I grew up on classic asp and HTML 4.0 in the good old days of Netscape Navigator 4.0 and IE 4.0. I remember how bad cross browser "everything" was. I recall irritating layout bugs with vanilla HTML tables that occurred if you didn't put your line breaks where browsers wanted them. I remember playing with AJAX before it was called AJAX (with the ie Active X object) and when Netscape's Layers were depreciated for DHTML.

Early on in my career, I moved on to .Net and got deep into Web Forms development. There was a time I could confidently say I've done most everything with Web Forms and had a firm understanding of the entire platform. I remember picking up a book on rails when it first became hot, way before ASP.Net MVC came out and thinking it was interesting, but not something that was worth breaking out of my web form shell for. 

Since then I worked deeply with Windows Forms and Desktop Development, BizTalk development and even SharePoint development among other technologies. I hadn't really kept up with all the advancement in the web development craft these past few years. When I started working on HOSY (my failed attempt at a social qa site), I was really impressed with the speed I could build applications with MVC and only scratched the surface with what could be done with jQuery.

A few weeks into development of Wedding Crowd, I really need to reflect on how much things have changed and how much better and cleaner development feels. I'm using knockout js with jquery and jquery ui to create an extremely rich UI and it doesn't feel overly complex. Templating is dirt simple and the tight binding between DOM and JavaScript model using observables really makes everything feel like the way it was meant to be done.

I've found excellent jQuery plug ins for skinning file upload controls, creating scrollable divs and creating light boxes, all open source with great documentation.

I'm also starting to dig into SignalR, a client server messaging framework which also seems to abstract most of the complexities needed for creating extremely rich messaging in web applications.

I really feel like I building on top of the shoulders of giants.

I remember several years ago remarking that I hated JavaScript. I feel like I've come full circle and my opinion has completely reversed. I not only don't hate it, I really enjoy it.

I originally approached the development of this idea from the social side. I didn't think facebook was a good platform for sharing details about your wedding as you were planning it.  I talked to a number of past and future brides who confirmed my assumption. A lot of brides get help from their bridesmaid, but most of that is coordinated via text message and email. So I set out to build a site where brides can communicate with their bridal parties and anyone else they wanted to include in the discussion.

As I began to research the market, I kept reading about pinterest and how many women were using it to organize ideas for their weddings. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought that would be a perfect way to let vendors know exactly what you want for your wedding. 

So my basic concept is to build a site where the bride and anyone else she wants to invite can privately discuss, rate and share ideas and pictures. The bride could then organize different boards that the images were classified into. For example she could have one board with all the pictures of flowers, one for dresses, another for hair and makeup, for each of the aspects of her wedding she would need to a vendor for.

Once she organized the board how she wants, she could then publish the board which makes the details of what she wants viewable by local wedding vendors that also subscribe to the site.  These vendors could respond with a proposal that includes comments that describe how they could help her bring her ideas to fruition and even include pictures from their gallery that demonstrate this.

She could even share a public url for the board with local vendors of her choosing who would be able to respond as well without having to subscribe to the site.

That's the 1000 foot view of the concept we're building. I'm working with my sister on this one, who is getting married in the fall. She's already blogging and tweeting. And I put up a landing page at WeddingCrowd.com where you can see our shiny new logo and sign up to be notified when we launch.

I'll post more on the technical details later, but implementation wise, we'll be building it using MVC 3, Azure, SQL Azure, Table and Queue Storage, Facebook API among other technologies.

If you're recently married, planning your wedding or a wedding vendor, I'd love to hear from you. 

Will update everyone once its back up.

It was a nice exercise of building something using Azure using MVC, jquery and some of the cloud storage options, so it wasn't completely worthless.

Anyway, I am working on something and hope to post details in the weeks to come.

In the mean while, check out Snip-It Pro, a product I built to make managing and using snippets easy as pie. 

I started with the best of intentions. Add caching to the site using Windows Azure Appfabric Caching. As I started to gut the pages to add in caching, I lamented that I didn't spend much of the initial flurry of activity on writing unit tests, which would have made me feel more comfortable about the changes I was making.

So I spent a few days writing unit tests and refactoring my controllers to be more testable, removing dependencies on the http context and refactoring for a bit more structured and elegant code.

Once that was in place I implemented the caching, which was pretty straightforward except for one thing. Since the configuration section used was a collection of datacacheclients, I thought it would be neat to get windows server appfabric caching and swap between them depending on whether I was doing a dev build or a release build. The cache client had the same name and were in an assembly of the same name, so I thought it would be straight forward. But it turns out the Azure assembly is version 101.0.0.0 and the Windows server is version 1.0.0.0 and are completely incompatible.

When I gave up, I had to deal a slew of errors, because apparently azure only likes it if you name your datacacheclient "default".

Anyway, once I got the configuration squared away, implementing caching was pretty straightforward.

