San Francisco, CA – Jan 31, 2011 – InnerWorkings announced today that it has signed an agreement with L&T Infotech to deliver its flagship product to enterprise developers through the L&T Infotech Developer & Platform Excellence Program.

The company will offer its entire catalog of .NET Framework coding challenges and performance support services to help L&T Infotech enhance developer skills. InnerWorkings Developer is scalable for geographically dispersed software teams, yet allows individual developers to receive in-depth feedback, code samples, and support.

“InnerWorkings is delighted to be chosen by L&T Infotech’s Developer & Platform Excellence team for this initiative,” said Mr. Francis McKeagney, CEO of InnerWorkings. “We are excited about working with L&T Infotech on our shared goal of driving .NET skills and programming excellence for enterprise developers on a large scale. InnerWorkings offers a best in class approach to improving developer performance and productivity within the enterprise. Developers gain validated programming skills with the very latest technologies while working almost exclusively in Visual Studio. We look forward to the successful execution of this strategic developer training program in conjunction with L&T Infotech.”

“L&T Infotech is committed to providing superior service to our customers by transforming knowledge into performance. We are pleased to see InnerWorkings as a key component of the L&T Infotech Developer and Platform Excellence Program. Developing effective software takes years of practice and experience accumulating techniques and tricks along the way. InnerWorkings allows us to provide our developers with this real-world experience in a safe sandbox, helping us to accelerate the delivery of higher quality solutions to our clients.” said Mr. Sudip Banerjee, CEO at L&T Infotech.

L&T Infotech developers will have access to InnerWorkings’ growing catalog of coding exercises on key technologies such as ASP.NET, .NET Framework 3.5x, AJAX Extensions, Visual Studio Team System, Silverlight, Enterprise Library, WPF, WCF and .NET Framework 4.0. Participating developers will also avail of InnerWorkings’ acclaimed code judging engine, Personal Tutor support service, full code search functionality, and the company’s extensive reference framework. The InnerWorkings learning environment is tightly embedded in Microsoft Visual Studio so developers can enjoy a more seamless and in-depth learning experience.

About InnerWorkings
At InnerWorkings, our mission is to help our customers build great software organizations. We believe that it is possible to create a successful, efficient, and cost-effective software organization and sustain it over multiple projects. How do we do this? By providing software executives with an integrated platform to improve learning, collaboration, and software processes across your development teams. InnerWorkings is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner and Carnegie Mellon SEI Partner. The company’s R&D facility is based in Dublin, Ireland and InnerWorkings maintains its corporate headquarters in San Francisco, California. For more information about InnerWorkings and its services, visit www.innerworkings.com.

About L&T Infotech
Larsen & Toubro Infotech Ltd (L&T Infotech), one of the fastest growing IT Services companies, is ranked by NASSCOM as 8th largest Indian software & services exporter from India and is amongst NASSCOM’s Top 20 IT-BPO Employers in India (FY2009-10). It is also ranked 7th in DATAQUEST-IDC top 20 IT Best Employers Survey 2010. A wholly-owned subsidiary of Larsen & Toubro, a US$ 9.8 billion engineering, manufacturing & financial services organization with global operations, L&T Infotech is differentiated by its unique Business-to-IT Connect, which is a result of its rich corporate heritage.

We offer comprehensive, end-to-end software solutions and services in the following industry verticals: Banking & Financial Services; Insurance; Energy & Petrochemicals; Manufacturing (Consumer Packaged Goods/Retail, High-tech, Industrial Products,  Automotive), and Product Engineering Services (Telecom). Our new emerging verticals include Media & Entertainment and Life sciences & Healthcare. We also deliver business solutions to our clients in the following horizontals/Service Lines: SAP, Oracle, Infrastructure Management Services, Testing, Consulting and Business Process Services. Our other service offerings are: Business Analytics, Legacy Modernization, Applications Outsourcing, Architecture Consulting, Enterprise Integration, Service Oriented Architecture, Systems Integration and PLM. (www.Lntinfotech.com)

All products and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

You’ve probably heard all the talk this week about Silverlight’s future as a cross platform runtime.

Bob Muglia’s comments in a PDC10 article by Mary-Jo Foley titled Microsoft: Our strategy with Silverlight has shifted kicked off quite a firestorm of reactions from the developer community.

Earnest responses to Muglia’s announcement have veered from blithe indifference (move along, nothing to see here), to apoplectic anger (never trust Microsoft), to resigned acceptance (I told you this would happen).

