Up till last week I have been swamped so I have not written a whole lot. Finally getting some time to catch up on things and thought I would point out a couple of things that have caught my attention lately. I frequently listen to .Net rocks and a couple of weeks ago I heard Dan Appleman discuss issues dealing with discoverability. His general argument centered on the fact that as an IT professional, there is just too much to learn and not enough time… in a nut shell, you can’t know everything. He further mentioned the importance of internet search tools in discovering answers to solving development issues. As he points out, the internet search engines return the information you want plus everything else. The problem is that a simple Google search is not specific enough when you need to solve a development related question. The solution … Google custom search. Appleman has set up a search tool that hand picks specific, trusted sites that provide a quick and easy resource for solving development search related results.

I have found that his site/tool searchdotnet is a wonderful reference and time saver when looking for programming related questions that does not return all the fringe stuff of a normal google search. I believe this would also be a great resource for GIS Development as standard google searches returns an eye watering plethora of garbage that is no where near to what I want. Also, with a GIS based version, subcategories could be created to search only within forums, or only within trusted blogs or only on ESRI sites etc, the possibilities are endless.

My thoughts…