Blast from the Past - The Inside Track Series Concludes
I hope you have enjoyed the Blast from the Past - The Inside Track Series.
To make life simpler, I have attached a zip file with all 10 of the original Inside Track pdf files.
To finish off, here are some comments from the original author, Karl Gunderson:
“You want to republish what?” was the first thought that went through my head when I received an e-mail from David. I sort of knew David from the distant past, but I’ll bet we were as surprised as the other that we are both still working here. Here being Microsoft Business Solutions, the people formerly known as Great Plains Software from Fargo, North Dakota. I’m now a developer working on Dynamics AX and David is still breathing fire into Dynamics GP (I looked over his blog after receiving the e-mail!). So David wants to dredge up those moldy old columns from umpteen years ago and republish them. I guess he’s on a nostalgia kick, I’m thinking.
I read over those old columns, columns that you have now had the, shall we generously call it a “pleasure”, to read yourselves, and found that they weren’t all that awful. They did touch on topics that are still relevant today. They did include some useful stuff like code and lightweight development methodologies. I didn’t notice too many mistakes; thank goodness for good editors! And so I gave David the oki-doki.
I guess I mentioned in the first column that I’d worked in both customer and partner-like organizations. From the inside, we are working on the next version, the next greatest thing. But I do realize that you still have a continuity of service and product that you need to maintain. You have real customers and users who depend on this stuff we call software, working day in and day out. And, there is a whole crop of new you out there that are helping those people; you who have never heard of a command line editor or only vaguely know what ActiveX means. We all depend on progress that those who came before us made. We continue to make progress and provide the basis for the next crop. I hope these columns have played a small role is building that road to a new software future. Engage, Scotty!
Karl
P.S. Scotty (James Doohan) was the engineer (surely a big part of his job would deal with software, right?) on the original Star Trek series. The overly dramatic Captain Kirk (William Shatner) would order the good ship Enterprise into motion (into the future, at warp speeds) with a proclamation like “Engage, Scotty!” It seemed fitting. My apologies for stating the obvious if you got the reference.
The newsletters are available as a zipped attachment at the bottom of this article.
David