At the same time, I starting looking for help with the design of the site. I pursued a couple of leads, but couldn't find anyone I was comfortable with, so I decided to try to do it myself. (famous last words...)

So I think I have a nicer layout, which I plan on rolling out, but as I thought about usability and my original vision of "once found" as a research tool, I started working on major changes to the site.

First decision I made was for no more polls. I'm ripping them out. Most topics they didn't make sense, and the few people I got to try the site were entering answers that should have been comments. Comments will be prominent, with links in the sidebar. 

I want to turn this into a research tool. When this is ready, I'll launch OnceFound, which will allow for research any topic, with each question site a more specific version of the site. With this in mind, here is how I picture people using it.

• For each topic, users will be able to drag and drop the links and comments in any order they please. The relative rankings each users give will calculate a "score" which could then be used to guess where links appear in the shared rankings. As new links are ranked, they could appear where we think a user would rank that link if they vote like other users. They can also remove a link or comment from their personal view and switch to the shared view.
• For each topic, users can maintain a personal log that is not shared with other users.
• Pages will show usernames of other users "researching" the topic ordered by their activity level on the topic. Will implement a user messaging feature.

Basically I see each topic page as a research hub, which I want to enable multiple people to combine resources.

Here's a very preliminary screenshot to give you an idea of the basic future layout (content areas are not styled yet).

This will be a lot of work and not all of that may make it into the first iteration. Will provide updates as more work gets done.

Here's my tentative plan for the sites: (in no particular order)

• Find a graphic designer to help come up with a better UI/User Experience. I think people can tell the site was designed by a developer. The current layout came from a free MVC template from the MVC 1.0 Gallery of templates on codeplex. If you know anyone who can help with this, let me know, otherwise I might have to outsource to oDesk, 99Designs or Crowdspring.
• Implement a more robust caching strategy leveraging Azure's Caching.
• Add a related Twitter Tweets widget to the topics pages. (Started looking at their API's and they looked interesting), and may give some default content to new pages.
• Use Windows Azure Access Control Services (ACS) to enable login through Google and Facebook. Part of broader strategy to integrate the sites with Facebook via their API's. Plus already viewed the Pluralsight training on this, and looks pretty easy to implement.
• Change the Voting strategy of the site. In the interest of reducing friction for using the site, currently anonymous users can vote and submit. JavaScript cookies are all that prevent users from voting over and over again. Eventually I'd like to build a more robust solution, storing user votes in Azure table storage. Right now all the data is in SQL Azure, but depending on how this goes, maybe its worth moving other items into Table or Blob Storage.
• Create a "curator" role either for topics or tags, to allow notifications when content changes. Hoping to give users the ability to monitor the site. Also allow these users to modify content (answers, comments, etc)
• Add a set of FAQ pages
• Add RSS Feed Support for tags or topics.
• Figure out how to implement a robust search function and implement it.
• Leverage above mentioned search functionality to automatically identify and handle duplicate topics like google does with "Did you mean?". Maybe depending on the confidence level, display a page with similar sounding question instead of creating a new topic, like we do today, which I think is a cool feature for now.
• Figure out how to monetize the site. I was rejected from Adsense due to a lack of content. 
• Come up with a better content strategy. I might end up finding a virtual assistant or someone to help seed the site with content. 
• Build out a better deployment strategy. I've grown tired of waiting for all the servers to be updated whenever I deploy a new package. I've heard of quick web deployments using the Windows Azure accelerator for web roles, and it's something I'm thinking of looking once the pain has become too much. And as far as automated builds go, I'm looking of forward to seeing how it will fit together with git. Right now, I'm pushing all my code to bit bucket before every deployment as a practice and it's worked out nice so far.
• Create a catch all site, "OnceFound" to describe the purpose of all of this. Eventually the plan could be to acquire more domains and leverage the same technology, or perhaps allow others to use this technology to park question oriented domains (become a host).

Sounds like enough to keep me busy for a while.

If anyone else has any other ideas, let me know.

To accomplish this, I didn't haven't to deploy anything additionally, and the domains are actually redirected to a single Windows Azure application instance.

The architecture of the codebase, allows the host names to drive the content of the site (title, branding, etc, thought not much is customized for now). 

I also cleaned up some of the code and layout, added images for upvotes/downvotes, added google adsense (which appears blank until google approves) and made a few other minor tweaks.

Feel free to check them out.

http://www.wherecould.com/

http://www.howcanyouget.com/

I then signed up for a Pluralsight membership and had been viewing a ton of their training materials on my new Kindle Fire using their app, and spent a good amount of time looking at their stuff for ASP.Net MVC, jquery and Windows Azure, all of which I have not had much experience with.

Wanting to work with all these technologies, and build something new, I spent the last 8 days developing a new site: "How Often Should You," a site which allows users to discuss, share information and vote related to questions users typically ask that start "How Often Should You."

