03 Aug 2011

How to Recruit a Technical Co-Founder for Your Startup

The LA startup scene is fascinating, having lived and worked in it for a year now - it's a scene teeming with brillaint people with big ideas, and it's starting to attract some major capital from the Bay Area. It has one major issue: a big shortage of technical...

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30 Jun 2011

MongoDB vs. SQL Server 2008: A .NET Developer’s Perspective

One of the first projects I put together this year was Captain Obvious, a nifty little application that runs off of AppHarbor and ASP.NET MVC3. What made Captain Obvious special for me was that it was my first time using something other than a relational database[footnote:...

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24 Jun 2011

How to Securely Verify and Validate Image Uploads in ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC

One of the more interesting things I had to do as part of building XAPFest was handle bulk image uploads for screenshots for applications and user / app icons. Most of the challenges here are UI-centric ones (which I resolved using jQuery File-Upload) but the one security challenge...

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21 Jun 2011

How I Built CaptainObvio.us

Captain Obvio.us - a place to share ideasI made a tiny splash on Hacker News a month ago when I asked for feedback on my newest side project, Read More

24 May 2011

Announcing XAPFest – A Massive Windows Phone 7 Hackathon in Santa Monica, CA on June 4th 2011

xapfest_black_logoI am pleased to announce something very exciting that Microsoft is doing in my neighborhood of Santa Monica, California: we’re putting together...

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26 Apr 2011

Geolocation Services and Bing Maps in Windows Phone 7

Tonight I gave a brief talk to WinMo LA about using Geolocation Services and Bing Maps on Windows Phone 7. I mostly covered the APIs and controls that developers can use in the current Windows Phone SDK, the steps developers need to take in order to protect a user's...

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08 Apr 2011

Having Network Connectivity Issues with the Windows Phone 7 Emulator?

I spent about three hours banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why my browser could connect to the Internet but the Windows Phone 7 emulator couldn’t, and if you find yourself in the same boat as me I thought I would spare you the trouble.

Are...

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27 Mar 2011

How to Create a Twitter @Anywhere ActionFilter in ASP.NET MVC

My newest project, Captain Obvious, got a fair amount of attention this week when it landed on the front page of Hacker News – one of the key features that makes the first version of Captain Obvious tick is Twitter @Anywhere integration.

Twitter @Anywhere is brand new and...

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19 Mar 2011

8 Lessons Learned from Startup Weekend

I imagewanted to post this the morning after Startup Weekend Los Angeles concluded in late February, but due to the fact...

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16 Mar 2011

ASP.NET MVC3 / Razor: How to Get Just the Uri for an Action Method

I normally wouldn’t post something this small to my blog, but this issue bothered me so much when I was working on some Twitter @Anywhere + jQuery integration in ASP.NET MVC3 that I couldn’t help but share it.

Issue: You’re using ASP.NET MVC3 and want to be able to place...

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