My sixth Toolbox column in the June 2006 issue of MSDN Magazine is now available online. The June issue examines three products:
- OfficeWriter, a tool for efficiently generating native Microsoft Word and Excel documents without the need for having Word or Excel installed (useful for generating these types of reports on a website)
- Event Sentry, which can be used to monitor a computer's event log or resource consumption and send notification to an administrator upon certain thresholds being met
- Vault, a source control tool
I also reviewed the book Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality, by Bob Walsh, which looks at the fundamentals of quitting your day job and starting up shop as a one man (or one woman) software developer. The term “micro-ISV” was coined by Eric Sink in an MSDN article (although I can't find it right now, but I believe its available on Eric's site), and refers to an independent software vendor manned by a sole individual. In a micro ISV the sole employee is responsible for everything, including all technical and design decisions (what platform should I target? what software tools should I use?) along with the business-side decisions (how much should I charge for my product? how am I going to market my product? what legal entity should I establish for my company?). For a more eloquent discussion of these challenges, see Joel Spolsky's essay, The Development Abstraction Layer.
Bob's book does a good job of distilling these core concerns down to informative chapters with a number of interviews and commentary from successful micro ISVers and others who can help with advice (a lawyer, a payment processing vendor, and so on). This book and Eric Sink's The Business of Software essays are must reads for those considering entering into the micro ISV space.
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