Was a tough week for Adobe when both Steve Jobs and Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's general manager of Internet Explorer, both came out questioning various aspects of Flash.    Well, some disclosures are in order...Northridge is a Microsoft partner and we use a lot of their technology.  We also do a good bit of Flash development.    Both Jobs and Hachamovitch hit on the reliability, security, and performance issues of Flash.  Yes, there are some of those for sure, but there are certain t ...

In a previous post we introduced the Northridge SharePoint Site Governance Lifecycle, which we identified as having five stages: Request, Standup, Adoption, Auditing, and Archiving. In this post we will focus on the second of these: standing up new SharePoint sites, one of the most common activities to take place in a SharePoint intranet, but also a key governance topic.   In that previous post, we briefly described the Standup stage this way: What is the actual process for standing up a n ...

As Northridge has developed various SharePoint-based business solutions for clients, and assisted clients in a consulting capacity with SharePoint strategy and governance, we have developed a model that we call the SharePoint Site Governance Lifecycle. This model addresses one of the most important SharePoint governance concerns for perhaps the most important element of SharePoint-based solutions: the site. The model most frequently comes into play in an intranet or extranet context, but coul ...

On September 1, 2009 Microsoft announced the availability of a preview release of Windows Embedded Standard 2011, the latest in Microsoft's line of embedded/compact editions of the Windows operating system. This allows manufacturers of devices such as point-of-sale kiosks, point-of-service handhelds, and other thin client devices to preview the latest Windows advances, including "hundreds of feature packages based on latest innovations for Windows 7."   Prior to adopting the " ...

Good news: WCF programmers no longer need to suffer REST envy in relation to their brethren in the wider development world. .NET developers will now be able to easily achieve both RPC and REST type services in WCF. Let's clear up some of those acronyms:   WCF, for the uninitiated, stands for Windows Communication Foundation, a feature of .NET that simplifies much of the mechanics and "plumbing" of programming service-oriented interfaces, particularly web services. The default WCF ...

In this series of blog posts I will be dusting off long forgotten software development and computer science tomes to uncover gems of wisdom that apply to the software work we are doing today. Please enjoy this first installment, which comes from a landmark software book that was first published in 1971, The Psychology of Computer Programming, by Gerald Weinberg (1971, Reinhold).   Of all the requirements that we might place on a program, first and foremost is that it be correct. In other ...

We often get asked by clients about what percentage of the market various browsers have when we start to develop cross-browser test plans. For many clients with analytic tools, we can see specific to their users what browsers people are using. In the general sense though, this is a good resource to just get a sense of how things are standing. It is updated monthly so is a great resource: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp ...

And change out some colors. I remember SharePoint 2003 when I would talk to developers about how much we can customize the user interface.  It really wasn’t much more than the above reality. As our design team works closely with our SharePoint development team with the MOSS 2007 platform, we continue to push further into interesting realms. Shortly after 2007 was released and we were working on our first project, we would get some grief for various rounded edge treatments. I often find myself ...

As software architect and developers, we try to adhere to some core principles and standards.  I was working with one of our new architects the other day and shared the following piece with him concerning the principle of Separation of Concerns. Quoting Wikipedia:   "In computer science, separation of concerns (SoC) is the process of breaking a computer program into distinct features that overlap in functionality as little as possible. A concern is any piece of interest or focus in a p ...

The Web Marketing Association awarded the site a “Best of” in this competitive category for the Interactive Advertising Competition.  http://www.freedomopsnet.com/ It’s very rare that we get to (and want to) develop an all Flash website. We had the opportunity to do that when working with a new product line of military figures. It just seemed like the right tool for the job. Adding to the complexity of the project was the level of functionality under the covers. Users set up personal profi ...