I’m trying to pair back some of my side projects so I can focus on the ones I really enjoy the most like RestSharp and some other things not yet public. That combined with a new job that is more time-intensive than my previous one led me to start looking for some new caretakers for a couple of my side projects.
Managed Assembly and @dotnetlinks
I have sold Managed Assembly to DotNetKicks. If anyone can take this site and make something of it, it’s James Avery whom you probably know from The Lounge ad network and TekPub. I don’t know his exact plans for it, but I trust it will be great. Control of @dotnetlinks was transferred in this transaction as well. Looking forward to seeing what comes next for my little link sharing site!
jQuery Snippets for Visual Studio 2010
I’m very happy to announce that Jon Galloway and Rey Bango have taken over maintaining the jQuery Snippets for Visual Studio 2010 project on CodePlex. I can’t think of two better people to take the project and run with it. Rey is a member of the jQuery team and Jon is best known for being my first Twitter follower. Thanks Jon and Rey!
I’ve updated my .NET Cheat Sheets page once again. The Visual Studio 2010 C# Snippets sheet has been updated for RTW (only two months late :) and I’ve added a brand new one for Visual Studio 2010 ASP.NET/HTML/JavaScript Snippets.
If you’re into this sort of thing, I highly recommend DevCheatSheet.com, the most comprehensive directory of cheat sheets out there. The interface is clean and not overwhelmed with ads like most sites of its kind. They’ve listed my sheets since they launched and I’m appreciative of their support.
I’ve been thinking for over six months now that it would be cool if there were a frequent, live, topical video podcast-like thing with a .NET slant to it. Basically a 1-3 times a week thing no longer than 10-15 minutes per episode where the latest in .NET and technology were discussed via Skype and broadcast via something like UStream. Instead of talking about a specific tech topic like most podcasts it would instead by oriented around the latest news and happenings. And it doesn’t just need to be .NET news, but it would be viewpoints interesting to .NET developers. For each episode I’d pull in a member of the community to get their take on things and take live video questions from viewers as well. With the new group video chat features of Skype this would be pretty easy.
My question is: would you watch it? Is it something you think would be valuable? Got a clever name I can use?
The Twilio REST API wrapper I originally wrote for my Twin Cities .NET User Group talk is now available on GitHub. I believe it covers 100% of the API. It also includes what will most likely be the 1.0 version of RestSharp (to be officially released very soon). Try it out and let me know what you think.
A few months back I started a Twitter account called @dotnetlinks to share the most recent interesting links that I came across. It was a combination of my submissions to ManagedAssembly and a couple other ad-hoc submissions I made via Delicious. The response has been good so far. Today a couple folks on Twitter were looking for a tech video aggregator and I thought that a .NET-specific one would be a good feature for ManagedAssembly. If you’ll recall, in my www.asp.net series I mentioned a a similar idea for a podcast directory as well. I haven’t built those yet, but as a start I’ve created @dotnetvideos and @dotnetpodcasts that I’ll start feeding with content as I come across it.
For @dotnetlinks, I don’t post every link I come across. I try to pick the cream of the crop to provide a higher signal-to-noise ratio. For videos and podcasts that won’t be as easy to do since I don’t have time to watch/listen to them all. We’ll see how it goes. It would be cool to integrate those feeds with an aggregator on ManagedAssembly to help promote the quality videos/podcasts and ignore the bad ones.
Give them a follow and if you have any ideas or feedback, let me know what you think.
I love Visual Studio code snippets. I’ve always wished that Visual Studio had them for HTML and JavaScript so I was thrilled to see that feature added in VS2010. I also love jQuery. jQuery is shipping with VS2010, but that’s about the extent of the official support for it. I thought there needed to be code snippets for jQuery and couldn’t find any, so I created 131 of them and started an open source project. You can find links to the project/downloads/docs below.
If you have any suggestions, issues, etc. Please let me know. You can follow me on Twitter for updates on the project. Thanks to Dave Ward, Jonathan Carter, and Rick Schott for testing them out and providing feedback.
On November 5th I gave a talk at the Twin Cities .NET User Group entitled ‘Using web service APIs in your applications’. I started out with a very brief overview of how REST APIs work and then talked about the current state of using REST APIs in .NET. I followed that up with a demonstration of a new OSS project I’m working on for making accessing REST APIs much easier. The project is called RestSharp but in the talk I refer to it as Stillwater as that was my working name for it prior to coming up with the final name.
Next I put RestSharp to use by writing a Twitter search bot that runs as an Azure worker role searching for mentions of a search term and then creating FogBugz tasks from the results. Then I demonstrated using Twilio to receive phone calls (utilizing ASP.NET MVC) and create FogBugz cases from those incoming phone calls. And lastly I demonstrated how to use RestSharp with Twilio’s REST API to initiate an outgoing phone call from a .NET app.
