BRIAN'S BLOG

Announcing MyPlayoffs.com

Brian Anderson — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 11:08:00 GMT

We are very happy to announce the release of MyPlayoffs.com. MyPlayoffs lets's you publish and manage playoff brackets and tournaments.

It is a long story but this idea has been with us for almost 3 years now. I finally came up with a design in my head that was much simpler to implement so I made myself work on it. I am pretty happy with the functionality for v1. There are lot's more ideas so you should see some updates to it soon.

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.

NuSoft Framework

Brian Anderson — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 11:46:00 GMT

I am happy to announce that the NuSoft Framework is now an open source framework. We used this to help build the PayItSquare website. Joel just posted a nice introduction to the NuSoft Framework.

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 Highlights

Brian Anderson — Mon, 07 May 2007 12:42:00 GMT

The MIX 07 sessions are now posted online here: http://sessions.visitmix.com/. This a gold mind of information for ramping up on key custom dev Microsoft technologies. The best place to start is the keynote. Fast forward to the demos to get a sense of what is possible:

The key highlights of this conference include:

Silverlight - www.silverlight.net. This is more than just a Flash competitor. The integration with ASP.Net, JavaScript and code behind CLR assemblies make this a very powerful addition to Microsoft development stack. The other big part of this plug-in is that a subset of the .Net CLR is now available cross platform, finally! It still is early and the marketing is a little misleading. There are actually two versions. Version 1.0 is a beta that doesn't support code behind technology or any controls. It is primarily designed to compete for media applications like showing videos online. All of the code is done with Javascript programming in the browser against the Silverlight DOM. Version 1.1 is the when the code behind functionality will be supported and it is slated for a end of 2007 release. Scott Guthrie has posted an excellent post higlighting the difference between 1.0 and 1.1. Check out this session if you want to see the lead Silverlight product manager show off what is available in 1.0: http://sessions.visitmix.com/default.asp?event=1011&session=2012&pid=DEV11&disc=&id=1520&year=2007&search=DEV11

WPF - If you want to see the power of this technology and what you can do with Blend you have to watch this session done by two designers. It is awesome to watch: http://sessions.visitmix.com/default.asp?event=1011&session=2011&pid=DES07&disc=&id=1509&year=2007&search=DES07.

AJAX - http://ajax.asp.net. This has been getting a ton of coverage over the past year but I have to tell you the more I learn about using the object model the more the power of this framework becomes apparent. There is way more to Asp.net AJAX than just the Update Panel! Take time to review the client script API. Here is a great session to watch done by Nikhil Kothari , a very well known ASP.NET architect: http://sessions.visitmix.com/default.asp?event=1011&session=2011,2012&pid=XD003&disc=&id=1570&year=2007&search=XD003

LINQ - This will speed up the plumbing development work we do for almost every application we develop. Why couldn't we have had this 5 years ago??? :) See Anders Hejlsberg , the author of C#, explains it very well in this session: http://sessions.visitmix.com/default.asp?event=1011&session=2012&pid=DEV04&disc=&id=1513&year=2007&search=DEV04

Orcas - Multi-targeting framework development, CSS and Javascript intellisense support make this install a must even during the beta period. This is a nice overview of what is coming: http://sessions.visitmix.com/default.asp?event=1011&session=2012&pid=DEV14&disc=&id=1523&year=2007&search=DEV14

Feedburner

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

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

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!