Pavan Gayakwad

Not sure how regularly you visit SrushtiSoft blog , if you had not visited it for several weeks; please take a glance now.

When I wanted to re-create “Quick Quest” (QQ), my struggle to move further sometimes made me feel “I am thinking too much!!”. Recently, When I come across few statistics about execution of software projects in the industry from Grady Booch blog (“Software And Movie Making” posted on Thursday, June 12, 2008. you can also find his blog link from My Favorites section on this page.) I just felt my struggle was realistic to my scale and I am not alone. “Quick Quest” is not a big revenue making software for me now however it taught many things to me. An extract from Grady’s post, “75% of all software projects at Fortune 500 companies fail, 33% are cancelled, and 66% go over budget by more than 200%“ Well, Me and QQ belongs to 66% share which indicates variance of estimated budget by 200%. Where ‘budget’ for me here is my ‘time’, which is impossible to slow down or earn more :)

Quick Quest - software created for college universities to generate ‘equally distributed complexity’ question papers. My college university attempted to utilize it and found it useful. This is an old story. The latest happening on this is, I am re-creating it with latest technology (.Net) putting the software architectural knowledge I have gained in several years being in this industry. If you are a person who is having more than 10 years of experience in software design, my step of software re-creation might not sound big for you. It turned out huge for me due to several reasons. When I had a plan to re-start on old successful software, I took opportunity to reach as many technical gurus as I can and asked them a most controversial question - “How good is to re-create good old software? Or should I extend the same old software with new features?”. Many had different thoughts but the common opinion was, extend the existing one instead going for whole new re-creation. When I sat and lo...

Life is not a neat story. Good men lose. Love does not conquer all. Everybody lies. All good things can only happen in movies.

I built a small utility using C# Dot Net version 2.0 in which I took help of Open File Dialog box windows control to know user selected file path and name. I used “SafeFileName”(Gets a string that only contains the filename for the selected file.) property of OpenFileDialog box to display selected filename on the windows form. I did a fine testing on my development machine and deployed it on production computer. The production computer was up by freshly installed Windows Vista operating system (without SP1 update). since Vista ships with DotNet runtime, my job was as easy as copying my dot net executable assembly and double clicking it. When the OpenFileDialog box tried supplying user selected file name through “SafeFileName” property, it crashed! Damn...!! The error message was clearly telling me that “method not found: OpenFileDailog.get_SafeFileName()”!! I was darn surprised. Though I did a quick fix for this problem by making use of FileName property (Gets or sets a string containi...

First time when I tried installing Linux on my box, I was failed to appraise it. I concluded that “I am typical ‘Windows’ user and might be not-understanding the Linux way”. I took break; I read some good articles on Linux. Few articles mentioned like “This Linux distribution is so easy that my grandma can use it…” I downloaded few Linux distributions (I would prefer not to mention their names here.) and tried installing one by one on my laptop. In almost all distributions, my first impression of Linux being faster operating system was gone. When I wanted to install new utility software (.rpm package) I had to learn command prompt options and finally ended up with error messages which tells one or the other supporting library is missing. Badly organized start menu always took more than required time to find out what I wanted. Too many small utilities fail to achieve user needs as a whole. Few distributions were good in few things. My overall intention was to get faster Linux on my ...

Knowingly or unknowingly committing a mistake is just okay, but continuing the same is a serious sin.