Tourney Logic

Feedburner

Brian Anderson — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 14:16:00 GMT

I just setup a Feedburner for this blog. I wanted to test the headline animator.

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.

Tourneytopia 2007

Brian Anderson — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 18:25:00 GMT

Tourneytopia.com is ready for private-labeled pools again this year.

Tourney Bracket Control 2.0 Update

Brian Anderson — Sun, 01 Jan 2006 16:34:00 GMT

We are still working on the Tourney Bracket Control 2.0. The beta license has just been updated to 3/1/2006. Download the updated Bracket Quickstart Tutorial again to get the updated license.

We have been slowed down with this release working on double elimination. It is coming along and we actually have it figured out but the testing is taking way longer then we expected. Due to the time constraints of trying to get it done and our need to get Tourney Pool Manager ready to go for March Madness 2006 we have decided to postpone the double elimination until after March Madness as part of Tourney Bracket Control 3.0. We plan to finish the final testing on Tourney Bracket Control 2.0 without double elimination and release it sometime in January.

Tourney Bracket Control 2.0 (Beta) QuickStart Source Code Available

Brian Anderson — Sun, 13 Nov 2005 11:30:00 GMT

The source code is now available for the TBC 2.0 (Beta). The QuickStart tutotrial and the TBC 2.0 are written in ASP.NET 2.0. We recommending using Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Web Developer Express / SQL Express (Note: the express products are free until 11/8/2006!!).

View the live Tourney Bracket Control 2.0 (Beta) QuickStart Tutorial.

Download the TBC 2.0 (Beta) QuickStart Source Code.

Learn more about the upcoming TBC 2.0 release.

TBC 2.0 Licensing Note: We are still working through the licensing details but at this point we are leaning towards having one option that will cost less than $50! Stay tuned for more information.

Tourney Bracket Control 2.0 (Beta) Demo Videocast

Brian Anderson — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 11:42:00 GMT

Watch our videocast of the Tourney Bracket Control 2.0 (Beta) in action!

Stream the Quick Demo Videocast (~1 minute):
150kps | 340kps

Stream the Full Demo Videocast (12 minutes):
150kps | 340kps

This demo will quickly walk you through building your first tournament bracket and publishing results without writing any code. The next part of the demo shows you how to generate a 16 team bracket layout dynamically with just 3 lines of code. Lastly, the video shows how to leverage the data binding in ASP.NET 2.0 using a SQLDataSource Control to create bracket and load results from a database. It is an action packed 12 minutes of demos that really shows off the power of our 2.0 release.

During the video I am using Microsoft's Visual Web Developer Express. Microsoft is making this tool available free for the first year! It is an exteremly powerful web development tool and the TBC works great with it.

Check out my previous post to see another code sample and to learn about the Tourney Bracket Control 2.0 QuickStart. We will be publishing the source code for the QuickStart in the next few days.

Let us know what you think.

Tourney Bracket Control 2.0 is now a Beta

Brian Anderson — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 19:36:00 GMT

Tourney Logic is happy to announce that the Tourney Bracket Control 2.0 is now a Beta! We have been working hard on building this version. Check out Joel's post to see see the details. Tourney Bracket Control 2.0 is based on Microsoft .Net 2.0 and it makes publishing a bracket a piece of cake. We are going to publish a video demo very soon. Developers, you will be very happy with how easy we have made it to develop with the control.

I have been working hard (and late nights) to build the Bracket QuickStart examples that shows off the many features of the Tourney Bracket Control 2.0. We will make the source code available for the QuickStarts shortley.

