The software industry has a long history of recreating incompatible solutions to problems that are already solved 

 

In 2001, my good friend Barry Varga  and I co-founded this company for a variety of reasons.  One of those reasons was to make decisions for our own company as previously we had worked for a variety of other companies where we watched the people in charge make, well, lets just say questionable decisions.  We felt that we could make better decisions or at least, we would be accountable for our own decisions we thought how, could we do worse?  I am sure this is how MiniMicrosoft kinda feels.

 

One of those decisions directly affected our programming team, which was, dont write code at least initially.  It sounds strange as most programmers (read: all) love to write code including yours truly.  The issue is that designs precede code and requirements precede design.  Pretty fundamental one would think.  However, as programmers, we are all guilty (and still are) of not conforming to this basic tenet.  Oh to be sure, there are a whole pile of reasons behind this we are good at rationalizing that we dont have any requirements or market intelligence to tell us what to code.  We also have great imaginations and think we know what the customer wants.  We also believe that regardless of size, complexity and/or change, by coding first we can figure it out

 

Since we were writing code on the MSFT platform, and have been since VB1, we knew, as old school programmers that it all has been done before, you just have to find an example.  The World Wide Wasteland has many examples of whatever you are coding.  In fact, since some 50% of the 8 million programmers out there code on the MSFT platform, you are bound to find an example or ten (or hundr