Responding to the unexpected controversy, Muglia posted a detailed blog yesterday clarifying his thinking titled PDC and Silverlight. This post strikes an unusual tone between defending his original thesis  that HTML 5 is increasingly important to Microsoft while going to some lengths to assure people that Silverlight is still a core technology.

As the dust settles, I’m beginning to see the following themes emerge from this debate (my opinion only, of course):

• Microsoft is endorsing HTML 5 as the primary, most widely accepted web standard.
• This move has been brewing since HTML 5 support in IE9 was announced.
• HTML 5 has incredible reach but limited tooling (when compared to Silverlight).
• Silverlight has rich tooling but limited reach (when compared to HTML).
• Silverlight has a fine niche in enterprise line-of-business applications.
• Microsoft no longer sees Silverlight as the best runtime on all devices.
• Microsoft will release Silverlight 5; don’t know where, don’t know when…
• Reports of Silverlight’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
  

So much for my opinion. Why not get an expert’s perspective on Silverlight in the enterprise by listening to Mick Slattery, EVP of Avanade’s Global Delivery Network? You’re invited to join us for a live webcast covering Silverlight adoption at Avanade on Wednesday, November 3rd at 2 PM ET/11 AM PT.

Our speakers will discuss how Avanade drove widespread Silverlight adoption across their distributed software teams:

• Fran McKeagney - CEO, InnerWorkings
• Mick Slattery - EVP, Global Delivery Network, Avanade

You’ll hear about the wide array of ‘line of business’ and web facing applications Avanade has completed for its customers using Silverlight. We fully expect to receive audience questions on Silverlight’s future as a cross platform runtime, and where it stands as an enterprise development tool. Don’t miss your chance to participate in this lively debate — register now!

I’m pleased to announce that InnerWorkings is continuing our thought leadership webcast series on Managing Application Development Teams and Software Projects.

Next in the series is a highly anticipated discussion on the Risks & Rewards of .NET Adoption in the Enterprise with one of our key customers, GE Healthcare — it’s scheduled for Tuesday, October 19th at 11 AM Pacific / 2 PM Eastern.

Ever wondered how a large, distributed software organization makes decisions about which development framework to adopt? GE Healthcare will be sharing their experiences of managing over 9 global development locations, and supporting a vibrant mix of programming technologies.

We’ll be discussing how to create an n-tiered, component based software architecture that supports their business vision. We will also explore the issue of preparing developers for .NET adoption in terms of licensing, the software roadmap, and key ramp up mechanisms.

In addition, we’ll be analyzing the risks and benefits of adopting .NET at GE Healthcare — what aspects exceeded expectations and what setbacks were encountered along the way. Lastly, the session will explore the road ahead in planning future .NET projects and taking advantage of the many new features available in C# and .NET 4.0.

It promises to be a fascinating session, so don’t miss out — join the live event on Tuesday, October 19th at 11 AM Pacific / 2 PM Eastern. If that time doesn’t work for you, just register now and you’ll be provided with a link to the on-demand version of the event once it has been archived.

Many thanks to the team at GE Healthcare for participating and we hope you enjoy the webcast.

I’ve always been interested in the economic impact of software development. While it can be extraordinarily expensive to build out a commercial software application, successful software products can achieve a scale that is simply staggering.

Think about the original code base for Google’s search service or Apple’s iTunes store, for example. Few could have envisaged the explosive growth that would accompany the development of these software services.

Both examples testify that a pure idea, disruptive in its nature and well executed in software, can go a long way indeed.

Technical debt

But it’s far too tempting to believe that you can build the “Next Great App”, ship it, and kick back to watch the revenue rolling in. As we know, the reality of maintaining, fixing, and updating software to support its lifetime value is a massive undertaking.

But is it possible to quantify this burden of “technical debt” — the cost to fix structural flaws that remain in the code when an application is released?

Software quality study

That’s why I was particularly interested in the 2010 CAST Worldwide Application Software Quality Study (link opens a PDF). CAST Research Labs specialize in the study of custom software development and they have compiled a dataset from over 500 applications.

I was really impressed by the range and depth of this study, involving 75 organizations across 8 industry segments. Data were collected over a period of 3 years and drawn from 288 applications built in North America, Europe, and India — it’s fair to say the results are broadly representative of the software industry as a whole.

