luffy

Once someone gets their site set up, what is the plan for actually getting eyeballs on it? If you can figure that out then you are on to something.

I see that you are using social networking with Twitter/FB, etc, but that is a chicken/egg problem. To use social networking to advertise your site, you need to actually have an audience to begin with. In which case, you probably wouldn't be interested in this type of product.

What would be really valuable, I think, is a way to get people you have no social networking connection with on the site, ie, via AdWords. Using AdWords is some kind of alchemy - find a way to simplify and integrate with that, and that is a fine product.

Does HTML5 have an element that is similar to an scrollable editable grid, with column headers that don't scroll? I know a lot of people hate that UI idiom, but it's very common and as long as people like to use Excel, this idiom isn't going anywhere.

Doing grids are a breeze w/ .NET. I don't think "use jqgrid" is an acceptable solution here... I'm asking about native HTML, the stuff that everyone is bragging about.

Not much really, especially if you limit the XAML to basic layouts. If you do everything in C#, it's not too much different from something like, say, WinForms. Which is why people like it.

But what would that CSS end up looking like? There will be a lot of proprietary extensions (at least their should be) and a lot of quixotic classes and element id's that you'd probably have to work around. I envision something like Office's awful "open" format - the same people are driving this bus.

I've done the MS HTML/JS client route for a long time - I've set up a lot of gadgets, and InfoPath(!) has an HTML/XML/JS programming model. Truth be told this model is actually really painful to work with if all you have is HTML/JS. Keep in mind that the "web" isn't just HTML. It's Perl, Rails, Json, JS, Google, Wikipedia, RSS, etc.

Now, if these tiles are something akin to mini-web browsers, where you can use the full power of the web & web technologies (is this what they are actually saying?), that is a different story.

No, Windows phones predate iOS and Android. Android really isn't that much different than Windows Mobile 6.5, aside from touch screen interaction and a superior web browser. (WM 6.5 has better email/messaging, actually).

The developer issue is the thorniest issue with choosing the .NET ecosystem. It's easier to find a .NET developer than a Ruby/Python/what have you, but it's harder to find a good .NET developer.

What I like to do is advertise for Python and .NET skills. That weeds a lot of bad ones out.

It's best to look at it like most of Microsoft version 1 products - it's going to be painful to use. But it has tons of potential - more so than any product in recent memory. And it's actually pretty reasonably priced, even if you aren't in BizSpark.

You really don't need to worry about roles that much. A web role is a website, and a worker role is a non-website service (though you can connect to a worker role via http). In theory, load balancing his handled for you so you can achieve redundancy with at least two instances.

Now, there are some real painful points with azure as it stands. My two two specific points are these: deploying takes a long time - some times over 10 minutes. So forget about agile build processes or continuous deployment or even making a quick, simple text change.

The other major problem I have is you have to run the debugger to get access to the development storage ( blob & tables). Both of these are really useful. But running the debugger all the time is torture.

Developer tools are hugely important to all of the MS ecosystem, and I bet these concerns get addressed - this is the big advantage for moving ScottGu over to the azure team. Azure is a big part of the future of that company.

I just tried this out. Did a search for "golf clubs" in my location. Craiggers gives me 6 results. Craigslist gave me 273.

Also, I still think the craigslist ui is actually better (I've never had a problem with it). To me, categories work better as a list to drill into, not as something to discover via search box.

Craigslist is a highly useful service, and as such, spam is inevitable (has this been codified anywhere?). I hope that they get the spam under control. But in a lot of categories, craigslist is still great.

I often wonder if there is there any volume at all in businesses that sell to startups. The startup market as a whole has to be pretty small. The startup market that will actually buy something has to be smaller still (I'd reckon a lot of startups would rather than make it themselves or use free software).

The site looks great. I assume you are working on this - but do you have screen shots of your admin interface or a list of available images? (You are probably well aware of this, but creating EC2-Windows images on a micro instance is ridiculously painful).

Not sure what you could do with AppHarbor that you couldn't do with this. You could set up a build server image that pulls from a Git or Hg repo, and repoints IIS...

Well there are no real details or specifics of any kind in this article. So that right off prevents me from making any type of analysis of the merits of what this guy is actually doing.

Then there is the speculation as to the mental state of the opponent and the attorney. The part about attorney's hanging up on the guy because he's "crazy" and it's "not worth pursuing legal action" is just complete crap. The facts, the potential damages, and most importantly, this guys ability to pay determine whether or not it's worth the time. If an attorney has hung up on him, its because he's a crank.

Look, it's a simple cost-benefit analysis. This guy probably has situational facts that support his case, such that it's not worth it for the opponent to pursue litigation. Or it's possible he couldn't pay the damages anyway and the opponent couldn't take possession of the property. There's lots of possibilities... depending on the facts. You would never know that from the frothy tone of this piece.

Finally, there's the speculative gem that it will never get in front of the judge. Trust me, all those pesky "case numbers" and "laws" that the attorney has been compiling are really going to suck for this guy once a judge sees them.

