On April 20, I attended the Microsoft Event “Visual Studio 2010 – At the movies”. One of the best events I’ve attended lately (content-wise), which speaks very well of the organizing partner Object Sharp. I took a few notes and wanted to share them with all of you. Here it goes:
Continue reading “Notes form Visual Studio 2010 At the Movies event (Part 1)….”
Starting a company is a lot of work… and expensive! Usually you gave up a steady income to go an do your own thing, and the expenses and costs can creep up very quickly.
For developers on Microsoft’s technologies, and in general for most start-up, it was always been hard to come up with the money for the MSDN Subscription that can be up to 6K a year. Company with competitive technologies which are open source, this is a major disadvantage for MS.
On top of this, if you developed your site on microsoft’s technologies, shared hosting was always much more expensive for licensing issues.
Well, it seems that MS has noticed they are loosing too many start ups and are doing something about it…
As a web developer, it is very common to have the need for an image server. Usually the requirement is pretty straight forward: We need to dynamically re size an image. This is very common when you display thumbnails and regular size pictures in a site.
Personally, I also like to have a single source image; that way, I don’t have to create all the sizes I need before hand. But most importantly, if I need a new size in the future I don’t have to create that new size for all the images I already have.
When working on enterprise environment, people tend consider only solutions by big companies which tend to be pretty expensive. People that can’t afford these solutions try to create the component them selves, which can be very time consuming (if done correctly).
I’ve been u sing Spry Photo for a while (http://www.spryphoto.com/). You can see it in action in http://www.clickclassified.ca and http://www.storybank.com.
Continue reading “SpryPhoto – An excellent and affordable image server”
I recently had the need to interact with Oodle as a way to feed a classified site.
I was suprise to see that while they had php and java libraries/samples already available, but they did not have a .Net one. I searched on their forums and on the web and did not find a library I could use.
Since I had to interact with the api, I decided to make a library, and publish it as an open source component so other developers can use it.
You can find the library at: http://www.codeplex.com/oodlenet; all the references, source code & samples are included in the workspace.
I hope this helps!
Ricardo Covo 