not true if you're developing the desktop app in Silverlight which will run in all of those desktop environments (of course Moonlight is not an official release from MSFT)
Complete agree with "If a recruiter insists in having references is a contacts-harvesting cowboy. Treat him like you would treat a zombie. I only give references after the initial interview."
They're always fishing for people (a major alarm bell should be if they're asking for hiring managers or persons of authority) who they can then spam with offers of services.
Based in Guildford, Surrey, UK (no remote at the moment) sharpcloud is looking for a talented Silverlight developer with a passion for creating great software for users, in a fast-moving, dynamic environment. You should have extensive experience in Silverlight, XAML, C# and the .Net framework and a deep understanding of web architecture. Note: if you don't have the Silverlight experience but are an experience asp.net dev looking to get into Silverlight we'd still like to hear from you.
sharpcloud was founded on a revolutionary idea: to provide a visually appealing user experience to communities involved in the process of managing knowledge and networks around strategy and innovation. sharpcloud is a Microsoft Bizspark One and Windows Azure Front Runner partner .
I take a pragmatic approach to Unit tests so find some use but don't feel the 100% gold standard of coverage is realistic or even sensible to aspire too but in response to Q3) never - but then I'd return the question When you deploy an app WITH 100% coverage how can you be confident that there are no regressions? I'm pretty sure the answer is never too as 100% test coverage doesn't prevent 100% of bugs.
Everyone is pretty quick to criticise Ballmer and Microsoft and while he does spout a lot of nonsense has anybody actually evaluated Microsoft's cloud platform....from the comments I would say no.
I have and I have to say it's an excellent platform, it has a good feature set, competitive pricing (matches EC2) and they're doing tonnes of work to it and throwing a lot of cash at it. It's not tied to the .Net framework(you can run php, Java, RoR etc etc on it).
Interestingly they also announced Windows Azure appliance yesterday at WPC10 which is the first proper effort to solve to private cloud problem and having spoken to businesses looking at our product this is definitely an issue for B2B SaaS applications.
I just don't understand the immediate disregard for anything Microsoft does, yes IE has been sh*t however it's foolish to write off every new MSFT offering as the "next IE" without understanding what it is offering.
You're right that they could actually make an impact.
Now with F# and clojure available as dev languages on .net (soon, if not now), maybe even the "cool kids" will find it fun. Cheering google over msft has been fun, but what we're really cheering for is choice. You don't want only one player in the cloud space.
Further, if they can offer DirectCompute in azure, that'll be a huge differentiator that'll attract the processing intensive apps.
So I'd be interesting to hear if anyone is running this in a prod env? I'm currently evaluating NoSQL at the moment (mongo, cassandra, raven etc etc) so would be interested to hear peoples real world experiences with it?
This might be of interest: Next week there is a MongoDB conference in London. I'm giving a talk and they've given me the discount code "ocw" that will give 20% off on registration.
Read the fine print though -- it seems like the 3G access can only be used for books outside of US (I checked UK and Denmark, and both say "Blogs and the experimental web browser are currently not available for your country"). Not sure about e.g. Wikipedia.
Also "Service fees for transferring personal documents via Whispernet are currently $.99 per megabyte." -- but I think that might already be the case for the US Kindle. That's similar to the fee I pay for basic wireless data service.
"Kindle (U.S. Wireless) user: We'll send personal documents to your Kindle via Whispernet while inside the U.S. wireless coverage area for a fee of $.15 per megabyte.
Kindle (U.S. & International Wireless) user living in the United States: If you transfer personal documents to your Kindle via Whispernet while inside the United States, the fee is $ .15 per megabyte. When travelling outside the United States, a fee of $.99 per megabyte will apply.
Kindle (U.S. & International Wireless) user living outside the United States: We'll send personal files to your Kindle via Whispernet for a fee of $ .99 (USD) per megabyte anywhere in the world you access Whispernet service."
Yeah I'm liking the look of 99 Designs, especially as you say the fact you get a broad range of initial designs which gives you a nice perspective on the directions possible.
It's certainly something I will look at, we've got a mix of short term requirements and more longer term so this approach seems to fit nicely with the latter at this point