For a good summary of the CAST report, I’d recommend the following SD Times article titled CAST puts a number on the cost of fixing code quality. The estimated cost to fix problems in an application once it is operational is particularly revealing, and it puts the cost of ownership for software applications into perspective:

If your organization has an application with approximately 374,000 lines of code, you can expect a technical debt of about US$1 million.

Security scores 

I was not surprised to read that COBOL scored highest in security and robustness, given the demands of financial services systems where mainframes dominate the picture. Clearly, mainframe systems are less open and exposed to the myriad of security threats that face web applications.

Perhaps more worrying was the abysmal security score attributed to .NET, with Java not far behind. Far more work needs to be done educating developers in the best practices of building secure applications — it’s no surprise that our web application security training generates plenty of demand from InnerWorkings clients:

Mainframe-based applications are less exposed to the security challenges posed to Web-facing applications. Nevertheless, the lower security scores for other types of applications is surprising. .NET applications received some of the lowest security scores.

Are developers too reactive?

Another key finding of the CAST report is the prevalence of performance concerns in developers’ minds:

It is not uncommon for end-users to complain vociferously to the development team about slow performance, prioritizing the remediation of performance problems over other quality problems such as poor maintainability.

This reactive approach from developers, while perfectly understandable, can lead to increasing technical debt over an application’s lifetime, as less attention is paid to software maintenance problems.

Perhaps the most telling recommendation from the CAST report is for developers to tackle structural flaws and maintenance problems in the development phase:

Time needs to be built in for remediation and refactoring prior to shipping. If you don’t do something about it now and continue to write code, you’re going to continue to build technical debt.

Consider your software legacy

So this CAST report encourages everyone involved in the software industry to consider the legacy of software applications. Don’t overlook the burdens of maintenance that an operational application must bear in order to be successful over its extended lifecycle.

Lastly, the CAST report cautions that software organizations are often unwilling to tackle cost of ownership or code complexity, particularly when an application appears to be running correctly:

In some cases organizations do not want to reduce the complexity of code that appears to be running correctly, even if cost of ownership and time to deliver enhancements could be reduced by refactoring the code. These observations may also identify the need for continued developer training in best design and coding practices.

Training really matters

So let’s not overlook the central take away from this last part of the CAST report — training in application design and best practices have a measurable impact on an application’s lifetime value and total cost of ownership.

I would argue that software executives reading this report should give serious consideration to setting up formal training programs on object oriented development, application security, and design patterns at a minimum.

Now that recommendation is really music to our ears at InnerWorkings!

The word “roadmap” tends to make honest product managers quiver; it provokes a similar reaction from software development managers. Nonetheless, we’ve been working hard on our .NET learning roadmap at InnerWorkings.

I’ll be walking through the full roadmap in future posts, but let’s start at the start shall we?

Hot on the heels of our most popular New Features in C# 4.0 release last month, we’re turning our attention to another core area of .NET 4.0 for professional developers.

Now it’s time to tackle <insert drum roll> the wildly popular ASP.NET MVC 2!

We figure that if Scott Hanselman and Scott Guthrie have co-written a book about it, you just know it’s going to be a big deal.

So what aspects of ASP.NET MVC 2 have we decided to cover for the intrepid professional software developer with some room in their brains for new skills?

Here’s the shortlist of topics that made the cut into our MVC 2 training:

• Introduction to MVC 2
• Using Controllers, Actions, and Views
• Templated Helpers
• MVC 2 validation and DataAnnotation support
• Using Filters in MVC 2
• Using AJAX with MVC 2
• Using Areas with MVC 2

I should point out that this outline is an update on our existing ASP.NET MVC Fundamentals training, so it’s well vetted content updated for the latest release of MVC.

Look out for an announcement on this blog once we release our MVC 2 training; it’s currently in development and will be coming soon.

I’ll be covering future InnerWorkings roadmap topics in my next post but here’s a hint — if you’re a Visual Basic developer, you won’t be disappointed with what comes after MVC 2.

 The April release date for Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0 was accompanied by the usual “hubbub” and evangelical zeal that we’ve come to expect from Microsoft.

It’s fair to say that initial feedback on the changes in the Visual Studio IDE and enhancements to the underlying .NET Framework were broadly positive.

However, it really takes a few months for adoption to ramp up and the real story to emerge from developers in the trenches, so to speak.

In today’s blog, I’m going to focus on our latest .NET training release titled New Features in C# 4.0. While InnerWorkings is a longtime Microsoft partner and we support adoption of the .NET Framework in many ways, we try to keep our heads about new releases.

