Software Made Simple

Microsoft just acquired DevBiz, the makers of TeamPlain web access for Team Foundation Server. And as part of the acquisition, they have made TeamPlain available for free!

This effectively, eliminates the need for our previously announced TeamVue product , but that’s the way it goes.

I’m still working on getting the TeamPlain installation to work completely (I’m having trouble with Windows Authentication), but so far it looks very nice.

Be sure to download it and give it a try.

RBDevZone has been online for 6 weeks now, so I thought I might give a quick update on it.

•  So far, we have 35 registered users.
• There are currently 4 articles, which have been viewed a total of  174 times.
• There are currently 5 downloads in the Code Library, which have been downloaded 362 times.
• Each week, the site has been averaging over 600 unique visitors, over 2,600 page views and over 11,000 hits.
• There have been a measly 16 posts in the forum!

Overall this is not too terrible, but I’m not really pleased with the amount of user participation.  After all, I would like RBDevZone to be a community, but in order to achieve that, people actually need to communicate.  Anyway, this a long-term thing and communities can take a while to build.

I continue to make changes to RBDevZone to keep it useful.  These are some changes that should be appearing soon:

• Since it seems no one is using it, I will be removing the Chat Room feature.
• The blog feature is also little used.  I find myself blogging here more often, so I will be updating that page to instead include some news feeds of relevant blogs.
• The Resources section has lots of useful links to other REALbasic web sites and products, but more links will be added.  I’d like to remind everyone that registered users can add their own links here as well.
• More articles are being written.  Feel free to write your own articles, too.
• More source code is being prepared.  Feel free to upload useful samples or tools you have as well.

If anyone has any comments or feedback, be sure to post them in the RBDevZone Feedback forum.

I’ll be doing the Unit Testing and Test Driven Development session at REAL World 2007 in May. If you were on the fence about going, you now have no excuse .

I went to REAL World 2006 last year and it was a loads of fun. I learned a lot and met a many interesting people. The venue is the same as last year, which is good because Austin is pretty neat and the Omni Hotel is gorgeous. And this year, the sessions look even better! Some of the ones I’m interested in include:

• Advanced Database Programming with ODBC
• Building a Web Application in REALbasic
• Contracts - What Every Developer Must Know
• Cross-Platform Interface Tricks
• Design Patterns II
• Optimizing in REALbasic
• Planning, Implementing and Supporting Cross-Platform Business Applications
• REAL SQL Server
• Report Printing I and II
• Team Development and Version Control

In addition, this year LogicalVue is a sponsor for REALWorld 2007. That won’t mean much to you except you’ll see our logo in various places at the conference.

Hope to see you there.