The service is interesting to me on a couple of points. First it’s all online delivery of the latest games. Unlike GameFly which uses the standard Netflix model of sending out physical media, OnLive is all online, streaming delivery. Now that’s the future!

I have a Netflix account, have for almost 2 years. I have never received a Netflix disk in the mail. I only use their Instant deliver (online streaming) and it rules, although Netflix could speed up adding things to it.

Personally I don’t like physical media, it can get damaged or lost and after a while just ends up taking up space and adding to the garbage pile. Which is why I kept an eye on OnLive for quite a while and signed up right after the E3 announcement. I believe the OnLive/Netflix Instant model is the future and I’m all for it.

After getting the OnLive client installed on my computer I fired it up and started browsing. I decided I would purchase the 3 day pass for Batman Arkham Asylum and try it out. I noticed no input delay, no lag or anything that would tell me I wasn’t playing this game on my local computer. The sound was crisp and everything was very fluid. It took a little bit to get the game started, but that didn’t bother me at all. From my few hours of game play experience OnLive works exactly as advertised. I could use my keyboard and mouse combo, or my Xbox 360 compatible controller for almost any game I wanted, which is good because I cannot play FPS or RTS games with a controller, so the game type and input options were refreshing.

OnLive don’t do a very good job of communicate this, but the monthly fee is just for your access to the service, not the games themselves. I’m currently not paying a monthly fee so that doesn’t bother me, but depending on the retail cost of the service that might be a stretch. So far there seems to be three methods and prices for playing games via OnLive:

1. 3 Day PlayPass ~$4.00
2. 5 Day PlayPass ~$8.00
3. Full PlayPass (Retail Price of the game)

So lets say your playing Final Fantasy 13 on OnLive, where it could take you 80 hours of game play to beat. Lets assume you can play for 4 hours a day on average, without taking a day off, that’s 20 days of play. Lets assume a 5 day PlayPass cost’s $6.95 and you need 5 of them, that’s a total of $34.75, not including your monthly subscription fee. I bought a 3 day PlayPass for the Batman Arkham Asylum game and only played 1 day of it, I think it’s most likely you won’t be able to all the days of your pass.

When you buy the full game on OnLive you get it until they remove the game from the service, some of the messages I read was that it would be available till 2013, so you get 3 years. If you can’t already tell I’m not 100% sold on the cost model for the service, if I GameFly Final Fantasy 13, I pay 15$ a month and can keep it until I’m done with it. I get 30 or so days at 15 dollars, compared to 20 at almost 35, not including the service fee. But I have to deal with the physical media and I have to have the console.

OnLive wants to bill itself as a service where you don’t need “top end hardware” to play games. But I think there missing the mark on this one. People already have Xboxes and decent computers. You can’t play RockBand on OnLive or have a Kinetic for the Xbox on OnLive, so people will have consoles anyways. OnLive should be focusing on instant access to the latest games and value, because they won’t replace a computer or console, but instead will be a supplement to it.

I’m truly excited about OnLive and if your even a little be into gaming you should give it a try, they have casual games like World of Goo to sports games like NBA 2K to FPS’s. I’m optimistic that the service will thrive and eventually find it’s place in the gaming ecosystem and give us consumers more of a choice, why pay the full price for a game you can beat in a night, buy a PlayPass and only spend $5.

So in addition to the ones I listed in my earlier post get Search References too, unless you like the hair rending experience of the current dialog.

As a developer in the Microsoft space I spend the vast majority of my time inside Visual Studio and even more so now that they made The SQL Management Studio also leverage the VS IDE. So it’s important that you make your development experience as fluid and comfortable as possible. Given that there are a few Addins\Extensions that I can’t live without anymore.

1.) Resharper
    I can’t develop with my little green box in the upper right of my code window. Not only does it give me background compile error checking it also gives some very useful code cleanup suggestions. I’m no ReSharper keyboard ninja and only know a few keyboard commands, but there are plenty to get your Kata on. I’ve made liberal use of searching, refactoring, extraction and code generation capabilities of ReSharper that when it’s not installed I’m a little lost.

