PayItSquare

PayItSquare Widget

Brian Anderson — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 08:54:00 GMT

If you are interested in using a widget to help you collect money we have the answer. Here is an example of the Pay It Square widget we just published on WidgetBox.com

Pay It Square Visual Upgrade

Brian Anderson — Sun, 11 Nov 2007 08:57:00 GMT

We just finished re-skinning Pay It Square (www.payitsquare.com). It is a major visual upgrade with a new color scheme and logo. Let us know what you think.

Building a .Net Startup - PayItSquare.com

Brian Anderson — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 12:53:00 GMT

I have recently been doing a presentation about building a start up web business using .net technology.

Here is the PowerPoint presentation and code samples from my .net user group presentation on 9/18/2007. You can find the NuSoft Framework on CodePlex.

Here is the synopsis of my presentation:

Building A .Net Startup

Building a .Net application from scratch can be daunting. There are so many ways to build an application and many of the early decisions affect your future development efforts significantly. Brian Anderson will open up the hood and walkthrough the details of how he architected and developed one of his startup businesses, PayItSquare.com (www.payitsquare.com). He will walk through building UI, business and data layers (with LINQ!), leveraging ASP.NET SQL membership, ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, ASP.NET AJAX Control toolkit, SQL Server 2005 and credit card processing using PayPal’s Website Payment Pro. The goal of this talk is to show how you bring all the details together to get your ideas off the ground successfully using .Net.

Speaker Bio:
Brian Anderson is a Solutions Director at NuSoft Solutions and owner of Tourney Logic (www.tourneylogic.com). He specializes in consulting, architecting and leading development of scalable .Net applications for well-known business such as National City Mortgage (www.nationalcityhomeloans.com) and entrepreneurs with great startup businesses such as Spout (www.spout.com), Indistr.com (www.indistr.com) and Crayon Interface (www.crayoninterface.com) to name a few. Brian is also among of the first group to be accepted into PayPal’s new PayPal Certified Developer program.

Presenting on Tuesday Night

Brian Anderson — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 21:18:00 GMT

I will be presenting my “Building a .Net Startup” presentation on Tuesday Sept. 18 at 6pm for the West Michigan .net user group. Here is my synopsis:

Building A .Net Startup

Building a .Net application from scratch can be daunting. There are so many ways to build an application and many of the early decisions affect your future development efforts significantly. Brian Anderson will open up the hood and walkthrough the details of how he architected and developed one of his startup businesses, PayItSquare.com (www.payitsquare.com). He will walkthrough building UI, business and data layers (with LINQ!), leveraging ASP.NET SQL membership, ASP.NET AJAX 1.0, ASP.NET AJAX Control toolkit, SQL Server 2005 and credit card processing using PayPal’s Website Payment Pro. The goal of this talk is to show how you bring all the details together to get your ideas off the ground successfully using .Net.

I will post the PPT and code samples after the presentation.

PayPal Certified Developer

Brian Anderson — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 08:49:00 GMT

It is official. I am now a PayPal certified developer. All the work I did with PayItSquare.com and Indistr.com made it easy to pass the exam.

MIX 07

Brian Anderson — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 14:11:00 GMT

Joel and I are both attending the MIX 07 conference in Las Vegas starting April 30. I am very interested to see the lastest WPF, ASP.NET AJAX and LINQ demos. Scott Guthrie is presenting on all of this and always gives a great demo talks.

We used ASP.NET AJAX extensively in both PayItSquare and MyPlayoffs. It really simplifies Javascript development and makes the web applications much easier to use.

I am especially looking forword to LINQ and DLINQ. We had to build Code Smith templates to generate business objects and data access layers in the past. I am hoping this new technology will simplify this type of work and still be extensible enough to accomplish all of the logic we have to support in our business layers.

WPF is the next logical step for the Tourney Bracket Control at some point. We want to support both Web and Windows with a unified format!

Tourney Logic is Busier Than Ever!

Brian Anderson — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 23:31:00 GMT

It has been way to long since I have blogged anything for Tourney Logic. The reason is that I have been spending every free moment developing our next services. Here is a quick update of what we have been and are working on.

Tourneytopia.com (www.tourneytopia.com)

We have invested major amounts of time into upgrading the Tourneytopia website. The key upgrade is that we made all of the tournament contests template based. We have made it very easy to setup a custom contest template with any number of competitors that allows for private-labeled pools to be based on. This is how we are able to support the Tennis Channel. They have contest that have 128 competitors like the Australian Open and others with 96 which include a bunch of first round byes. The Tourney Bracket Control is flexible enough to support all of this programmatically. We also made major updates to the layout and skin look and feel. We also added a email notification system that keeps participants updated after each round. We plan to continue to upgrade this site with many more features each year.

PayItSquare.com (www.payitsquare.com)

This is a new and exciting addition to the Tourney Logic family of websites. The idea came to me by playing in soccer leagues for many years. I realized how much effort it was for the team captains to manage the team's registration every season. Most times the team managers would pay the entire registration fee up front so they could get our schedules. Then they would pester people for weeks to collect all of the money. Many times they wouldn't even collect everyone's payments. Part of the reason for this is because it was way to hard for them to stay organized or they just felt bad about pestering all the time. The other thing is most of us wanted to pay them on time but we just always forgot our checkbooks!

That is where PayItSquare.com comes into play. It allows Team Managers to setup a Group Payment with amount they need, they load the people they want to collect money from, then they can automatically send them a Payment Request email. The Group Payment Members get a link to a Member Collection page where they can pay online with their credit card. As soon as they pay online the Team Manager get with a PayPal payment. If they collect the money offline they can mark the member paid manually which keeps them organized and also lets everyone see who has paid on the Member Collection page.

We beta tested it this past soccer season and it was a huge success. I was actually surprised that so many people paid online. The team managers that used it liked it so much they actually wrote testimonials that I posted on the site.

There are a few more upgrades we are planning for this site in the near future. The major one is to allow for custom payment amounts by member. Right now every member is billed an even amount which is just the amount request divided by the number of group members. We had some requests for custom amounts and it makes sense because sometimes two people fill one roster spot. I can also see other reasons for this outside of sports leagues.

MyPlayoffs.com (www.myplayoffs.com)

This site has been in the works for years now. I am happy to say that we are actually almost done developing the first release. It is a tournament management website. It allows users to setup private labeled tournament websites and manage them. Kind of like Blogger for tournaments! We provide all the tools to manage an entire tournament event. This includes teams, players, draws, brackets of any size, registration, content publishing, printing and more! We are very excited about this venture. It will be free to use because it will be advertisement supported. We are expecting to launch the beta version of this site before May 2007. It will launch with Single Elimination bracket support. We are planning to add double elimination and round robin support shortly after we get the initial site launched.

As you can see, we have been busy! If you want more information about Tourney Logic or any of these sites just email us at sales@tourneylogic.com.