Recently, we sent out the following newsletter to those we thought might be interested in what’s happening on the technology front this year. You can use the signup form to the right to add yourself to the newsletter list, we would love to stay in touch! Here is our first newsletter:
The festivities are over, kids are back at school, and you have had your 2016 kickoffs. We are sure you are fired up to attack the challenges of the New Year, and we want to help you get there!
Technology continues to evolve at an ever faster pace. Are you taking advantage of the new opportunities that can help your product or business be more competitive? If you hadn’t noticed, things have changed! Here are a few of the changes we think are the most interesting:
- The Internet of Things (or IoT) is a fascinating development, where gadgets and devices of all kinds connect to the Internet to deliver and fetch information. Be it appliances, cars or sensors, it is becoming increasingly easy to wire them up to your cloud based services and collect data, provision them, update them, and analyze a vast stream of telematics. With Microsoft Windows 10 IoT Core, you can now use .NET to develop your embedded code with the ease and productivity of modern languages (C#) and tools (Visual Studio). Are you currently, or do you want to be in this space? We can help! Trailhead does IoT core programming.
- Big Data continues to be a hot topic. It boils down to making sense of all the information received from devices (think IoT, phones, apps, transactions from point of sales systems), and leveraging the scalable cloud fabric to apply vast number crunching resources on a pay-per-use, flexible scale to make sense of what you are collecting and visualize it in an actionable way. Trailhead can help you do this with powerful frameworks like Hadoop and Microsoft HDInsight. Got Big Data? Get Trailhead!
- Mobility. An ever increasing amount of work is now being performed on mobile devices: phones, tablets, phablets and convertibles. Android and iOS are the prevailing operating systems, but Windows 10 is a strong contender. At Trailhead, we use Xamarin to develop cross platform applications with 60-70% code reuse. We also develop native applications for IOS, Android and Windows/Windows Phone. Ask how you can deploy your application to multiple platforms with minimal rewrites!
- Responsive Web Design and Single-Page Applications. Frameworks such as Angular allow you to write very powerful HTML web apps that will run on the desktop and seamlessly adapt to a mobile form factor. With more work now happening on tablets and phones, you might want to rethink your desktop or plugin-based technology (read this!) and replace it with a responsive, single-page web app! You can keep the back-end or wrap it in a more mobile-friendly layer. Either way, we can help you make the transition.
- ASP.NET 5. Have you always loved the rapid development enabled by .NET, C#, and Visual Studio, but needed to create Linux-hosted applications? With the release of ASP.NET 5, and .NET Core, it’s now possible to write C# applications and host them on Mac and Linux natively. With this exciting update, we are finally able to realize the promise of a truly portable and cross-platform framework and runtime since that was first promised with the initial release of .NET over a decade ago.
- Cloud. It is becoming increasingly easy to develop and deploy apps as multi-tenant, scalable solutions, using Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. New technologies such as Docker, and Microsoft’s new embrace of Linux (yes, you can create .NET apps and deploy to Linux!), are changing the landscape and the ease with which you can mix and match infrastructure to meet your needs. Stuck in costly on premise solution? Let Trailhead help you move to the cloud!
2016 is already shaping up to an exciting year for Trailhead. Since launching a month ago, we have signed four new clients and tripled the size of our team. We have dedicated web and mobile quality assurance, tools, and processes. We have top notch front-end and full-stack developers. We have native and cross-platform mobile developers. Our great design department also allows us to quickly create interactive, clickable visualizations of mobile and web apps, and to help you understand your needs.
We’d love to apply our team to your most challenging projects, and look forward to working with you to make great things happen in 2016! Don’t hesitate to call us and get going.
John and J.