I could go on and on, and take this one paragraph at a time. But it's not worth it. Long story short, take legal advice from lawyers. Likewise, accounting advise from accountants, design advise from designers, and so on.

This article is so chock full of speculation and all around horrible advice it's hard to pick just one thing to criticize. If this guy's crap has worked in the past, its probably worked because he actually facts of the case in his favor, not because of these shenanigans.

I feel sorry for those who take legal advice from people who are not lawyers.

Not sure about that. The Web Platform installer has introduced a lot of pain to what used to be fairly simple proceedings. It probably my least favorite application to use.

I set up an Windows 2008 R2 instance on EC2 the other day that did not have IIS7 installed. Even launching the WPI on that instance was painful. IE8 is the default browser, and the default settings in IE wouldn't let you launch the application, and for the life of me I couldn't figure out where the security restrictions were.

So then I went and download Chrome which didn't have the security restrictions, and then I was able to download the WPI and run it.

From within the WPI, I selected IIS7 and .NET 4.0. Ninety minutes later + a reboot or two later IIS7 was installed.

For kicks, I deployed the same app on Ubuntu 10.04 and Windows 2008 R2 micro instances on AWS. I chose the plain Windows instance - with no software ( ie, IIS & .NET) pre installed. No database is used in this app.

I had the mono/Ubuntu version up and running in about 30 minutes. The longest part of the install was that I chose to use Mono 2.6.7 which isn't officially supported, so you need to do some work to install it. The app was deployed using FastCGI and Nginx.

It took about 90 minutes to get the Windows 2008 version running. Most of which time was spent waiting for the instance to start and waiting for the bloody Platform Installer (worst app ever!) to do whatever it does.

The moral of this story: the Windows micro instances are unusable. But to scale vertically, use Windows. To scale horizontally, or if you are cheap||frugal, give mono/Ubuntu a shot. Can't wait to see what moving to LLVM is going to do to mono's performance.

RoR is definitely more of a full web stack than ASP.NET MVC, which to me feels like a micro framework layered over top of whatever in the the world ASP.NET is. Personally, I like ASP.NET MVC's micro fx feel though.

You hinted at Ruby not needing DI - for me, that's the biggest advantage when choosing a dynamic language (in my case Python) over C#. IMO, there's something about using DI that just feels wrong (don't mean to start a flame war over that).

Anyway, that's why I use F# in .NET land: the type inference provides the best of all worlds. No need for DI, light syntax, and great runtime speed. F# sucks w/ ASP.NET MVC though.

They can't afford to do otherwise. Accepting community contributions will increase the MS surface area for copyright/patent infringements. The F# team is mostly a research outfit - they aren't going to vet patches.

The newer projects on the MS backed OuterCurve.org (formerly Codeplex.org) all use either an Apache or BSD license.

I suspect two reasons for MS accepting the Apache, BSD, and MIT licenses:

1) the terms of those license are not very onerous and let the end user pretty much do as they will. This is very important to a company like MS that has a lot of code and needs to be paranoid about subjecting themselves to patent suits.

2) Joe Briefcase has no idea what-so-ever what the "MS-PL" license is - no name recognition at all. The Apache/BSD/MIT licenses have been around so long and are so commonplace that they are generally acceptable to most everyone, and most developers shouldn't have a problem using one of those licenses.

Does Google actually have a claim under the Tucker Act? Some quick searching limits claimants to those who have an actual contract.

http://topics.law.cornell.edu/wex/tucker_act

EDIT: Note that in general sovereign immunity would preclude a contract suit against the government. The Tucker Act permits several types of claims against the US Gov't.

Looks like C# is borrowing even more from the F# playbook. Though from the looks of it, I still like the F# implementation better.

Next in C#: workflows ( aka F# monads ).

I really wish they had dabbled more in dynamic programmic. I'd have loved to see something akin to Python's multiple inheritance. ( EDIT: is this technically dynamic? :p )

If you don't have Silverlight installed or have no desire to install it, I hate to say it, but: this keynote probably isn't in your wheelhouse.

That not withstanding, the quality of Silverlight streaming video is actually quite good.

This is a great list and a must read for anyone doing WP7 development.

In my opinion, you will always be better off using the bare minimum amount of XAML. XAML is completely unnecessary and is a huge barrier to adoption of WPF/SL. You've been better off avoiding XAML this Since SL2; heck you've been better off since WPF beta. That means no databinding, avoid converters, and do the layouts in C#. I.e., not the way the documentation tells you to do it. In fact, much of the list boils down to the above advice.

Regarding scraping:

I have a hard time figuring out what the difference is between having a human read a web page with sports scores on it, and then entering those scores in to your application vs. having a scraper grab those scores automatically. In most cases, these source web pages will be publicly available without requiring any agreement to a terms of service contract.

Scraping a site and using the actual HTML in your application would be a copyright violation, definitely. Sometimes a particular format can even be patented. So I'd definitely stay away from actually scraping out an entire table and inserting that into your app.