2.) PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2010
     This is a must for anyone developing in Visual Studio. At first look the command set included is ‘meh’ until you need one, then a whole new world opens up. Undo Close saved me a few times and Format on Save keeps all my documents consistent without me having to Ctrl-K-D all the time. Open Containing Folder is my sacred cow of the command set and I found myself using it a lot.

3.) Regex Editor
     I rarely do any RegEx, but when I have to I hated it with a passion. I usually found a website where I could get RegEx help and had a way for me to test and refine my RegEx without having to go back and forth. Well now that functionality is in VS2010! If your doing any work with RegEx this is a must, with IntelliSense and testing.

4.) Spell Checker
      I recently had to do some Java development and I used the Eclipse development IDE. Eclipse has a built in spell checker that I found incredibly useful and was astounded by how many spelling mistakes were in my comments. I know I’m a bad speller but this was embarrassing. After that I searched around for one in VS2010 and found this addin. Works like a charm and keeps me embarrassed throughout the day.

5.) Solution Load Manager
      Have a large Visual Studio 2010 solution? Tired of waiting endlessly for it to load? I routinely have very large solutions, due to my flagrant misuse of the Onion pattern and separating almost everything into their separate DLL’s. As my solutions grow each project will take longer and longer to startup. So do I let VS2010 load times dictate how I architect my solutions? No! I softly whisper to myself that I don’t have a problem and got this extension.

6.) Visual Studio Tip of the Day Start Page
       I always like learning new little tips, and by gosh there is an extension for that! Every day when I open VS2010 I’m greeted with a new little tip.

7.) devColor
       If your working with Hex color this little addin draws a line under then with the color corresponding to the Hex value you typed in your code. It caught me making a mistake on my coloring that might have been hard to find otherwise.

8.) Team Foundation Server Power Tools
      If you ever had to administer a TFS server you will love this VS2010 extension. Although it only works with TFS 2010 when/if you upgrade make sure this is on your list for all your developers to install in their VS2010 environment.

Finally, not a Visual Studio addin, but something I’ve found very useful in my development lifecycle is SQL Prompt from Red-Gate. I –HATE- the IntelliSense in SQL Management Studio and SQL Prompt thankfully makes my SQL writing so much easier.

Your protection scheme will be cracked, no matter what it is. But you have to figure out the value/effort curve, if your software is only $9.95 and protected by a decent protection scheme, chances are your not going to find it cracked. But if your software is in demand and costs $299.95 it will most likely be cracked.

When someone cracks your demo software they are by-passing your protection schemes and enabling the full functionality of your application. This could be enabling features, disabling time bombs or any other measures to try and get people to pay up.

But I have another suggestion for your, build a specific demo version of your software, that doesn’t have the code for the other features at all! NDepend does this and I’ve never seen a real cracked version of it out there, because the code for those other features isn’t there, there’s no way to enable it.

If your building your software in a modular way, you should be able to create sub-sets of your code and your application picks of the differences.

For example I put the valuable code in separate projects and register them with StructureMap.

My full project, has 25 separate .cs generators files in it that contains the useful stuff, but my demo project only contains 2 (NumberGenerator and StringGenerator)

This assembly compiles into the exact same file as the full version and will get swapped out before I secure the project with {SmartAssembly}, at no time will my full versions of the code be in the demo project, which in startup will pull all of the available features and present a limited set for the demo.

I’ve also been playing with a system to compile a full version of the product on demand (when someone buys it) which will embed customer specific information into the code base, allowing me to determine who leaked the full version out and revoke their license and possibly recoup my looses.

If you are going to produce many software products you shouldn’t protect them all the same way. Your low end software can be protected by a licensing key system while your higher end software is code limited and compiled on demand. You should always try and have a demo, or free version of your product out there, but be smart about how you do it and it will be a benefit and not a potential liability.

