Dan Griffin's Blog

Comments on security, PKI, smart cards, cryptography, and entrepreneurship.

I just read an interesting article - the January 2007 The Business of Software column in the Communications of the ACM - entitled Agile … and Offshore, by Phillip G. Armour (sorry, the text isn’t available for free, but I’ll summarize). No, this post has nothing to do with so-called Agile development.

Rather, my interest is this: the author reports on an interview he conducted with the CEO and CTO of Chicago-based Aginity, who make business intelligence dashboard applications. Their development team is split between their headquarters and a city in Ukraine. What’s cool is that they rely an a number of ("free") open-source tools, which they claim have only recently reached the level of maturity to make such an offshore approach feasible for a small and, okay … agile … company.

The list of tools cited:

The fact that Aginity seem to be targetting the Windows platform makes me wonder if Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE was omitted from that list simply because it’s not open-source, or because they’re actually not using it. Playing around with the live demo dashboards linked from their webpage leads me to conclude that they’re almost certainly using VStudio, since the demos are ASP.NET based, and they appear to be both high-quality and quite complex. I don’t know the relative cost of VStudio licenses in Ukraine, but I can only guess that it must pay itself if you’re doing this type of work. Hence, I theorize that they’d be screwed without it, perhaps even more so than in the absence of any of the tools above.

The point is that the list of tools above is collaboration-oriented, and that while this type type of tool seems to have reached critical mass in terms of enterprise-readiness, the open-source IDEs (e.g. Eclipse; acknowledging, of course, that IBM has its own agenda) have not, at least when it comes to working with Microsoft’s current application technologies (e.g. ASP.NET, WinForms, etc), targetting Windows.

I suppose this is simply a reflection of the reality that VStudio will always have a built-in head-start when it comes to integrating with proprietary Microsoft technologies. That’s not to say that a 3rd party couldn’t pull it off, or that, for that matter, Microsoft’s technologies are the best solution for every mainstream business problem. Still, I find myself using VStudio almost constantly - wishing it were both better and cheaper. Healthier competition might accomplish both things.

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