Telerik blogs
  • People

    Writing Software as a Kaizen Event

    In the past, most developers’ approach to code is that you should write it once and hopefully never have to debug or revisit it again. This stems from the traditional waterfall approach of software development where we were trying to completely describe the entire system up front perfectly. Change was bad and bugs were not accounted for and left for the end. The Agile movement ushered in the first change to this mentality. Agile introduced the concept of refactoring, or writing your software once and then revisiting it (often if needed) and restructuring its internals for improvement (without changing its external outputs). Refactoring is a core tenant of test driven...
    October 18, 2011
  • People

    Lessons From Steve Jobs

    A lot of people have posted tributes to Steve Jobs over the past week. I’ve seen him called the CEO of the Decade (something I agree with) and also compared to Henry Ford (I sort of agree with). I’d like to call attention to four lessons we can learn from Steve Jobs’ Apple, two positive and two negative. First the good: Apple avoided falling into the trap of the Innovator’s Dilemma Apple avoided falling into the trap of the Innovator’s Dilemma. In a nutshell, the Innovator’s Dilemma says the following (I am paraphrasing): when you invent something, first you are trying to penetrate a new market and convince people to buy your...
    October 10, 2011
  • People

    Day 3: Can the Tablet come out and play?

    Today is day 3 of running the Windows 8 Build tablet. Apparently I am the only person in Hong Kong with the Build Win8 tablet and everyone I  know in Hong Kong wants to play with it. Some Telerik customers read my blog post from yesterday and asked me if they can play with the tablet too. I set up a meeting at a local pub in Hong Kong to allow some Telerik customers to play with the tablet. So today, the tablet went into the wild. Stop 1: Starbucks I was a little early to meet our customers, so I hung out at Starbucks. Just about all of...
    September 21, 2011
  • Mobile

    Day 2: Building a Metro App with Visual Studio 11 Express

    Yesterday I blogged about using my Windows 8 tablet as my main machine for work and device for play. Today I will share my experience in using the device for building a Metro app. The first application that I ever wrote was 19 years ago for the Timex Sinclair 1000. (I can’t believe that I am that old!) I’ve come a long way now writing for a touch enabled device (but the TS 1000 was about the same size of an iPad.). Keeping with tradition, I will write a simple “Hello World” and see how it goes. Step 1: Load Visual Studio Sounds easy, right? Remember this is Windows...
    September 20, 2011
  • People

    Day 1 at the office with my Windows 8 Developer Tablet

    Today was my first day back in the office for my job at Telerik and I decided that I would try an experiment. I would use only my Windows 8 tablet that I received at the Build conference last week for both my work and play. I put away my Lenovo laptop (for work) and my iPad (for reading in bed) and decided I would use only the tablet for the next few days. The tablet came with a Bluetooth keyboard and dock, so I put that together and started to play around.   The first thing that I realized is that the traditional Windows “Start” menu is gone, completely replaced by...
    September 19, 2011