Power-coder.net

A couple of weeks ago I happened to stumble onto a treasure chest of insider Microsoft information through something they call Channel9. It’s Microsoft’s attempt to provide some transparency into their development processes and demonstrate some new technologies that will be coming through the pipeline in the future.

Personally I’ve become quite hooked on all the videos they have posted, it’s not all codemonkey stuff either. For example here’s some of the topics that I’ve really been enjoying:

• Windows Vista - All kinds of stuff here, especially since PDC, demos of new features and tech.
• Going Deep - Advanced topics, Vista Transactional File System, Windows Memory Manager Design
• Visual Studio - Neat features and tips for current and future versions of Visual Studio
• Microsoft Partners - Visits to Microsoft partners for demos of new apps and tech.

Most of the videos range in length from 15 minutes to an hour and aren’t just canned press releases, the format is very much ‘in your face’ with the interviewer using an amateur handheld camera in a one-on-one situation with the people directly responsible for the product being featured. I love these videos, especially from a developer point of view, it’s a great opportunity to see how software development is done at a huge corporation like Microsoft. They’re also really cool because I’m now very excited about what I’m going to be able to do when Vista ships next year, both from a user perspective and from a developers. After watching many of these videos I have a greater understanding for why certain things were done they way they were at the Windows architecture level even though it might not have made sense from a user’s perspective.

I strongly recommend any developers, and especially .Net developers, head on over to the site and check out some of the videos. There’s also a fairly active forum commmunity with developers and users from all over the world talking about technology.

Go Channel9 Guy!

Over the weekend I was giving a lot of thought about whether or not I was going to release an application I’m working on as an open-source project. Then I got a little off track thinking about how to monetize the thing if it ended up being of that quality and popularity. Eventually I came to the following point: most open-source software companies charge their customers for customization and support, this led me to the following question:

Is it in the developers best interest to create reliable and stable software when their key source of income is supporting said software?

It’s an interesting paradox, if a software vendor writes an application that is intuitive and easy to use, and also stable and correct, how will they make money if they’re giving it away for free? The ease of use would eliminate most of the need for installation assistance and general operations. Having the software be stable and reliable will reduce the amount of support required for application problems, thus again reducing the vendor’s primary revenue streams.

This makes me wonder if perhaps one of the big things holding back open source is that it is difficult to make money off of well designed and implemented open source software that is easy to use. Maybe I’m way off track here, so please correct me if I am missing any information or if my understanding of the problem is incorrect.