The Software Devotional

For Sale By Owner

At last, I have made the initial public release of Assembly Inspector, my mISV laboratory project I started about 3 years ago. It was born out of necessity with my work and has been an indispensable tool since that time. I put the final touches on the app and the web site early this week and officially make it public.

Now the real work begins. Marketing, support, maintenance, etc. Anyone who has been down this road with a small mISV knows the time commitments, financial ramifications, and sacrifices to realize a product with a "For Sale By Owner" sign in its yard.

I am a software developer by trade, working for a medium-sized company with established marketing, product management, development, and systems & operations groups. Taking a step away from that warm and comfy cocoon to take on all these responsibilities on my own is not a walk through my comfort zone. I'll grant you, the scale of my endeavor is only slight compared to that of Passport. However, given the first-time-ed-ness of it all combined with the traditional lack of time consistent with a guy who is a devoted employee, husband, and dad of 3 kids who are active in all manner of extra-curricular activities, and you have what should result in a sinking vessel.  We'll see.

So far, the hardest part has been getting to the first release. The psychology of moving forward incrementally now is a great burden lifted.

At any rate, I will work hard to keep this boat afloat and will try to share some of my experiences along the way.

Check out Assembly Inspector. Here's the elevator speech: Use Assembly Inspector to verify that all of a .NET assembly's dependencies (other .NET assemblies) can be loaded. You can use it to either proactively find problems with missing dependencies before you launch an application (on a server, for example) or by helping to troubleshoot a problem with missing dependencies after you have found a problem.

So now the money starts rolling in. Right?

Moving To TypePad

If you have followed The Software Devotional, you have no doubt been disappointed over the last couple of months with the lack of posts and problems accessing the site. The hosting provider I have used for a number of years for all my sites has, as of late, been experiencing massive problems with keeping the shared hosting sites online. The problem is so severe that I have had trouble accessing even the management control panel to modify the site, contact customer service, etc.

To make matters worse, I have also been struggling to get the site's domain name provider changed. My previous provider was having trouble and could not seem to allow me to change the DNS address so I could move the site from my current web hosting provider to another. I'm using GoDaddy exclusively now as my domain name provider - I love their management tools. They aren't the cheapest, but I have received very good service from them and have never once (famous last words) had any trouble with them.

Coming to a decision about which blogging provider to use is not an easy one for anyone who has tried to analyze the feature comparisons between the plethora of blog services available. One factor that made it hard to find useful reviews is that I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the blog, and wasn't so willing to bend myself around the blogging platform's capabilities.

For example, I am not interested in hosting my own blog software. Too much hassle for me at this point. To get good customization with tools like WordPress, I understand that a hosted solution is the only route. I am a mISV-er with a limited amount of time to spend on my budding product (check out Assembly Inspector). I also want to make the 'blog' not just a blog. I have other content to share that isn't necessarily amenable to the format of a blog. I also, probably foolishly, care about what it looks like, even though anyone who knows me knows that I couldn't make something aesthetically appealing if my life depended on it.

Alas, I think things should begin to settle down. I have moved my blog to TypePad and it will hopefully live happily here for the foreseeable future. For a variety of reasons, I chose to pay to use TypePad over the many other free services available. TypePad comes with a learning curve, but I hope you will begin to see good things happening over the coming month as I get this thing figured out.

Stay tuned.