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.
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 )
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.