Our community expects us to focus on the key features that professional developers need to master. So consider us “fair and balanced” but not in the Fox News kind of way…

So what’s important for developers in the latest release of C# and why should you care about it anyway? Let me list the core areas of C# 4.0 that we think developers should focus on:

• using the dynamic keyword as a data type that supports runtime lookup
• using optional parameters for constructors and methods
• explicitly naming an argument being passing to a method
• working with the enhanced COM Interop features in C# 4.0
• dynamically importing COM APIs and deploying without Primary Interop Assemblies
• skipping the passing of optional parameters when making calls to COM objects
• omitting the ref keyword when calling a method on a COM object
• using the built-in .NET interfaces that have been made variant in .NET 4.0
• making generic interfaces and delegates covariant

And that’s really all there is! Our latest Drill on New Features in C# 4.0 is available to all InnerWorkings enterprise customers from today — contact us if you’d like to learn more about our subscription options for developers and software teams. We’ll be adding more .NET 4.0 training (think ASP.NET MVC 2) to the bundle before making it available from our web catalog, so watch this space.

In the meantime, you should check out this Channel 9 video titled Inside C# 4.0 for a behind-the-scenes look at how C# 4.0 evolved at Microsoft. Enjoy!

Let’s face it — we live in a world obsessed by certificates. All the important life stages — birth, graduation, marriage, home ownership, death — are all marked with solemn and official looking piece of paper.

The role of certificates is certainly prominent in our professional lives too. Apply for a software development position and your potential employer will usually ask for physical proof of your diploma, degree, or certification. In many instances, that official piece of paper or digital certificate really counts.

At InnerWorkings, we introduced our certificates of achievement for .NET developers about 2 years ago. I recall that we questioned the effect of certificates on our developer audience at the time.

Would people appreciate the validation and visible recognition of a job well done, or would it simply be an annoyance without much objective value?

Thankfully, the response from our developer community to receiving our certificates of achievement has been overwhelmingly positive.

The premise behind our certificate model is simple — for every Drill (3 hours of .NET coding exercises) that you complete successfully, you receive a digital certificate from our learning platform.

Our certificate threshold is very high, I might add — you’re required to post a perfect 100% score in each coding task before the system will recognize your achievement. It’s not that we are biased towards perfectionists, I protest; we simply take the view that an application which is 97% secure isn’t going to cut it with your customers in the real world.

Since introducing the certificate system into our developer community, our platform has issued almost 20,000 unique certificates of achievement to individual developers. Think of all the rain forests we’ve saved by opting for digital certificates, eh?

Feedback on our certificate feature has been really positive too — it’s clear that developers in our learning environment are delighted to receive recognition of their hard work in getting to grips with new and often difficult .NET technologies.

Peer recognition is always a nice bonus, so many developers choose to share their hard earned certificates on social networks or add them to their resumes. Go on, we encourage you to brag a little!

In the end, I think it’s human nature to want a physical record of our achievements and recognition of our skills — imagine the Olympic Games without medal ceremonies, or the World Cup without that stunning gold trophy.

So if you’re in the business of building a community of practice where people contribute significant time and effort, I’d highly recommend that you consider a certificate system to reward your users. It’s likely to generate good feeling among your most dedicated followers and I promise it’s much less painful than a trip to the local government office to retrieve your birth certificate!

If you’re at TechEd 2010 in New Orleans this week, I think you’ll be interested in the following announcement.

InnerWorkings has teamed up with our .NET training partner Pluralsight to offer developers access to a very powerful combined learning solution.

TechEd attendees will get the best of Pluralsight’s acclaimed on-demand training videos from industry experts alongside InnerWorkings’ award-winning learning tool embedded in Visual Studio.

Both our training solutions are available for the price of a single annual subscription — a great deal for folks at the show.

So if you’re at TechEd, please visit the InnerWorkings booth (#2632) or the Pluralsight booth (#2544) and we’ll provide more information about this amazing deal. Inquiries can also be sent to sales@innerworkings.com or pssales@pluralsight.com.

Laissez les bon temps rouler!

Over the years at InnerWorkings, we’ve teamed up with enough developer communities and local user groups to fill a small stadium. We’ve sponsored dozens of developer-centric events by offering free training, hosting contests, and giving away spot prizes.

Such user group activity is typically a positive experience with good intentions on both sides — organizers bring tangible value to the development community and vendors get meaningful product exposure to an influential group of developers and architects. Fair enough.

