjoy reading. I shall be adding them over the next month so keep an eye on the blog, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

I have also been busy developing the next update to NewsAware Author. The next version will add to the user experience and make maintaining RSS feeds even easier than it currently is. Remember, if you have already purchased a license to the current version of NewsAware Author, your license key will also work with the new version when it is available.

I have also been getting people email me with lots of useful questions about using NewsAware Author, I shall soon be setting up a FAQ so these answers can be shared with everyone. If you have any questions regarding NewsAware Author, the blog, or Haunted House Software in general then I would like to encourage you to subscribe to the forum where information can easily be shared with everyone.