But more often then not with some “off the beaten path” OSS .Net projects…

I sign all my .Net projects with a Strong Name Key, first it provides a ‘small’ amount of security to ensure that the assembly hasn’t been tampered with or corrupt. I say small because with about 10 minutes of work you can remove an SNK form a .Net assembly. But if your creating a library that you expect people to use, it should always be signed, why, because you cannot reference a non-signed assembly from a signed project, but you can do the reverse.

So by signing your assembly you make it more usable to those of us who sign our projects, and don’t impact anyone else, seems like a Win-Win to me.

There are a couple of reasons I don’t believe that I was successful on trying to get my cost out of my project. I first tried looking for a software product that I could use to do this for me, by analyzing my codebase and letting me plug in additional numbers, there weren’t any.

Failing to find a white software knight I turned to the OSS community to look for solutions, as I know Ohloh has something that estimates cost for OSS projects called OhCount, it wouldn’t work for me being a MS developer, and there weren’t any other OSS tools that would work against my codebase, or that worked at all on my box.

Most tools I found were metric or analysis tools for your codebase, these are Lines of Code tools. This sounds great but not all code is equal. For example my XAML code is harder for me to write then C# code, so it’s actually more expensive for me to write XAML then C#, as it takes more time and resources.

One of the key software project cost estimation formula are is the COCOMO/COCOMO II cost model, which if applied correctly I think can get you into the ballpark of your software projects cost.

Cost estimation in software projects is a huge area and a major problem and you will never be 100% accurate. There will always be cost that you miss, or items that you over-estimate and if you have more then one person working on your project then using a straight LoC formula won’t take into account that developers strengths and weaknesses in relation to the code they are working on.

My software project isn’t finished and here are my basic COCOMO metrics:

I’ve only been working on the project for about 2 1/2 months and then only few a few hours here and there, but in a way I think it could line up. To get a true cost I would have to factor in resource usage (power, bandwidth, computing resources, etc) and many other hidden costs that are difficult to determine and quantify.

All lines of code, even from the same developer are not even and thus fixing a cost per LoC is inexact to say the least. But without anything better, it’s a decent starting place. So at a minimum try and get your software projects cost to help you plan how much to see it for and when you will break even in that expense, and you might also be able to use it to help market your product as well.

I think this is a vital topic to anyone wanting to break into the software market, and eventually trying to sell their software. I’ve seen far to many software products horrible overpriced and think they could sell much more by lowering their price a little.

But this depends on your target audience, if it’s individuals or cash strapped small companies or startups, charging hundreds of dollars for your software might not be the best idea. But if your targeting major enterprises, your fifty dollar product could probably sell for much more.

Neil touches on this pricing demand curve in Chapter 1, and provide a great basis for the rest of the book. Armed with some basic economic and target customer knowledge you can start to develop a cohesive pricing plan for your software. Neil mentions in chapter two that your software is more then just bits and bytes, and a nice GUI. Your product is documentation, support, development roadmap and so much more. In my opinion your product is also your company and the community surrounding your product, company or people.

In one of my Licensing System reviews I found a great licensing application called EZIRIZ IntelliLock. It was priced right, had the right features, but the company wouldn’t respond to my sales emails. If they can’t do that when I dangling money in their face what kind of support will I get when I bought the product and have a problem.

When your developing a product you should look at the marketplace and your competition. Figure out how much they charge and how closely the software maps to your product. But don’t analyze it in a vacuum, take into account the size of the company, it’s community and your perception of the value of the ecosystem around that product. Established products from larger well known companies can change more, even if your product is better you might consider selling it for less until you’ve made a name for yourself and your product.

Customers will compare, especially with the Internet. So if your selling your software more then your closest competitor you have to make sure you justify it to your potential customers with more features, better documentation, a larger community, etc.

As developers we like things round. So Selling software for fifty bucks even is great, none of those messy pennies flying around. But as Neil points out, fives and nines exert another powerful psychological effect on peoples perception of value.

Give Neil Davidson’s book a read and buy a physical copy if you enjoy it. You’ve spent tons of time designing and creating your product, now your only quarter the way there, now you have to market it, sell it and support it. Developing it was the easy part!

