Sunday, October 10, 2010, 2-5pm
TPL will host a web design seminar this weekend, with sessions by Thuan Ngo, Design Director and Digital Creative Director at Notch JSC, and several other leaders in the Vietnam digital design community. This is a great group of people and we are really excited to help spread knowledge around!
Seats are limited, so check the Facebook event to register.
TPL’s office is located in K300, Tan Binh District:
View Tech Propulsion Labs Saigon Office in a larger map
Simply, Mono Touch is a set of tools that allow developers to create C# and .NET based application for iPhone and iPod Touch. It based on the Mono framework which is an open source implementation of .NET framework, it has been developed by Novell to enable a cross -platform version of .NET framework. The Mono Touch API provides the combination of the core .NET framework features and iPhone SDK. Of course Mono Touch dose not wrap all the features, there still something not supported yet. At the time of this post, the current Mono Touch version is 3.0.8 which supports .NET 3.5 and iOS 4.
As you know, Apple doesn’t allow any interpreted or run-time compiled program, that why you don’t see Java, Flash or pure .NET applications on iPhone. Mono Touch is .NET based frame work, so why the application build by Mono Touch can be run on iPhone? The magic here is Mono’s Ahead-of-Time(AOT) feature, it generates all native code that application could generate at run-time ahead-of-time, so the application deployed to iPhone is 100% native application.
Pros of Mono Touch:
Cons of Mono Touch:
There are a lot about Mono Touch that i have not discovered yet. In general, it’s a cool framework for .NET developers to start making something on iPhone, the most popular smart phone that grow from zero to 80 million devices in only three years. But, in my opinion, i would like to start learning objective-C, because learning new thing is always good for you.
By Ngo Duc, Software Engineer
As a TPL .Net developer, I have just researched about StoryTeller for some days. I think this is a good automatic acceptance test tool because it uses the same mechanic as Fitnesse tool(also a BDD test tool), especially it’s built in .Net language. In current version (v1.0), It supports almost some basic features as Fitnesse features, such as:
About comparing with Fitnesse test engine, in current version, I don’t see a very big difference in features, except these things:
Anyway, as the author said, building a new BDD test engine, cleaner, simpler and integrated better with .Net environment, also old engine framework is the first goals in current version.
I like this tool and It can be considered to use as quite good BDD test engine in our projects.
TPL is proud to announce the second event we’ve organized in Vietnam around mobile development: VN Mobile DevCamp 2010. As we did last year, we’re co-organizing the event with faberNovel, and have also brought MDC 2009 sponsor Orange France Telecom along as an organizer this year. From the website:
“The Saigon Mobile Dev Camp is an event focusing on mobile application development with professionals and young software developers.
Over the weekend, participants will share, learn and innovate thanks to: Workshops animated by Vietnamese and foreign experts.
A 24-hour coding contest on mobile applications development.
Attendance is free of charge. The event will be bilingual, in both Vietnamese and English.”
Last year’s MDC was a great success. It was the first event of its kind in Vietnam, combining training in different mobile platforms with a coding competition that lets developers put their new knowledge into practice. Plus, its free and open to anyone with a passion for mobile apps and some coding skills. We had over 75 attendees, and 8 teams stayed overnight to build apps for the coding competition.
TPL organizes this event every year as part of our overall mission to bring the state of the art in Internet technology innovation to Vietnam, and fast track the development of Vietnam’s top local talent. We’re looking forward to this year’s event, and are excited to see the apps developed by this year’s participants!
Paul Graham can be hit or miss depending on your perspective, but his recent article on being Ramen Profitable is a big hit. What is being Ramen Profitable? “Ramen profitable means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders’ living expenses.”
Paul, as usual, is discussing the rarefied world of founder/coders; while I love these guys, it’s not actually that great a description of the customers we work with, who tend to be exceptionally savvy in areas that aren’t software. Still, the idea is the same: spend the absolute minimum to build a real, working product and get as quickly as possible to ‘sustainable’.
Of course, the whole article (including recipes) is worth reading but here’s the section that resonated the most with me:
A startup that reaches ramen profitability may now be more likely to succeed than not. Which is pretty exciting, considering the bimodal distribution of outcomes in startups: you either fail or make a lot of money.
While I would love it to be true that 50% of ramen profitable companies will “succeed,” I do agree that if your company can achieve any kind of real cashflow profitability, you’ve passed a huge hurdle and your chances of success are hugely better than average…not only because the business is proven to be working, but because you’re now giving yourself several different types of success to choose from.
And isn’t freedom to choose one of the real reasons we’re in this entrepreneurial game, to begin with?
Tech Propulsion Labs is happy to announce the first Webcamp Saigon on this Saturday, May 23rd 2009! This first Webcamp event will be a workshop focusing on web standards. Attendance is limited to the first 30 designers who want to join.
Update: Attendance is now closed for the first Webcamp workshop. Organizers are working on some creative ideas to get more people involved through slideshare and twitter, we’ll see what we can do to involve the many people who wanted to come but couldn’t.