Let me give you a quick example of how easy it is. Here is an example that shows a MLB playoff bracket example:

HTML Markup:

<%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/MasterPage.master" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="MLB.aspx.cs" Inherits="PopularTourneys_MLB" Title="TOURNEY LOGIC: TBC 2.0 QuickStart Tutorial: Changing Round Titles: MLB Playoff Bracket" %>
<%@ Register Assembly="TourneyLogic.Web.UI.BracketControl.v2" Namespace="TourneyLogic.Web.UI.WebControls"
    TagPrefix="tl" %>
<asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="ContentPlaceHolder1" Runat="Server">
<h4>
            <strong>2005 MLB Playoff Bracket Example</strong></h4>
            This example shows how to use Tourney Bracket Control to build the bracket for the MLB playoffs.<br />
            <br />


    <tl:Bracket runat="server" ID="Bracket1" ReadOnly="false" RoundWidth="130" ><Competitors>

<tl:BracketCompetitor runat="server" ID="AL1" CompetitorName="Yankees"></tl:BracketCompetitor>
<tl:BracketCompetitor runat="server" ID="AL2" CompetitorName="Angels"></tl:BracketCompetitor>
<tl:BracketCompetitor runat="server" ID="AL3" CompetitorName="Red Sox" ></tl:BracketCompetitor>
<tl:BracketCompetitor runat="server" ID="AL4" CompetitorName="White Sox"></tl:BracketCompetitor>
<tl:BracketCompetitor runat="server" ID="NL1" CompetitorName="Padres" ></tl:BracketCompetitor>
<tl:BracketCompetitor runat="server" ID="NL2" CompetitorName="Cardinals" ></tl:BracketCompetitor>
<tl:BracketCompetitor runat="server" ID="NL3" CompetitorName="Astros" ></tl:BracketCompetitor>
<tl:BracketCompetitor runat="server" ID="NL4" CompetitorName="Braves" ></tl:BracketCompetitor>

</Competitors>
    </tl:Bracket>
        <br />
        <asp:CheckBox ID="CheckBox1" runat="server" AutoPostBack="True" OnCheckedChanged="CheckBox1_CheckedChanged"
            Text="Read-Only?" /> <br />
        <br />
        <asp:Button ID="Button1" runat="server" OnClick="Button1_Click" Text="Show Bracket Results" /><br />
        <br />
        <asp:GridView ID="GridView1" runat="server">
            <Columns>
                <asp:TemplateField HeaderText="Winning Team">
                    <ItemTemplate>
                        <%#((BracketMatchupResult)Container.DataItem).GetWinningCompetitor().CompetitorName %>
                    </ItemTemplate>
                </asp:TemplateField>
            </Columns>
        </asp:GridView>
</asp:Content>

C# Code File:

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Collections;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.Security;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls;
using System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts;
using System.Web.UI.HtmlControls;

public partial class PopularTourneys_MLB : System.Web.UI.Page
{
protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{

}

    protected void Button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        GridView1.DataSource = Bracket1.Results;
        GridView1.DataBind();
    }
    protected void CheckBox1_CheckedChanged(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
        Bracket1.ReadOnly = CheckBox1.Checked;

}
}

Now that you see how easy it is, now you can view this page at run-time.

We have just a little ways to go. The main features we are working on right now is double elimination and licensing. Send us a message to sales@tourneylogic.com if you want to beta test.

Thanks Alex

Brian Anderson — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 06:35:00 GMT

Check out Alex Lowe's blog posting about Tourney Logic. Thanks Alex for the nice write up. We appreciate your support!

For those that don't know, Alex just left Microsoft to work with Telligent Systems (makers of the Community Server). This product is getting tons of attention and has a real strong team including Rob Howard (former ASP.NET program manager), Scott Watermasysk (developer of .Text) and Jason Alexander (developer of nGallery). Watch out for this up and coming company. They are on to something good.

TL supporters: Please help us get WebHost4Life's attention!!!

Brian Anderson — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 15:09:00 GMT

WebHost4Life is really a solid .Net web host. We have been using them for our Tourney Logic hosting and we have referred quite a few people to use it as well.

We asked WebHost4Life to setup the Tourney Pool Manager as a .Net plug-in for their customers. That means that all you would have to do is sgin up for a WebHost4Life hosting account then tell them you want the Tourney Pool Manager and everything would be installed automatically for you. They said if they get enough demand they will do it.

We would really appreciate it if you would just send a quick email to their sales department telling them that you would like to have this feature. The email address is hosting_sales@webhost4life.com.

Thanks in advance for your help!!!!!