Groove, Windows, etc

Russell Beattie (via Jeroen) has a good bunch of things to say about Groove. Quite a few important things there. Let me just talk about a couple of them.

Russ says

At the beginning Groove was making noise about being developer agnostic - you could create Tools by using their collection of XML file formats and whatever language you wanted - VB, Java or even JavaScript if you wanted to. But now it's obvious that Groove is basically a Microsoft only area. That's too bad. Also, it's becoming apparent exactly how difficult it is to develop custom apps for Groove - it's not Notes Next Generation by any stretch.

It's hard to disagree that building Groove tools is too difficult. I've had a lot of practice, and it still takes me a couple of days to build anything interesting. To be really effective, there's a depth of knowledge you have to acquire over time; and to get anywhere at all, you gotta climb over a big learning curve. IMHO the best way to do this is to go through developer training. (There are some good books, too).

But yesterday, one of my chance corridor chats was with John Guidice, who's product manager for some of our tools. I dont think John's really a hands-on developer. But he mentioned how he just sat down and built a real, functioning, collaborative, deployable Groove tool in ten minutes.

How? This is the VS.Net stuff which Jay and Sam and co have been working on; first time I saw it in action. This is the sort of leverage which takes it even beyond "Notes next generation".

(I still haven't crossed the .NET rubicon myself - I wonder if that'll be an easy transition from my Java days. We'll see...!)