Services
We offer a number of Microsoft .NET consulting services ranging from a couple hours
of our time to many months. We charge $125/hr plus travel expenses and other project
expenditures such as hiring a design firm to create graphics, or an offshore QA
team to ensure quality. We will never bill for something you didn’t see coming.
Read more about our services or contact us to inquire
more.
Areas of Expertise
- Shrink Wrapped Software Development
- Service Oriented Architecture
- XMPP/Jabber Protocol
- Presence Aware Architecture
- Scalability and Performance
Mentoring/Tutoring/Training
We’ll lead your development team from start to finish, conception to release, through
a software project you choose, using the latest Microsoft .NET technology. Do you
have a team of VB developers that need to make the move to .NET but don’t feel comfortable?
Or maybe a project that was built in .NET 1.0 and needs to be brought up to date?
We can help.
This isn’t your average cookie cutter training program. The curriculum will be developed
on the fly, custom tailored to meet the individual needs of your development staff.
The result of our training will not only be an increase of your staff’s abilities
and confidence, but a product with concrete value for your business.
Performance/Scalability Planning, Testing, and Tuning
We’re offering our many years of experience designing and developing scalable .NET
applications to you. Are you building an application that will need to scale and
perform under pressure? Do you have an existing application that can’t, or soon
won’t be able to, keep up with demand? Let us take a look.
If you’re still in the planning stages we can provide software architectural guidance,
capacity planning, systems architecture, and anecdotal advice. If you have an existing
product or service that now needs to scale, we’ll spend time meeting with your team,
analyzing code, the production environment, and developing a plan of attack. We
will then execute on the plan and get your application ready to handle the required
load.
Architecture/Code Review
We believe a key part of the software development process is architecture and code
review. Without someone else to look over a developer’s work, it is typically sub-par.
It’s well known that most developers get lazy if they don’t think someone else is
going to be looking at the internals of their work. Ego can play a major role in
the quality of code. (Yes, we do reviews of all code that is developed in house.)
We’ll meet with your team to understand the nature, history, and goals of your project,
and have a look at the code or documentation. We provide an honest, no-holds-barred
report of what we see with source code comments in-line where appropriate.
Debugging
Does your application have a problem that your team can’t figure out? Does it crash
unexpectedly? We have a knack for debugging difficult problems. We can come on site,
or work remotely to debug your code. We will analyze the problem, determine the
best course of action, and get it fixed. If we commit to the project and can’t fix
it, we won’t charge you! Read more about our guarantee.
Technical Hiring Assistance
Hiring the right people is one of the most difficult hurdles any manager or small
business owner has to jump over. Are you looking to hire some in-house technical
staff but don’t know exactly what you’re looking for? We will sit down with you
and ask questions to figure out what you need out of the employee. We can help you
write a job description that will bring in the best, or if you’re already getting
candidates we can perform in-person and phone interviews.
Rescue Missions
Are you ridiculously overdue? Missed every deadline and then some? Maybe you’ve
spent so much money you can’t imagine abandoning the project. It is a well known
fact that a majority of software projects fail to be completed. The odds are not
in your favor. We can help you swing those odds and take your failing project through
to completion. We will meet with the relevant parties, analyze your situation, and
steer the project back on course.
Product Development
Last, but not least, we offer product development services. We will take your project
from conception to reality and deliver shrink-wrapped quality software. We believe
our development methodology is second to none. We set clear goals and deadlines
with complete transparency. You’ll be able to look at the status of your project
at any time and collaborate with us during the development process.
Our process is one not typically found in consulting companies. Its closer to something
you’d find in a software company. You know; the guys that have to make money on
the software they build. We start out with very little documentation. You will never
receive a 100 page requirements document to review. It will most likely be much,
much, smaller, and primarily bullet points. A clear first version feature-set goal
will be set. We’ll aim for no more than two months of development for the first
version — but probably less. It has been our experience that human beings
are much more able to provide beneficial feedback and vision on something concrete
rather than a huge stack of documents.
We believe detailed documentation is a waste of time. If you want us to put together
a book outlining what every widget in the yet-to-be-created software will do, well,
we won’t. It is more important to get the first version of your product developed
quickly and constantly collaborate with you. We have found that in the end projects
never conform to the initial documentation and too much documentation stifles the
creativity of the software developer. While it is very important to understand what
you are building and architect it well, you always miss something when creating
requirements documentation. It is more practical and beneficial to deliver small
sets of complete features in short time periods, receive feedback, and make adjustments
as necessary. We will never disappear for 6 months and return with software that's
nothing like you wanted. In the software world this methodology is called
Agile Software Development with the mantra: “Release early, release often.”
We know requirements will change, and that’s ok. We will adapt.
You may be thinking that we’re just lazy or undisciplined. But we’re not. We know
how to build software that works and makes customers happy.
