Platformers

I have been watching some of my favorite video casts and all of them ar talking about ala cart television. Most notably is Leo Laporte on TWiT. He was talking about platforms and how MS is starting to get it right.

I agree with Leo about the app market shift, I just dont like the current division, nor do I like the concept of one platform. I feel we need a few platforms for choice, but only one framework. We have this somewhat with the Apple iTunes store, the Android store, and the soon to be released Windows Phone 7 store. I see these three as the major platforms for "mobile" content (Yes I know WebOS is out there but nobody is really pushing it well so it is kinda dormant.) Now we need a congealed and accessible framework, which we somewhat have with MonoTouch.

Now, I dont mean a framework necessarily like the dotNet framework. I mean a framework like a base development framework (again with MonoTouch as an example.) If I could write an app with my language and IDE of choice, then have that app ported with minimal fuss to the major app frameworks, to me that is a win.

For example, if I could write the next cool widget in C# and then with compiler defines and tools, build a native iOS, Android, WPhone7, and WebOS application, and then upload them to the appropriate stores. This would allow me to write an app once and have massive distribution and audience. Vendors could then build hardware for multiple or single platforms (i.e. Apple TV, iPad, Google TV, Android phone, etc.) and my app would be available as long as the hardware meets its intent. A game would require more than a video cast or ebook.

There are some roads into this but they are not practical yet. MonoTouch is one such approach, but it is cost prohibitive for a small developer. Though I have an idea for a solution.

My idea is cost markets and certificates. Apple does this somewhat and it would be good if it could be expanded out a bit more. You should be able to get a basic certificate to develop for a platform for little or no cost, however you cannot "sell" on that platform. This would be for opensource or freeware development.

For example for maybe $75 I could get a license to develop free applications on the major platforms with the tool of my choice, but I cannot make money off of them. Now if I wanted to sell my app for a low-cost market, i.e. 99c. I could pay $250, since I will be making some money. Or if I wanted to do a subscription model or larger cost I would pay $500 and I could charge up to 10$ a month or $5.99 a download, and the price model could go up from there.

However, for this to work would require cooperation between the  platforms and frameworks. This could be handled via a reseller cert program where I buy a package from my vendor who in turn gets the appropriate license from the platforms.

Just my idea to keep everything fair and somewhat free-markety.

Why do I do this?

Here I go and start another blog that I dont keep up with. Well, I want to get better at this so I will just have to fore myself to post more often. Lets see if I can do a post a month, or maybe even a week.. right...

Well, again a lot has happened since my last post. I was laid off from my previous and wonderful job because the economy sucks still. However, after a small hiatus I managed to land some temp work working for the state.

The people in the department I am in seem pretty nice, though I have only been there three days now so it is too soon to give any judgements on personalities. The work so far is fairly easy, I am taking over for the previous developer who moved up to a federal gig. His programming knowledge was basic and I have to work with VB.Net (shudder) but I will make do, its still an income, better than unemployment.

Microsoft, why hast thou forsaken me?

I am working on the DDEX provider for my job and testing it in 2010 B2 since a lot of our customers have decided to switch to it. When I tested in the first 2010 release, only the install failed due to a .net 4 assembly being laoded by a .net 2 runtime, once that was fixed everything worked.

In B2, however, I got the installer working, but now the provider crashes when trying to create or select a database. This is code that has not changed since before the last 2010 test and now fails? I think the .net 2.0 support in 2010 B2 is busted.

Well, I decided to fire up a VPC image and remote debug the code to see where it fails, well that was a pure fail situation. I cannot use 2008 remote debugger to debug any managed code running under 2010, even .net 2.0 code. It was then decided to just go ahead and install 2010 on my machine and try it that way.

After a horrendously long install and a reboot I loaded up my debugging environment and attempted to do a hive install. Again MS has decided to kick me in the nuts, 2010 does not use the registry for its experimental hive, unlike all previous verisons, though 2010 running normally does use the registry.

Now I have to research how to test in the new file system based hive. There are no registry keys used, and 2010 still requires regkeys to load a DDEX provider. Now what am I to do? After researching MSDN I foufn they provide a new tool to create pkgdef files that are supposed to contain the information to load a package. I hoped it also created the virtual regkeys necessary for the hive. I then went about adding the util to the build process so I could gen a build and a pkgdef file.

Fail again, the pkgdef tool cannot resolve an assembly, Microsoft.VisualStudio.Data, so it cannot create a pgkdef file! AAARRGGGHHH! WHY?!?!

Looks like I'll have to fall back to old school debugging and just log the hell out of the provider and troubleshoot that way.

At least I have Gibraltar to make the logging a bit easier, thank god for small favors.

I'm at it again.

Well, I decided to start a new blog, this one pertaining to my work. This will also tweet my posts so it should annoy the crap out of any followers I might have. Mostly I intend to use this as a dumping ground for my coding and research ideas. I may also give plugs to tools and sites I find useful, including that by which I am currently employed. Don't know how much content I'll post or how often but its a start.