This was my first formal technical presentation (I gave one at jQuery Conference, but that was much more informal) and you can tell early on in the video. Stick with it however, things smooth out as they go along. Also, the audio is a little tinny with some minor background noise, but it’s not unbearable.
I’ll be posting more about RestSharp/Stillwater soon as I get closer to launching it. You can follow @RestSharp on Twitter, follow the project on GitHub or visit the official site (nothing there yet though).
Watch the Video (49:25)
Download (right click, save as): MP4 (103MB) | WMV (135MB)
I’ve added a new cheat sheet for the built-in C# snippets that ship with Visual Studio 2010. It’s current as of Beta 2 and I’ll update it if they change. If you’re unfamiliar with the .NET Cheat Sheets I’ve created, you can find them here. I’m also working on one more related to Visual Studio 2010 which I hope to have ready soon.
Currently this cheat sheet is more up-to-date than the MSDN docs which have some errors and omissions in them. Hopefully they’ll resolve that before release.
I’m working on a project to make dealing with REST APIs in .NET apps much easier. I’m looking for APIs to test against. Let me know in the comments or via email what REST APIs you consume in your applications.
Where do you go when you want to find a library or component that performs some specific function you need? Do you go to one of the many open source hosting sites like CodePlex, Google Code or GitHub? Or do you just Google/Bing until you stumble upon something that might work, try it out, find out it doesn’t, rinse and repeat.
What do you do when you’re looking for an API or third-party commercial component to integrate with your apps? More Googling, more trying things out, more wasting time.
The problem is there’s no central directory of these sorts of things. Nothing where people can rate and review projects to give you some idea of whether or not they’re worth your time. Nothing to separate the wheat from the chaff. The Toolbox section of the ASP.NET site would be a great place to centralize all of these things but limited to just stuff that works with ASP.NET.
It could be community-managed (like a structured wiki) but offer the option for specific entries to be “claimed” by their owners. Only users with sufficient reputation (earned throughout the site) would be able add entries or make changes.
Open Source Project Directory
I’d like to have a better way to locate good open source libraries (I’ve seriously considered building this for Managed Assembly and it still might happen). They’re currently all spread out across different hosting sites so a central directory would make them easier to find.
Each project can add links to their project home page, downloads, issue tracker, mailing list, etc. They could also provide their RSS feed URLs so the latest news from each project could be displayed right on their listing.
Visitors would be able to add favorites/follow/become a fan of projects which could provide for customized news feeds for just your favorite projects. Users would be able to rate and review projects as well. In addition to favoriting (which is for personal use), users could select ‘I Use This’ to publically show their support for projects. Ratings + reviews + user counts would help narrow the list when trying to find the right OSS project for your needs.
This is essentially what Ohloh does, but I’d like it specific to projects that work with ASP.NET. Like other parts of the site, this could be a subset of a larger directory that is for all of .NET.
API Directory
Similar to the open source project directory would be a directory for APIs that work with .NET. There are so many useful APIs out there that people don’t know about. Companies would jump at the chance to increase exposure for their APIs. They can provide getting started articles, code samples, etc. APIs would be able to be reviewed and rated just like open source projects.
Commercial Product Directory
This might very well not be even remotely feasible and considering the hubbub over ads on the home page, it’s a treacherous topic to even broach. But I’ve been operating in a “in a perfect world” mentality since I started this series, so keep that mind here.
Like the open source project and API directories, I’d like to see another directory of commercial products built to work with ASP.NET. This would operate identically to the open source directory above, just separated so that it’s clear that these entries cost money.
Would the community take the time to list commercial products? Would it even be useful for finding the right tool for your project? Would vendors support such a concept? This is probably the most risky of any idea I’ve proposed, but I think it would work and be extremely valuable.
A Place for Ads
This is the place on my version of the site where ads make complete sense. You’ve got people looking for tools. They’re in the right mindset and they’re actively searching out new things. Ads could actually be useful to them. They don’t disrupt what the user was trying to do (unlike the home page). Advertisers might not get the same number of eyeballs, but the ones they do get would be highly-targeted.
Conclusion
And so this little project comes to an end. I’m happy with how it turned out. I had a lot of fun thinking through each section and am glad to hear that it caught the attention of the people who are in a position to make changes. Microsoft deserves credit for the recent progress they’ve made with the lightweight MSDN view, the Web Application Toolkits, the MSDN Beginner Developer Center, etc. and I’m sure they have a lot more in the works.
