Category: General

This was a great article about a large scale commercial product and the tools and techniques used to manage it.

https://www.drdobbs.com/tools/building-quickbooks-how-intuit-manages-1/

Sometimes you hit smack in to a runtime exception that requires a weekend off to get your head straight again to tackle come Monday morning.  That was my experience today, as I wrangled with an unexpected exception when doing something I’d done plenty of times before.

Our app has the following structure:

• Interfaces assembly
• Business Logic assembly (where interfaces are implemented)
• Web Application (where Interface and Business Logic are married using the Unity Framework)

We have a build script that copies the latest version of the Business Logic assembly in to the /bin directory of the Web Application, since that app does not reference the assembly directly.

It has been fairly routine for us, when adding or extending functionality, to add methods to our Interfaces library, implement the corresponding method in the Business Logic library, then use that method in our Web app.  But this time around, even after clean builds, we’d get a runtime error when the Unity framework would try to initialize.

A bit of searching online revealed that this error occurs often when you’re not looking at the most recent version of an assembly that is implementing the Interface, and so to the Framework, it appears that the implementation is missing, even though your compiler will run clean.

As a step to make sure that there were no residual versions of previously built assemblies, I went through Windows Explorer to purge the /bin directories.  Something caught my eye as I was looking at the /bin directory for the Business Logic library – an extra subdirectory names ‘x86’.  In this directory were the Debug and Release subdirectories, and then the new build of the assembly.

So, it appeared the problem was that our build script was not in fact getting the latest version of our assembly since it was in a different (unexpected) location.

The x86 name was a clue to look at the Configuration Manager in Visual Studio.  Sure enough, somehow the Business Logic project got set explicitly to x86 rather than ‘Any CPU’.

I changed the target platform for that project, did a new clean and rebuild, and this time through, the app loaded up without error.

Thankfully I didn’t spend an unrecoverable amount of time trying to sort this out, but I still thought it may be helpful to record for others who run in to that error and, as I did, mistakenly believe that nothing has changed to trigger the new runtime exception.

Sometimes it’s the little things that drive you mad.

We got a report from a customer following a SharePoint 2007 to 2010 upgrade that their Blog site was showing too many posts, and they wanted to filter it by category.  That’s a simple enough request, right?

In 2007, the user explained, she’d Edit the Page, Edit Web Part, then click on the ‘Edit the current view’ to get the ability to set the filter criteria.  However, in 2010, the ‘Edit the current view’ link never appeared.

I set off to confirm what she was seeing.

In my 2010 development lab, I created a new site using the Blog site template.

As advertised, the default view of the site showed the ‘Posts’ web part showing all the approved posts from the blog.  I added a few other posts, and set one of the categories to be called ‘Announcements’.

So, as the user did, I went to Edit the web part.

Sure enough, the ‘Edit the current view’ was notably absent.

I was able to get the link to s how up, by changing the Selected View, clicking ‘Apply’, then re-selecting ‘<Summary View>’ and clicking ‘Apply’ again.

However, when I clicked on the link, I got a whole lot of nothing.

So, on to plan B as it was evident this was not to be done through the Browser UI.  I launched SharePoint Designer and loaded up the Blog site.

Then clicked on ‘Edit site home page’ to load up the web part page.  There was my Posts web part.

By selecting the Web Part, I got a ‘List View Tools’ ribbon with a nice big ‘Filter’ button on it.

Clicking the Filter button brings up the ‘Filter Criteria’ dialog, where I could add my category filters.

After adding the additional criteria, the Posts web part showed the filtered list of entries.

Save the page in SharePoint Designer, which will automatically publish the changes to the server.

Now, when I go back to the Blog site, I see the filtered list of entries.

A few weeks ago I applied for a grant offered by a local Venture Capital firm.  The grant application is essentially an abbreviated business plan, and finalists compete for several awards.

Today I received my rejection letter.  Complete with the classic “we regret to inform you” clause.

However, they attached a remarkably polished PDF analysis of my application compared to the 183 other submissions.

The analysis gave me a unique insight to my own idea-making.  Here was an objective evaluation of my idea (related to offering HomeSpot in a unique way to home improvement companies) and some direct feedback from people who look at entrepreneurial ideas for a living.

Across the seven scoring categories, our application performed above average in all seven.  This is more clearly seen in graphical form.

I assume, but do not know for sure, that the selected finalists exceeded some established threshold for their total score.  So, while our application was 30 points off of the maximum score, it may have only be 10 points off of the threshold.  I’ll never know.

Here is some of the feedback from the reviewers:

This is an interesting service, but it feels like an ultra specialized solution. It is addressing a real need, but it is another website that consumers need to log into. It is not unique and it is very difficult to differentiate. Ultimately the success will obviously depend on execution.

What I take from this is the validation that we are addressing a real need.  Finding a solution for a existing problem is key to success as an entrepreneur.  I agree fully with the reviewer here that execution will be the determining factor on our success.

Great platform with promising customer feedback. I am wondering, however, what the long term competetive response and market growth will be. How are you planning to grow your platform outside of local handymans? What is your growth strategy serving as an anonymous service provider?

Again, affirmation on the product idea itself and the feedback we have received already.  But the challenge is put forth – how do we grow, scale and sustain ourselves beyond our initial markets? The third review also shared this concern:

The problem, market, and technology are all very clearly presented. It is difficult to see how this really scales to a company with significant revenue…

In the eyes of a Venture Capitalist, “significant revenue” has lots of zeroes following it.  For me as the entrepreneur, my standards of significance are no doubt different.  My definition for success may well come in being able to first hit “insignificant revenue” having started with “zero revenue”.  But for the reviewer, and the investor alike, the criteria for growth and scale are well understood.

The last reviewer was the most critical.

I think it’s good that there’s a competitor, but I’m slightly concerned that your product (as described) appears to be very similar, yet you describe your product as “revolutionary”. Honestly, this hurt the credibility a bit, at least in my eyes. If successful, there are likely to be other revenue stream opportunities. I’m not sure if you considered any, as they’re not included in the proposal. You indicated that the product is already on the market, but that you have no sales and don’t expect any for 12 months. Why? Also, pricing was not indicated.

This reveals much to me about how we presented ourselves in the application.  We obviously (at least in this reviewer’s eyes) lacked differentiation and clarity on our current status and future growth.  Our exclusion of other revenue streams was not because we are not keenly aware of them, but had to choose carefully our statements in the limited format of the application.  Questions about our sales efforts and pricing are also in our minds constantly, but we chose not to put them forth in the application.

What is important is that these things that I deem to be secondary or even trivial are clearly not thought of the same way by the reviewer.

All told, I am encouraged by this feedback.  It was a solid helping of affirmation, with some key calls to address the perceived challenges in a product we have yet to fully bring to market.  I am motivated to prove these skeptics wrong, execute, achieve significant revenue, and capture all the opportunity before me.