Ryan Cromwell | Applied Information Sciences Blog

70% of all devices sold in 2012 were tablets or smartphones. Tablet purchases by businesses will grow three times by 2016. These numbers, provided by Gartner, confirm what we already know from walking in the mall or sitting at a cafe…and the news for PC sales doesn’t appear to be improving any time soon.

Navigating this post-PC world can a frightening experience when your corporate lifeblood relies on the dominance of PCs. Compounding this is the fragmentation of the emerging market across native mobile platforms, three primary desktop browsers (exponentially more when including mobile), and varying device form factors and operating system flavors. Read More…

Ryan Cromwell

We recently started working on a new iOS project. As part of this adventure, I asked the team if we could build a case study around XCode and TFSPreview.com. TFSPreview, if you’re not aware, is Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server 2012 as a service, hosted in Azure.

This isn’t your normal pairing. Mac developers aren’t exactly flocking to the Microsoft stack and the Microsoft development tools haven’t exactly catered to the predominantly OSS community working on Macs. In recent years, though, that has changed. ASP.Net is now OSS, first class Azure tools ship for the Mac, even the Nodejs for Azure tutorials feature Chrome on a Mac. It’s a brave new world out there!

Starting with this post and continuing over the next few months, I’m going to be sharing some of our experiences building iOS/XCode apps on TFSPreview using the cross-platform (yes, they used Java – who are these guys?!) git-tf plugin.

Ryan Cromwell

You’ve had a sip of the NuGet Kool-Aid, picked your jaw up off the ground after seamlessly installing your favorite Open Source project, and now you’re diving head first into NuGet as your team’s dependency management tool of choice. Private NuGet repository is in place, Package Restore is enabled and new packages are being published automagically from your builds.

DLL-hell is behind you right? Not so fast. This never-ending saga has reemerged as NuGet-hell.

Managing your dependencies requires discipline and conscious decision making regardless of the tools you choose. Don’t leave the building blocks of your applications to chance.

But how do you get the information necessary to make these decisions?

Ryan Cromwell

The Daily Scrum, sometimes referred to as the Daily Standup, is a simple activity most teams have adopted or experimented with at some point. In most instances, the extent of their guidance is to limit the gathering to 15 minutes and to answer three questions:

What did you do yesterday?
What will you do today?
What impediments do you have?

Most leaders will jump at a chance for their teams to share this type of information and communicate every day. Fifteen minutes is a small price to pay for a bit of insight and the appearance of teamwork.

Ryan Cromwell

Here at Applied information Sciences, we use Yammer quite a bit to facilitate quick, transparent and open communication. For such a distributed team of smart individuals, it’s an invaluable tool to building camaraderie and cohesiveness. Yammer allows us to discuss hot industry technologies and opens the channel to shared experiences and knowledge.

I recently used Yammer to conduct a poll here at AIS: