General

The Benefits of Being a VIP...

Joel Ross — Fri, 17 Mar 2006 11:15:00 GMT

...arent' exactly what they're cracked up to be! Somehow, I got on the VIP list to watch NCAA games online this year, and in case you were wondering if you were missing anything, well, this pretty much sums it up.

Technorati Tags: NCAA | basketball | VIP | mmod

March Madness 2006 Is Ready!

Joel Ross — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 15:59:00 GMT

We just finished updating the teams for this year, so if you are a Tourneytopia.com user or a Tourney Pool Manager user, the teams will be downloaded shortly, if they haven't been already!

Now, I have to go back and actually look at the seeds. When you're focused on data entry, you don't get a very good look at what's going on!

Technorati Tags: Tourneytopia | Tourney+Pool+Manager | March+Madness | Brackets | Selection+Sunday

Tourneytopia's Speed Boost

Joel Ross — Sat, 11 Mar 2006 19:54:00 GMT

If you happened to be perusing Tourneytopia's offerings early this morning (around 12:30 or 1:00 AM), you might have noticed a little bit of downtime - something we are very cognizant of as we get close to the Big Dance. We try our best to prevent down time, unless we have a good reason. This time, we had a good one - we switched servers to one that's much faster.

The NCAA tournament presents a challenge - there are five days when you get absolutely pounded. From the time the selections are made until that first game, we typically get more traffic than any full month (other than March, obviously), so we want to make sure that we are on a server that can handle it. So, last night, that's what we did. Moving the domain and getting the new environment all set up gave us a little bit of downtime, but overall, I don't think we were down for more than 5 minutes, if that. We had the new machine set up, and was just waiting for the DNS to switch over. We did have one deployment issue, and that was the license for the Tourney Bracket Control - yes, we even have to have a license! We use the same build you can get on our site.

Anyway, we're all moved over and don't have anything that we want to add, so now it's just a waiting game. Tomorrow will get hectic again, and around 5:00 PM or so, we'll be busy again. We want to watch the Go-Live process and ensure that everything works as expected, and then at 6:00 PM, it'll be time to get the teams in. By 7:00 PM, we hope to be live and ready to go, and by 8:00 PM, most pools will be open to accept picks. We'll monitor it all and ensure everything runs smoothly, as we will all week.

Technorati Tags: Tourneytopia | March+Madness | Selection+Sunday

Late Nights With Tourneytopia

Joel Ross — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 22:36:00 GMT

Here we are, about 1:30 AM, and I'm just finishing up deploying a minor (very minor) update to Tourneytopia. We're definitely starting to stabilize, as we were able to skip a build last night, and both tonight's and Sunday's build were purely cosmetic.

Now, Saturday's build was a different story. We had some major fixes in there. The web services we expose weren't working, so we fixed those. We didn't (and still haven't, really) hyped those, but we offer a few feeds that allow you to get data out of Tourneytopia, so you can use it on your own site. There's quite a few integration scenarios that you can do, so instead of just listing out what we offer, we'll walk through a quick scenario.

Let's say you run a forum and you decide to use Tourneytopia as a promotion for your members. First, you set up a custom user demographic field to collect their forum member id (we're hoping to have a better user account integration story later this year), and once all picks are submitted and the window closes, you go export all of the entries and users to an excel file. Work a little data magic, and you can import entry IDs for each user in the system. That's the first part. Now, whenever a user comes to the site, you can do a couple of things. First, the simple one. You can show them the top overall standings. Then, you can show them how they are doing - you can query our site for information about their entry IDs, and we'll give you information about them, including their total points and current rank.

But that's not all. You're the forum administrator and everyone knows you. So you set yourself up as a Featured Entry. You can also query Tourneytopia to get the featured entries and show them on your site too. You can also get the featured entries based on an entry - so you can show a user how their pick is doing against the featured entries.

You can also query the standings by name, email address and entry id, so you also have some searching capabilities too. Overall, it's a nice way to bring some of the information in Tourneytopia back and be able to use it in your site. Of course, if you just want the standings, you can just use the RSS feed that we have for those.

One last feature we added? A new way to upload images. Before, we allowed you to upload an image and then we put a size on it. Unless you did some planning to get a logo the size we specified, you could end up with a pretty distorted image. So we fixed that, and now are using a tool that resizes your image to fit into our space, but keeps the image looking good.

I'll talk more about that tool a little later, but if you want to check it out, head over to Tourneytopia and set up your own pool, and test it out.

Technorati Tags: Tourneytopia | web+services | images

Tourneytopia's New Look

Joel Ross — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 20:25:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago, we decided we couldn't wait for the final logo to launch Tourneytopia.com, so we went with a nice little text-based header, with plans to switch once we had a real header. Well, today, our designer, who's been awesome for us thus far, delivered again, sending a few different sizes we can use. So, with that, I'm happy to show you guys our new logo:

I'm very happy with how it turned out! What do you think?

Technorati Tags: Tourneytopia

Tourneytopia.com Updates

Joel Ross — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 21:14:00 GMT

Since we announced the launch of Tourneytopia.com, we've still been very busy tidying things up. We've done builds just about every night since then, and sometimes first thing in the morning if we found a critical issue.

Well, I'm hoping that will slow down now. When we launched, we still had a few minor issues and features we wanted to get done, and tonight, I feel like we've got them all done. Don't get me wrong, there's still things we want to do. But most of that relates to either brand new features or changes to the current features to make it support more than just March Madness. So, given how busy we've been, we've decided to shelve any new features until next year, and put off making it more generic until April.

So, what does that mean? It means we're now feature complete for 2006! I listed out the major new features a while ago, but here's what we've added recently:

Improved What-If Scenarios: First, what we need to answer exactly what "What-If Scenarios" are. Once the tourney gets to the final four, the scenarios become active. Last year, all we did was show them for that week between the final four being set and when the first final four game was finished. After that, it was disabled again. This year, we still show them, and incorporate the actual results into the scenarios - so you track as the final four and championship games complete which scenarios are still valid, but also see what could have been. By the way, I always fall into the "what could have been" category - there's usually a scenario where I can finish in second or third, but it never comes to pass.
Licensing can be purchased directly from Tourneytopia.com. You can initialize a purchase directly from the Tourneytopia.com. We aren't completely automated - we still have to add your license once we are notified, but by this weekend, we are hoping to have it completely automated. The good news (if you want to look at it that way!) is that most people don't make their purchase until the week before the tourney starts or the week of the tourney so it shouldn't affect too many people (although, orders are starting to come in!).
We made a change in how we handle unlicensed entries. Before, if an entry came in and it took you over the number of entries you had licenses for, then that entry was saved, but not visible on the site. That can get confusing for users who don't (and shouldn't have to) know anything about how it's licensed. They wonder what happened to their entry. Well, now they'll be able to find their entry. It just won't be scored or ranked. But users can still see it, and edit it before the tourney starts.
We also have made quite a few minor UI improvements, including some basic formatting of grids, removal of an unneeded page, and a few others. Nothing major here, but the changes give it a better feel.

So what's coming from Tourneytopia.com? Not much new over the next few weeks. Our focus now is sales and support, and we'll fix bugs as we find them. Then, it'll be time for March Madness - my favorite time of the year!

Technorati Tags: Tourneytopia | Pools | Pool+Manager | NCAA

Congrats to pwarner!

Joel Ross — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 19:24:00 GMT

Congratulations to pwarner for winning the Second Annual Tourney Logic Match Play Pool Contest. He (yes, I know for sure that pwarner is a male) gained the most points throughout the tournament. We'll be sending out his $25 Best Buy gift certificate soon!

While pwarner won it all, everyone who entered helped us out tremendously, and I want to thank everyone for that! We were able to find quite a few bugs and squash all of them. Fortunately, none of those issues involved any type of data loss - the one that confused a lot of people was the bracket change that happened at the last minute - the 12th overall person dropped out of the tourney due to a back injury, and numbers 64 through 13 all moved up one slot, throwing the whole bracket out of whack. Luckily, we have a way to edit the bracket, so anyone who was able to get back into their bracket could fix it up. Not that i tprobably made much of a difference - the seeding of this tourney is much less of a factor than it tends to be in March Madness. Anyone can beat just about anyone!

Technorati Tags: World+Golf+Championship

DotNetRocks on Server Controls, And More

Joel Ross — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 17:18:00 GMT

As a server control developer, I was very interested in listening to the latest DotNetRocks show. Overall, it was a great show, and while a lot of it was review, there were a few good nuggets in there, as well as some validation that I'm doing things The Right Way. If you're never developed a server control, it's a great introduction to them - why you'd do it and how you'd do it.

Anyway, one thing that I've never really thought about was the different types of server controls. Miguel says there's three: Inherited, rendered, and composite. The composite is the most common I've seen, with the inherited being second. Rarely do I see rendered controls, mainly because they're too complicated to get working correctly, despite them being (slightly) faster than composite controls. It's also interesting to note that composite controls are, at their core, a collection of rendered controls.