But these local efforts seem almost quaint in the shadow of some very large developer communities that boast incredible scale and reach. For me, it has been remarkable to watch the emergence of these massive, highly networked developer communities in the past few years.

Just for kicks, I’ve put together an informal list of these substantial developer communities — it’s admittedly a little .NET centric and apologies in advance for those I’ve omitted (but feel free to fill in the gaps in your comments):

• StackOverflow
• The Code Project
• DotNetKicks
• DZone
• Codeplex
• DotNetSlackers
• DeveloperFusion
• C# Corner
• INETA
• MSDN

Most of these communities have morphed from relatively humble beginnings into web powerhouses with millions of active contributors. StackOverflow is probably the most successful implementation of a beautifully simple community idea — creating a technology agnostic Q&A site for programmers that is collaborative and peer-reviewed. I think of it as Wikipedia for developers, and it’s great.

Another example of a developer community on steroids is The Code Project. It’s .NET centric but has racked up over 7 million members since inception, with tens of thousands of developers online at any given time. Everywhere you look, the scale of these successful communities is staggering.

So what is driving this rapid growth in online communities and programming forums? Certainly the increasing sophistication of community sites and the explosion of social networking behavior among users is a key factor.

But we also know that the demand for credible and useful technical information is almost insatiable among professional developers. In our experience at InnerWorkings, it’s clear that software development is one of the most knowledge intensive industries around today. Developers solve problems for a living and they believe in the power of community and collective knowledge to help them out when in a bind.

Whatever the driving factors, I wish all these mammoth communities the best of luck in serving their many millions of developers while crafting an unobtrusive advertising model to pay the bills. It’s a delicate balance for sure, but reaching competitive scale is a critical advantage when you’re building a community of any kind. For the architects of today’s software development communities, you have built it and they have come.

We’ve seen quite a metamorphosis in the world of software development over the past couple of years. It wasn’t all that long ago when developers were faced with a four basic career choices:

• Work as a code scribe for a monolithic software empire — go big.
• Create vertical solutions for an independent software vendor — go deep.
• Build a stealth product for a dinky little startup — go small.
• Run as an independent consultant — go alone.

OK, so I might be a little reductive in my argument, but you get the point. As a professional developer, you could choose to be part of a team (small, medium, large) or you could fight for scarce contract work in the big, bad world as a consultant. Finding a market for your own solutions was a bit like finding the next Fred Astaire on America’s Got Talent — always possible, but not likely.

Everything changed with the advent of the application marketplace, however. A vast ecosystem of apps has grown up around the mobile devices that we cling to in almost every conceivable location and situation — once off limits restaurants, golf clubs, and even restrooms (sadly, yes) are filled with the pings of text messages and full scale phone conversations today.

But good things have come from this ubiquity of mobile devices too. Software companies and individual developers responded to our ‘always on’ web experience with an overwhelming torrent of both niche and general business applications, ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime.

Clearly Apple has been at the epicenter of this movement with 100,000+ applications released to the App Store (as of early 2010). Taking a conservative number, Google’s mobile platform accumulated 38,000+ Android apps in a much shorter space of time.

New devices only add fuel to this app inferno — I read today that Apple’s iPad has just sold over 1 million units, with 12 million apps downloaded, in less than a calendar month, opening up a whole new category of touch screen apps that didn’t exist 12 months ago.

The volume of new applications is not limited to consumer devices and trivial apps, mind you. Enterprise application marketplaces are also thriving — Salesforce.com leads the way with 890+ AppExchange apps and a huge combined user base.

I’ve written in the past about how we use VerticalResponse within the AppExchange suite to manage our email communications at InnerWorkings. The hosted app is so seamlessly integrated with Salesforce.com that we’ve barely glanced at their standalone product.

The list of application marketplaces continues to grow elsewhere too — with the likes of Google Apps and Zoho offering a virtual buffet of productivity and collaboration apps to a hungry world of business users.

Twitter and Facebook continue to offer a massive audience for all kinds of applications that play by the rules of their underlying platform and APIs. Some of these apps will break out of their niche status and become self-sustaining, profitable entities that will make their owners wealthy and their users very happy. Others will be cannibalized by the natural expansion of the underlying platform and disappear without a trace.

In any case, this is a brave new world for application developers. I think it’s still true to say that great ideas with careful execution are the best recipe for success, but the emergence of these massive application marketplaces puts the world at a developer’s feet. Go forth. Multiply. Be careful. And don’t use your phone in the restroom.