But as far as the scores/facts - those are not subject to copyright. So what is the particular legal issue if you are scraping and only getting non-copyrightable facts from a publicly available web page? I'm genuinely curious to know.

I have a site using Flask on GAE, and it works pretty well. Here's a reference to get started.

http://www.franciscosouza.net/2010/08/flying-with-flask-in-g...

framework: Flask

database: Postgresql

server: UWSGI + Cherokee

Flask is a very nice framework, and the documentation is awesome. I've tried a lot of Python frameworks out before deciding on Flask. It's a paralyzing decision - there is just so much out there. The process of choosing a web framework is filled with information overload - from reading about the framework, dabbling with the code, and finally learning the actual framework. For the reason, I recommend going with a microframework. You learn what you need as you go. So this lead me to Flask.

Two things set Flask apart (for me) - the documentation and the extensions. Just check out the site http://flask.pocoo.org for more information. You also want to be assured that development on the framework is not just going to be dropped some day. It really feels like this framework is going places. (My initial inclination was toward CherryPy, but the documentation is bad. After all these years.)

My dev work is mostly done on Windows, and for an IDE I've taken to using JetBrain's PyCharm. (I'm primarily a .NET developer, and I find it more convenient to use Windows to avoid context switching. The fact that I deal with the massive and all-encompassing .NET is also a major reason I went with a Python microframework). On Linux, I can get by with Emacs.

Using Ubuntu in production environment.

I'm currently working on several applications for WP7. The development experience for WP7 is a million-billion times better than it was for past Windows Mobile operating systems.

- The emulator is snappy and you don't need to mess around with ActiveSync.

- I'm not a huge fan of the XAML (the Silverlight/WPF markup language), but that is not an issue. I put a XAML place holder element in place and add controls in C#

- The built in controls look great and are surprisingly functional. I specifically thinking of the Panorama control - which allows application content to basically flow off screen. Some may find that style of having content get cut off by the edge of the display off-putting, but its effective if that truncated content is limited to titles.

- putting XNA in there is great, mostly for familiarity's sake. You still have to design for the phone differences (form factor, input, and library). Porting games over from XBox live probably won't require an enormous app-rewrite. Can't wait to see how this particular piece plays out.

The one drawback I can see has to do with Windows Phone store. I'm not really sure what the story is there. Is app distribution really limited to the store? How about enterprise apps?

I don't have experience developing iPhone or Android apps, so I won't comment on whether or not WP7 is better in that department.

Any discussion of video calling needs to be attended by DFW's classic commentary on it, from Infinite Jest:

http://kottke.org/10/06/david-foster-wallace-on-iphone-4s-fa...

tl;dr: phones are great because I can be naked and I don't have to look like I'm paying attention to you.

The Intellifactory guys really know their F#. But this seems too much like WebForms and MSAjax for my tastes. After a while autogenerated javascript and HTML becomes very problematic, to say the least. If I want javascript, I'll just write it myself.

Now what I'd really like to see is an F# stand alone webserver - that would operate outside of ASP.NET/IIS. I envision a functional Request/Response pipeline, where you can augment the pipeline using function compositoin. Perhaps this could even handled by a computation expression or workflow. ( For those unfamiliar with F#, this is one of the killer features. See how simple it is to handle Async or parallel processing in F#).

Chris Smith has an interesting example of a Session State workflow in his F# book - I would like to see someone attempt that with a full fledged server.

First off, I love F#. I use it extensively for offline data processing, managing our build process (via FAKE), and general purpose Windows scripting. I've also dabbled in DSL creation, and if you follow any of examples it really is pretty easy to do. As Don Syme (F#'s creator) has said, F# is a lot like a statically typed Python (with lots more syntax).

But I wouldn't use it with ASP.NET. Learning F# is pretty heady and it would give your average .NET developer fits to learn it. You'd lose an advantage of using the .NET platform then - it's pretty easy to get average developers to be productive in .NET/C#. Forcing developers to learn F# would grind productivity to a halt.

Also, because of the whitespace requirements, F# is lousy in the webforms view engine. (Perhaps a Mako-like templating engine for F# would make sense).

Stick with C# for your web work and your libraries that your web site are using. Life will be easier.

If you really want to delve into F# on the web, these guys did a framework designed to be used with F#: http://www.bistroframework.org/

They also did a .NET port of the django templating engine: http://ndjango.org/

Leveraged Buyout (LBO) city, baby!

Prediction: a firm like KKR or Carlyle buys GoDaddy and borrows a bunch of money (> $10B ?) on the cheap, and then uses GoDaddy's revenue to service the debt.

This is asking for some fairly specific items - curious that no specific suits are named though, instead of the vague reference to the "occasional defense". Seems like they are having trouble in China. I wonder what the real story is.

I haven't researched international trademark law, but here's the registration for the Fedora mark - filed in 2003, registered in August 2007: http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4005:60...