The Tourney Bracket Control, by the way, is a composite control. It's actually a server control with other server controls in it that are made up of basic rendered controls.

There were a few things that were said that I didn't agree with. Well, not that I didn't agree with, but that I do differently. First, I don't typically statically declare my child controls in the server control. Most of the server controls I've worked on are dynamic - I don't know how many child controls I'll need until I look at the way it's configured. In the case of the Tourney Bracket Control, I can't statically declare how many match ups there will be because I don't know how many there will be until I look at the configuration at run-time (or design-time). So I create them dynamically as I need them.

The other thing I do differently is how I build my controls collection. I don't know why I do it this way, but looking back, I use the CreateChildControls() method to create all controls that need to be involved in the postback/viewstate process. That way, I can get data in and out of the control as I need it. But, I do the non-essential controls in an override of OnPreRender(). So if a table is needed to contain some controls, I add it there, rather than in the CreateChildControls() method, as described by Miguel.

The other DotNetRocks related item has to do with Carl's expansion of the DotNetRocks show into a family of shows. From his latest newsletter:

dnrTV
This is a weekly camtasia-based interview show. Think of a combination webcast and DNR interview. The guest will drive real-world demos and explanations using screen-cam technology from TechSmith (www.camtasia.com). 60 minutes

Hanselminutes
This will either be a video or audio short featuring yours truly talking with ASP.NET guru Scott Hanselman as he takes us on a journey of problem-solving and the intelligent application of technology. 20 minutes

The 64-Bit Question
This is an audio-only call-in quiz show in which the teeming millions compete for prizes by answering questions about .NET and computing in general. 30 minutes

It looks like it's time to make room for some new shows! The Hanselminutes should be a good one.

Technorati Tags: dotnetrocks | podcast

CodeKeep

Joel Ross — Sun, 21 Aug 2005 13:22:00 GMT

A while ago, I blogged about wanting to find a way to share code snippets for a team. Ben Carey (who used to work at Sagestone, before we became NuSoft), read it, talked to Dave Donaldson, and Dave contacted me to help him test CodeKeep. I didn't do as much as I would have hoped to help him out, but it's now public.

You can read Dave's announcement or just go to the website. So far, I've only added three snippets (all public). It's a very cool idea, and Dave plans to add to it as it goes. One of the cool things it does have is a Visual Studio add-in that allows you to work with snippets from within Visual Studio. Nice job, Dave!

Joel Ross — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 18:59:00 GMT

Steve Rubel started it. He's posted his list of 10 indispensable blogs - the ones he would take on a desert island with him.

Then, he created a Technorati tag so everyone can participate.

Side note: adding tags for Technorati is pretty simple! Just add a link to (for examle) http://technorati.com/tag/10blogs with a rel="tag" in the link. Nice!

Ok. Back on topic. My ten blogs I can't live without. That's tough, but here's my list. If I read your blog and don't list you, please don't be offended. Getting it down to 10 was hard!

1. Andrew Connell - He's one of two on this list that I've actually met in person and talked to. His blog is a great resource for finding information about CMS (and Sharepoint, but I'm not into Sharepoint) and ASP.NET development in general.

2. Dare Obasanjo - He wrote RSS Bandit, which was my first aggregator. He also has a bunch of great posts about RSS and XML in general. He's now working on the MSN team and his posts have been excellent regarding the things going on over there.

3. Dave Burke - He got me into customizing .Text, and has had me hooked ever since. Great technical content!

4. Jason Salas - Only recently has his blog been chalk full of good technical content, but it's had his podcast on it for a while. It's a great podcast - I dedicate the end of just about every night to listening to him.

5. Larkware - A great resource for finding what's new in the community just about each day. There are those who don't consider it a blog, but it's syndicated, so to me, that's enough!

6. Michael Swanson - He doesn't post very regularly, but when he does, his posts are excellent. He's also the other one I've met in person.

7. Scott Guthrie - Another who doesn't post much, but since he's responsible for managing the ASP.NET team, his posts are very informative and authorative.

8. Rob Howard - He was a key piece of the ASP.NET team - he helped design the provider model as well as database cache invalidation. Then he left Microsoft to start Telligent Systems and built Community Server. This guy is sharp!

9. Scott Hanselman - If for nothing else, then his tool list. He also has great content beyond that, and provides some very in-depth code samples.

10. Scott Mitchell - He runs 4GuysFromRolla, and always puts out great content.

There's a disproportionate amount of Scott's! Anyway, who's on your list?