Editor's Note -- MIND, September 1999

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The Great Heat Wave of 1999 has taken its toll on the MIND offices. Our power has been flickering on and off for weeks. We've been asked to turn the air conditioning up from 68 to a brutally uncomfortable 70. The MIND House cafeteria just instituted its own energy-saving brownout, downgrading the prime rib to utility rib. Even the bums are knocking off early for the day because of the heat.
      One place to beat the heat is San Francisco, where we recently went for the first of several reader focus groups. Whenever you get a dozen Internet professionals in a room, you'll hear about several dozen different projects and technologies all at once. We thought we'd share some of the interesting and relevant findings with you.
      We found interest in Site Server extremely high. It's obviously becoming a very popular tool for setting up e-commerce sites. Sales stats alone don't give you any indication of the enthusiasm behind a particular product like this.
      People are looking for more cradle-to-grave solutions laid out for them in articles. In addition, scalability is a hot-button issue. Site creators are quickly and unexpectedly seeing their traffic grow to the millions-per-week level without always planning on adding the necessary capacity. Some people raised concerns about the scalability of the Visual Basic WebClass architecture, but one attendee actually gets a million hits per week on a WebClass-based solution with no problems. We've checked out this claim in the field, and the same advice keeps coming up again and again. Developers should put the least possible amount of their processing in ASP code, and offload more work to compiled modules—DLLs, WebClasses, whatever they want. Every line of code in a WebClass is one line that doesn't have to be interpreted on the fly, potentially increasing scalability.
      Both consultants and developers who work on internal apps reported a complete disconnect between the programmers and the graphical people on a project. Neither side has the time or energy to cross over and learn the other's realm. One consultant reported special frustration with the design side of Web development when it gets too much weight in a demo, hiding a product's technical superiority. More than one account has been lost simply because the screens in front of a technical content demo were designed using the wrong font.
      Lots of people are interested in advanced features like Active Directory, but don't have much time to investigate them while continuing to work on production code. In a way, internal developers might get a break with problems like these if their companies institute production freezes for Y2K.
      People want ninety-day trial offers on software. It gives them enough time to get sucked in and to depend on the tools by the time the trial period expires and they have to purchase it. When making purchasing decisions on limited budgets, many of the attendees go to the world's most widely distributed source—Usenet. By scanning the newsgroups to see which products are getting all the gripes, they know which models and releases to avoid.
      A lot of this stuff might seem obvious at first glance, but it's also chock-full of valuable lessons if you heed the experiences of others. First, don't assume that you'll get the job just because you've got the best product. With only a few minutes to make your pitch, people sometimes look at your Verdana before they worry about your COM class. Second, there's too much information for any one person to really comprehend.
      There are lots of other topics on our readers' minds. How do you mix and match technologies? How do you share content across sites? What's the best way to integrate existing databases with ASP? How about a column like New Stuff that just lists product patches and where you can download them? What sort of team development strategies work in the Web world? What's going on in Microsoft Research? How do you best use Office 2000 and FrontPage 2000 on a Web server? What are all the third-party Site Server components available for purchase?
      Of course, we think all of these topics are interesting. So here's your chance to help us serve you better. Drop us a line (mindmag@microsoft.com) letting us know what you want to see in the magazine. (You can also drop us a line rating any past articles we've run.) We'll let you know what you told us in a future issue.
      Remember in the early 1990s, when you were sooo close to having a handle on every last API offering out there? Give it up—those days are long gone. At MIND, we're trying to filter out some of the noise so you can get a clearer picture of the technologies you need to do your job. Third, and perhaps most important in today's Web scene, there's usually more than one way to get the job done. By knowing what your options are, you'll be better prepared to surmount tomorrow's fresh challenges.

—J.T.

From the September 1999 issue of Microsoft Internet Developer.