Any question searched for automatically gets a topic specific page. In the interest of getting things live as quickly as possible, I've only implemented bare bones functionality for topics including:

• Submit and Vote on answers to the question, Poll Style.
• Submit and Vote on Links related to the question
• Submit, Reply and Vote on comments related to the question.
• Tag each topic with keywords that will relate the question to other questions.

There's also a basic account/login model, which isn't really used for much now, as for now anonymous users can vote and submit content. 

There is plenty of room for feature improvements, and I already have a large backlog including rolling out sister sites for a few domain names I already registered (WhereCould, HowCanYouGet). I will actually be able to leverage the same servers and db as this is architected into the approach. It's part of my plan to create these sites under an umbrella site called "OnceFound," which right now is just another domain name I own.

Ultimately, I'm planning on running ads on the sites, and is this my first venture of this kind, I'm curious to see how successful this could be. 

Under the hood, I'm using a bunch of technologies I haven't gotten a chance to work with before including: ASP.Net MVC3, Entity Framework 4.1 (code first), JQuery (JQuery UI and a few other plugins), SQL Azure (Plan on using table storage down the road) and of course Windows Azure. I'm also using GIT for the first time, and saving my code in a private repository on bitbucket, which has been a nice experience so far.

Luckily my MSDN subscription gives me a number of Azure computing hours for free, which I'm hoping will eliminate most of my costs for running this experiment. Right now the site is powered by 3 extra small instances.

I plan on posting more details about the technical implementation and planned features so stay tuned.

There is not a lot of content now, but I'll be adding generic pages based on search estimates from google's keyword estimator tool.

Check out the site here: http://www.howoftenshouldyou.com/

I created a "store" server control that will handle registering a data model and creating a store and filling it with data from the data source. Since it inherits from CompositeDataBounControl, you can set the DataSource property or specify the DataSourceID of any ASP.Net data source control. Finally you need only set your widgets store property to the same ID that the store uses to have that component work off of that store.

Here is the ASPX markup for a simple object data source, store and List control (similar to the List sencha touch sample):

<asp:ObjectDataSource runat="server" SelectMethod="GetContacts" TypeName="Contact"></asp:ObjectDataSource>

<SD:Store runat="server" DataSourceID="ObjectDataSource1" >

  <sorters>

    <SU:Sorter property="FirstName" />

  </sorters>

  <getGroupString>

  function(record) {

    return record.get('lastName')[0];

  }

  </getGroupString>

</SD:Store>

<ST:List fullscreen="true" runat="server" grouped="true" indexBar="false" store="contactsStore">

  <div class="contact2"><strong>{firstName}</strong> {lastName}</div>

</ST:List>

Couple things to note, the GetContacts method is a simple method that dummy's up some names in a list. I've also tested with a SqlDataSource with parameters which also works fine. Right now the component will render every property of the data item, though I can imagine adding properties to allow folks to control which columns will be rendered.

I also have been playing with PersistanceMode and the ParseChildren property to improve the readability. The store supports this for Sorters and Filters and the GetGroupString property, which allows you to easily specify a custom javaScript function to get the groups. The list component itself maps the inner content to the itemTpl property which allows you to easily setup a tpl template using the standard Sencha Touch {fieldName} syntax.

This markup will output the following javaScript into the head of the page:

Ext.regModel('contactsStore_Model', {

            fields: ['firstName','lastName']

        });

        var contactsStore = new Ext.data.Store({

                model: 'contactsStore_Model'

                , data: [ {firstName:'Captain',lastName:'America'},

{firstName:'Tony',lastName:'Stark'},

{firstName:'Super',lastName:'Man'},

{firstName:'Wonder',lastName:'Woman'},

{firstName:'Peter',lastName:'Parker'} ]

                ,storeId : 'contactsStore',

getGroupString : function(record) {

        return record.get('lastName')[0];

    }

            });

            var listMain = new Ext.List({

                fullscreen : true,

grouped : true,

indexBar : false,

itemTpl : '<div class="contact2"><strong>{firstName}</strong> {lastName}</div>',

store : 'contactsStore'

            });

        new Ext.Application({

                launch: function() {

                    listMain.show();

                }

            });

I know the javaScript code rendered isn't the prettiest thing in the world, but it is functional. Even if you hate it, this approach could be used for simple scenarios or for rapid prototyping, after which you can take the rendered javaScript and manually clean and move.

I also have this working for the select form control. I eventually want to give some more thought on how to modify the control to better support other store scenarios binding to data sets external to the javaScript code (localStorage, REST, etc).

So far I have working samples that match the Carousel,  Forms, Overlays, Tabs and Tabs2 samples.

Want to work on getting some of the Media controls and map control working and will update. I'm getting close to the point where I need to figure out what to call this library (nTouch?) and where to put it (codeplex, github, etc)