Greatest Software Development Milstones of 2009

Here are the biggest milestones in Software Development that we either reached or surpassed in 2009:

1.) Team Development is here, at last: With the introduction of Visual Studio 2008, the state of Software Development has been truly revolutionized. How you’d say? By truly sharing everyones code and design (AkA Sweat & Code), in an automated manner that presents member of the team with code already made and helping to stop the reinvention of the wheel, which to this date happens too often even in small development teams. This Team effort will be even extended further once Visual Studio 2010 is released. The Microsoft Share-Point server also plays a great role in this effort. Team Development is the way to develop software for this decade. A combination of Agile & XP approach to programming in a Team Development environment would make us much more productive and closer to meeting our deadlines. Hopefully…

2.) Scripting and Dynamic Languages like Ruby – PHP – Perl – Python and Javascript have taken their place at the forefront of the development projects. This is one of the reasons that I have been learning JavaScript as fast as I can for the past 2 months. I have never worked with JavaScript – but I have been involved in the development of C# projects. So I am trying to bring these Apps directly to web, by using Javascript as the transport mechanism for the UI to be brought to a web browser environment, so the users can operate these application remotely without the need for VPN and complicated / possibly unsafe connection to their servers. If you are a Java Dev, learning JavaScript is a cinch. But since I am Primarily a C++ / C# developer, takes me a little bit long to learn the damn thing. What is fascinating for me is the fact that JavaScripting is an Object Oriented development language. Something that I never would have thought or believed.

3.) Simple better than Complex, At Last! Simpler solution is chosen by most developers as oppose to heavier and more blotted tools. Spring Framework – Ruby on Rails, are consequently, hot.

4.) Frameworks for the Web: Standard application software engineers, developing in C++ / Visual Basic / C#, have been enjoying Development Frameworks for years on all platforms. Now Frameworks are appearing for the Web developers and this is great. In a short time, these Frameworks will be sophisticated enough that the Web Developers can produce great software in much shorter time.

5.) Palm OS, webOS, has been a fantastic example to prove that CSS – HTML and Javascript can be used for more than just as web development tools. Palm webOS has done well in this field.

6.) Open-Source Software has come a long way and it actually attracted heavy weight developers to join in and contribute their time. To the point that I and planning to join the Audacity Macintosh development team soon. All developers must find some time to donate to the Open-Software organization. This, in long run, would be a great help for all of us.

7.) Nokia QT Cross Platform GUI Tools, which the name explains it all. Use it to cross develop your applications on PC and then simply recompile it on Macintosh. The Apps generated with this tool don’t look like cross developed Apps. It actually looks like native Apps. We should all than Nokia for putting this great tool in the Open-Source Community.

More to come…