I’ve been teaching myself WPF / Silverlight as part of my next big project at StannardLabs: a line of trivia games for WinMo7 / Android / iOS phones. It’s mostly an exercise for learning how each of those platforms work, how they differ, and some of the application marketing...
My Talk at BarCamp San Diego: How to Create Applications People Love
I showed up at BarCamp7 this morning and saw that absolutely no presentations were up on the board whatsoever, so me being me I spent most of the day putting together a presentation at the last minute.
I spoke for an hour about How to Design Applications People...
Read More
BlogEngine.NET Extension: Footnotes
I finished this extension up last night but I was reluctant to deploy it to my own blog given that there was a major flamewar in progress on my recent post about Why .NET Adoption Lags Among Startups. Having actually tested this extension on that very post, I feel confident sharing my...
Read More
.NET Culture Shock: Why .NET Adoption Lags Among Startups
One of the other things I took away from Code Camp was a bit of .NET culture shock. As you can tell by glimpsing around on this blog, I am somewhat enamored with the idea of starting my own business. I’m a natural entrepreneur and it is my wont...
Read More
Lessons from Code Camp 2010
This time last weekend I was in the middle of the second session of Southern California Code Camp. Ever since I came to the realization that no man is an island and I’m going to ultimately need to work with other programmers in order to be successful in this...
Read More
Announcing the Release of Quick and Dirty Feed Parser
Alternate headline: "never see XML again."
Ok, that may be a bit of a stretch. Regardless, I'm quite pleased to announce the launch of Quick and Dirty Feed Parser, a library for people who want a seamless way to use Atom and RSS feeds in their .NET 2.0+ applications without...
Read More
Learning When It's Time to Walk Away from a Project
I wanted to take the time to follow up on some of the additional lessons I learned from my May startup project, some of which I already shared in The Myth of the Single-Person Startup.
This week I decided to indefinitely postpone my startup project, the same project I spent a...
Read More
Programmer's Dilemma: Baby-Proofing vs. Giving Guns to Monkeys
One of my best friends from college once described a previous job in the financial industry as something akin to "giving guns to monkeys."
He felt that the product he sold, although it was something that could reap tremendous benefits for his customers if used properly, was something that more often than not harmed...
Read More
How to Query a User's del.icio.us Feed with RestSharp
I've been meaning to give RestSharp a go since I first started using Hammock in my startup project's codebase, just because I had heard some good things about RestSharp's auto-parsing capabilities.
This weekend I cobbled together a small example using del.icio.us' RSS feeds (not to be confused with its draconian REST API) for users and RestSharp performed magnificently, although its POCO -> XML Element mapping process requires a lot of experimentation before you get it just right.
Read More
The Myth of the Single-Person Startup
During the month of May, 2010 I took an unpaid leave of absence from work for the entire month and set off to launch my own web-based startup company.