What: Webcamp Saigon is a series of events specifically organized for Web Designers & Front-end Developers in the southern part of Vietnam. It is part workshop, part networking, and part geeking out about design. Current plans are to have quarterly events, sponsor design competitions, and anything else we can do to build communities of sharing, thinking designers in Vietnam
Who: The first event is a workshop by and for Web Designers, though we try to make room for fans of Web technologies, too :)
Why: The webcamp series aims to facilitate discussions and knowledge sharing among those who work on Web design and development, with a focus on Web Standards, Quality, and making the Vietnamese web beautiful and functional.
Where: Tech Propulsion Labs will provide a venue for the event, as well as take care of all the logistics involved. The address is at H17 (No. 64) A4 Street, Ward 12, Tân Bình District, HCMC. map to the Tech Propulsion Labs offices.
Sponsors: Together with Tech Propulsion Labs, ASALEO JSC and Frexy are sponsoring Webcamp Saigon.
Media, sponsorship or attendance inquiries related to Webcamp Saigon, should go to contact TPL. If you want to keep updated on the Webcamp series, join our Facebook Group: Webcamp Saigon
Tech Propulsion Labs CTO Dan Shupp is attending Singapore Unconference 2009, an event styled after DEMO and Techcrunch50 to showcase Asia-based Web Start-ups.
For more info, one of Tech Propulsion Labs’s Project Managers, Nguyen Anh Hung, blogged about the unconference at Fresco 2.0, or you can check the unconference’s site.
A common refrain in the Agile Development world is the difficulty of reconciling change embracing, shared risk, human centered Agile with specific, CYA, plan-loving contracts. Fixed price, fixed schedule is easy to understand and easy to specify in contract terms. Negotiation around deliverables every sprint? That’s harder, especially when you’re working with customers new to Agile.
We have a lot to say about Agile contracts, but the best thing to say (and as developers, we love saying this) is that there’s more than one way to do it.
Fixed price contracts and Time & Materials are just the two ends of the spectrum…in between you can charge by hours, man-months, or story points, you can fix scope (and price) at different times, you can increase the frequency of milestones for payment and delivery, and there’s always lots of fun to be hand figuring out a project’s “definition of done.”
But, as is usually the case, the way engineers prefer to talk about something isn’t necessarily the most, shall we say, straightforward. Alistair Cockburn maintains a collection of Agile contract ideas that are invaluable to us when introducing Agile contracts to our customers. We like this list for a couple of reasons: they’re succinct, precise descriptions of the different directions you can go with Agile contracts, embedding shared risk and Agile ideas into contract T&Cs. Also, Alistair’s list thankfully doesn’t go into the details of the more esoteric contracts, but does hint that they’re around. Finally, a more subtle reason we like Alistair’s list is that, when introducing Agile to your customers, every little bit helps to show that Agile development is a well established movement much larger than our two firms and this contract.
(from VietnamNet)
Viet Nam has officially become a member of Asianux, an organisation dedicated to the development of free software, Deputy Minister of Science and Technology Tran Quoc Thang has announced.
He was speaking at a recent symposium on open source software (OSS) in Ha Noi, organised by the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Education and Training, the Viet Nam Chamber of Commerce and Industry and other agencies related to the IT sector.
“Viet Nam’s entry marks a new step in the country’s advancement in the IT sector in general and the availability of the OSS in particular,” Thang said.
Over the past four years, Viet Nam has adopted policies designed to encourage the development and application of the OSS, resulting in a total of between 14,000 and 20,000 personal computers using OpenOffice, Firefox, Unikey and other free software.
Experts say the development of the OSS enables developing countries to gain wider access to a range of software solutions, helping them increase their investment efficiency, better meet the demands of the poor and assist them in adapting to different indigenous languages and cultures.
Prior to Viet Nam joining Asianux, its membership consisted of Japan, China and South Korea.
My friend William Hurley (whurley to most) has a post up on his blog about opening up the iPhone. This has proven to be predictably polarizing as is often the case when opinions regarding Apple or Open Source are voiced, for reasons I can’t say I fully understand.
Don't worry, it's a harmless robot, see?
The interesting aspects to watch are Apple’s choices about timing and methodology. Will they pre-emptively open up or dig into their proprietary position, only to be dislodged when there’s no other alternative? What aspect of their platform will they open — will it be possible to buy applications from alternative publishers, or for unlocked iPhones to be sold legally, or will they actually open source aspects of the phone’s software stack, hoping to extend the ecosystem to other devices?
jailhouse rock
Given Apple’s seeming preference for maximum control, the most likely path is one of very conservative moves made incrementally, each one spun as radical steps towards openness. A surprise announcement about DRM, for example, or additional carriers licensed to sell the iPhone. Still, Jobs has proven himself capable of springing genuine surprises on the market before, so anything is possible.
What seems certain is that mobile computing is truly beginning to come of age. The App Store, with 10,000 applications and 300 million downloads, is undeniably a breakthrough. Achieving what no wireless carrier or handset manufacturer could accomplish before, Apple has opened the door to a new era where a mobile client is becoming a standard feature of every up and coming new Internet application.
That’s openness from which we all benefit.