The amazing web experience with Firefox didn’t go away all at once, no no, it was slowly chipped away with upgrade after upgrade until what I was left with was a slow, lumbering browser with tendencies to crap itself and hog resources. I tried to justify it, I have too many browser windows open, or my addons are causing those issues, not my dear Firefox. But that niggling feeling in the back of my head wouldn’t go away.

It really wasn’t until Chrome was released that I started to see the light. Even IE8 seems better to me now then Firefox, which really is saying something as IE6 so soured me on IE that I would rather program in BASIC my entire life then use any IE. When I first made the switch to Firefox almost no sites would render correctly or even accept Firefox in. Banking sites wouldn’t work with it and other web applications I used were IE only. Moving back and forth between IE6 and Firefox endeared me even more to it.

In multiple runs of the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark Chrome was fairly faster then Firefox, with Chrome in the 400ms to 500ms range and Firefox in the 800ms to 900ms range. This was the brand new Firefox 3.6 against Chrome 4.0.249.89 on my work desktop and my home desktop. No these weren’t fresh installs of Windows and browsers with no addons, because that’s not where I use browsers or view the web. Firefox has 2 addon’s installed and Chrome had 3.

In addition to just raw JavaScript speed Google Chrome also starts up much faster then Firefox and isn’t prone fits of crashing that Firefox is. At least a couple of times a week I have to kill a hidden Firefox.exe process because Firefox won’t open complaining of another instance running.

But Chrome isn’t the only choice. I’ve tried and liked Opera before, but this was at a time when Firefox was still chugging along well, and a co-worker is really liking the new Opera experience. But really those are the only two other choices left opposed to IE8 and Firefox.

It’s been a good 5 year or so run with Firefox, but I’m not seeing things getting better. Update after update my experience with Firefox gets worse and worse and eventually it will just be the new version of IE6 with less security holes. Not at all a fitting end for the browser that showed the world how great the web can truly be.

A friend of my just bought a refurbished Sony Vaio from Sears and it came with some unexpected surprises in the line of wedding photos and videos, personal information and other data. It’s something that creeps up from time to time that someone bought a used hard drive off of EBay and it had someone’s personal information on it.

I recently bought a Dell Studio 1557 laptop just before PDC and had some issues with it, after working with tech support for a little while Dell sent me out a replacement. Now my broken one, with some personal data needs to sent back to them. Which could result in someone getting my refurbished laptop down the line, and possibly my data.

So what are you to do? Personally I use a program called DBAN that works very well and will write random data to your hard drive, making it extremely difficult to recover. I’m currently using DBAN on my old laptop before I send it back to Dell.

I used to work with a man who would buy a secondary hard drive when he bought a computer or laptop and swap out the one that came with the unit. Anytime he had to drop it off at computer repair place or send it back he would swap the drive back. This solution had it’s pros and cons, for example if a computer repair shop is trying to fix a problem on your OS, then you have to leave it in.

If your hard drive is completely dead you might consider a handheld eraser, which the ‘home’ version would run around $80.00. Whatever you do ensure that if your sending your computer away or having it replaced your data is either cleaned off of it or encrypted, with TrueCrypt.

You can get VIX quotes from CNBC Money and although I don’t recommend watching it like a hawk if you have some money in the market that you control, like a play account at ShareBuilder, you might keep an eye on it.

From my understanding is that if the VIX goes up it means there could be a lot of volatility in the market. If the VIX is down investors seem to think that everything is ok and it won’t be as volatile. Back in Q4 2008 when the market was dropping like a rock the VIX was in the 50’s range for a while with spikes all the way to 80. The VIX seems to be normal, i.e. low volatility, around 20.

Sorry for the two off topic posts, but these two things just happened to peak my interest. As another off topic comment the Winter Olympics started today. I’m watching the men’s hockey this year and am cheering for Canadian Men’s Hockey Team this time, as I did the USA last Winter Olympics. If you haven’t watched Olympic hockey it’s actually pretty fun, I find it a little more action packed then the NHL.