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?
