QVCS/QVCS-Pro 3.8.20 available

QVCS/QVCS-Pro 3.8.20 is now available. This fixes a few bugs present in earlier 3.8 releases, and is a free update for any registered 3.8 user.

Stating the obvious in fewer words than Joel Spolsky

Tom Warfield points to what he claims is a 'must read' post by Joel Spolsky. Don't trust Tom's judgement on this one. Joel spends a lot of bytes stating the obvious:

1. Some developers are better than others.
2. It makes sense to hire the good developers and not hire the mediocre ones.
3. Some of the really good developers can create things that the average developers will never, ever, ever, be able to create.
4. It makes sense to pay the really, really good developers lots of money (and keep/make them happy) because they are able to produce 10 times as much as an average developer (if the average developer can even produce it at all).
5. Management outside of the software development domain generally doesn't understand any of the above.

This doesn't seem like a huge insight to me.... maybe I'm just getting too old.

UPDATE: Added (and keep/make them happy) to #4 as that is one of the key elements of Joel's approach to running his business.

Coming in QVCS 3.9

The ink is barely dry (so to speak) on the 3.8 release, and Jim's already talking about what's going to be in the 3.9 release.... Can't you just leave well enough alone? Well.... no. QVCS is a journey, not a destination.

The 3.8 release included a lot of internal changes, but was kind of light on the changes visible to the user. The 3.9 release is different -- it has the external changes that the 3.8 internal changes made possible. The most obvious will be (finally) support for displaying recursed directories: just click on a toolbar button, and you'll see all the files in the current directory, as well as any files in any child directories. This makes it very easy to see all the files that are out-of-date for the entire project. You can get a preview of the way it will work by taking QVCS-Enterprise for a test drive since this same feature has been in QVCS-Enterprise from the beginning. The 3.8 changes laid the foundations so that I could actually make this work for the 3.9 release.

To get these changes in to the upcoming 3.9 release, so far I've made 364 changes to 195 files. By way of comparison, the 3.8 release included over 1000 changes to over 300 files. While I'm hoping you're impressed with the amount of effort going into these releases, what I'm really fishing for here is some guidance on what else should go into 3.9? Shoot me some e-mail, post on the forums, or add a comment here. A squeeky wheel may get the grease.

And just to be clear, if you buy now, the 3.9 release will be a free update.

SIC Impressions

I'm back from Denver where I attended the Shareware Industry Conference. It was my first SIC. I suspect it won't be my last.

Microsoft attended this year, which was a good thing. They were attentive and humble. They were giving away copies of their Beta2 of Visual Studio 2005. I got a copy, though I'm not sure if I'll have much time to take a good look at it. They hosted a session where they described their Shareware Starter Kit -- a kind of embedded software registration toolset that has the goal of making it easier to build product activation and registration behavior into your application. They initially support C# and VB, and will soon have support for C++. They got hammered pretty badly on the size of the .Net runtime. On Saturday, they hosted a session on Visual Studio 2005. It was mostly a demo session for VS 2005 -- it has a lot of cool features. I especially liked the refactoring features which were quite complete. Microsoft was ably represented by Michael Lehman and Dan Fernandez. They both have blogged about the event.

The SIC is also discussed here.

As a newby to the conference, I took some time to just get a feel for the goings on. Most of the sessions were business focused, which was a good thing. I did get a chance to have a few one-on-one conversations with fellow attendees.I would usually try to ask: what do you use for version control. I was initially surprised when most responded with "None". As I thought about this, it began to make sense. Many of my fellow shareware authors came to their respective businesses not from a background in software development, but from a background in some other area of business. This other experience gave them the domain knowledge they needed to create their shareware product, but it did not magically translate into knowlege about software development best practices. In a sense, it's a largely irrelevant point. Those authors who are most successful make a pretty even split of their time between sales/marketing and development work.
While I'm sure using version control would make them more effective developers, only half their time is spent on development. Since I spend much more of my time on the development side, it's a much more important tool for me.

SIC in Denver

I'm off to the Shareware Industry Conference in Denver. It's a 3 day conference. Attendance in the past has run around 300 or so. I'm curious to see whether it will be worth my time (and money) or not.

Back from South Dakota...

Back from the Black Hills of South Dakota. We rented a house out there for the week, near Rapid City, and did the standard sight-seeing trips for the area: The Badlands, Crazy Horse, Devil's Tower, Sturgis, and Mt. Rushmore. This site is a good place to start. The house had high speed internet, so I was able to get e-mail, process orders, monitor the QVCS forums, etc.... pretty convenient.

I also had time to read several books, and start on the sequel to Dan Simmons' Ilium: Olympos.

The Black Hills is a beautiful area, and not so crowded with tourists as some of the other popular destinations 'out west'. We'll have to go back in another 10 years to see what progress they've made on the Crazy Horse Memorial.

I didn't get anything done on QVCS at all -- but that's the whole point of taking a vacation. It's good to be back home.

Here's some pictures I took with our relatively new digital camera (a Sony DSC-P100). I haven't completely figured out how to use it, so the sky is washed out some times... pilot error.