JD ConleyWritingSoftware. Startups. Life.
Sometimes you just gotta take a step back
and stare at the wall.
"we better have health insurance" . . . "peyton got hurt" These are not the text messages you want to receive from your wife on Mother's Day, when you are four hours away from…
Read the storyI've been playing around a bit with node recently. One thing it's quite good at is quickly bringing up a developer workstation. You can just run a quick command line to have…
Raiders of the Last Nerd made the front page of Hacker News yesterday and went a bit viral around the geek ecosystem. For good reason. Fueled by accelerating technology…
Update:I expanded on this a bit over here: http://blog.jdconley.com/2011/07/how-to-recruit-great-engineering-talent.html I'm taking some time out of my lunch break today, when…
Today I decided to upgrade some of our new projects (top secret, shhh) to Visual Studio 2010, ASP.NET 4.0, and ASP.NET MVC 2.0. There are about a million new features that look…
In Youtopia we wanted to have animations. We also wanted to have thousands of buildings on the screen at once. Anyone who has done a lot of Flash development will tell you that…
Youtopia has been growing quickly the last couple of weeks. It's fun to watch and the team is really excited about it. Of course, with the growth comes a lot of performance…
About four months ago Max, Hive7's Lawful Evil CEO, decided we needed to take our games to the next level and build something fun and accessible that everyone who plays "those…
Wow, I haven't posted in a while. In recent months I've been focused intently on a few things. Babies! My wife and I had twins in February. Learning a new technology while…
A few months ago Phil Haack wrote about how C# 3.0 is a gateway drug to functional programming. (Yeah, that's how long ago I started writing this blog.) I couldn't agree more.…
Hopefully after reading that title you're thinking of the old adage "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" and not something crude. Ok, I admit, either way it works for me.…
Introduction In my lifetime there have been very few technologies that have created a paradigm shift in the software industry – I was born just after the spinning magnetic hard…
A number of years ago I was doing some mentoring at a California state agency that shall remain nameless. I got my butt up in time to be into their office at 8am. (Ok, I'll be…
I had a lot of fun over our holiday break this December working on prototype projects for up and coming technologies. One of those projects dealt with Windows Azure, or, the…
It seems as a group, us programmers have our priorities screwed up. Programmers value clean, concise code. Code that requires no documentation. Code that perfectly uses design…
Since we moved to Palo Alto I've had the luxury of walking to work every day. Usually that's where I do my deep thinking. By the time I cruise by the Whole Foods it's really…
I'm not the first person to talk about this paradigm and I won't be the last. Every single programmer I've seen that is exceptionally good at their job also does it for fun.…
Apparently, saying something sucks gets you a lot of hits. I think I'll use this tactic more often. My post on 10 Reasons ASP.NET Webforms Suck has been quite the talk in our…
Often times when you're working on a web site you want to fire and forget an email, a web method or, most common in our case, a Facebook call. There's a good chance there's a…
I've always been a .NET Fanboy. I've been on the bandwagon since its inception. I've developed quite a few shipping .NET products for the web, Windows, and Linux. I've given…
Here at Hive7 we host all our servers with a hybrid co-location/hosting provider. When you host your servers in a colo facility there are a few key things you look for. Stuff…
Last night I gave a talk at the San Francisco chapter of the Bay.NET User's group. It was a lot of fun. Thanks for the great interaction everyone! I am also thoroughly…
For anybody who's been watching you will have noticed that I have had some fun trying to get x64 Windows Vista stable on my workstation. Well, because of all that fun I've been…
As I mentioned in my last post I recently took on the exciting new position of Chief Software Architect at Hive7, Inc. We're building all kinds of great stuff. Our most popular…
It's been forever since my last post. I promise I'll do better. I've just been juggling three jobs. ;) But that has changed (more on that soon)!The last couple of nights I did…
As you probably know, I'm a cofounder of Coversant which, at its heart, is an XMPP development platform. Most of our larger customers (thousands of simultaneous users) are…
Next month I'll be giving a talk at the Sacramento .NET User's group titled C# 3.0 Overview where I'll be presenting the great new features in the third version of C#. I've…
Alright, so, occasionally I post something funny that happened recently. Yesterday I received a spam company broadcast email from an anonymous customer of mine. You know who…
I'd like to start off by saying asynchronous programming is easy. Building asynchronous frameworks is hard, but using them is easy. Everybody doing programming in AJAX and…
I was just IMing with a good geek friend of mine. This is what happens when you give paranoid geeks kids (names removed for obvious reasons).(5:08:06 PM) Geek Friend: i'm outta…
I've been trolling the Facebook Developer Forums recently and talking with other developers. I've also been reading a lot and trying to get a feel for what people might want…
I don't remember how exactly I got there, but while clicking through my morning feeds I ended up at the very interesting story of an Australian .NET micro ISV startup called…
A couple days ago I built Photo Feeds. I wrote about it here. After using the app a bit I noticed something peculiar. The page took a really long time to load. From my local…
I deal with a few dozen databases on a daily basis. Often times I wonder "What the heck is making this database 100GB?" Sure, you can click around in Management Studio and find…
I've built quite a few applications for Facebook. These include SoapBox, Friend Photosaver, Photozap, and my latest creation (late last night) is called Photo Feeds.Photo…
I've been doing .NET development professionally since the first public beta release of the 1.0 framework. That's... well, a long time. It constantly amazes me how big the…
I've converted a few projects to 2008 RTM now (from 2003 to 2005 to 2008 beta projects), and I wish John Robbins had published this blog earlier. For those of us that don't…
Yesterday I posted on the first thing I ran into. Today I ported another project and hit a couple more snags. Linq to Sql Unicode Byte Header Linq to Sql Add/Remove Method…
Visual Studio 2008 was officially released today to MSDN subscribers so I took the leap and did the upgrade. I ran into an issue with a simple fix that I thought everyone…
I'm a huge fan of Test Driven Development and I've been looking forward to the ASP.NET MVC (Model View Controller) Framework to increase the level of testability of web…
Maybe I'm just young, arrogant, and naive, but I think John's getting a little senile. In his latest rant for his PC Mag column he bashes Google's plans for the Open Handset…
Next month Vista will have been out in RTM for a year (it was released on 11/30/2006 to the volume/dev world). Why is it then, that it still doesn't work?When I originally…
Asyncify your code. Everybody's doing it. (Chicks|Dudes)'ll dig it. It'll make you cool. Pretty much everything I build these days is asynchronous in nature. In SoapBox…
A task that I often end up doing when coding an actual web site (i.e. not writing a sample or some such) is adding client script to a page/control in codebehind using the…
I've been loving the new Extension Methods in Orcas. If you haven't had the pleasure of working with them, well, you're really missing out. They are utility at its finest. Here…
Today I had to build yet-another-list of country names for a web site drop down form. I did some Google searching for about 10 minutes and didn't find anything that was free. I…
Today I was working on some Linq to Sql code that dealt with an event management system. There are events people can attend, and attendees fill out a form to register for the…
This is a quickie. Yesterday I was doing some Url rewriting for a project and accepting user input for said Url. It's basically like this blog system. I can specify the…
I've been doing a lot of WCF development lately (love it) and ran into a bit of a stumbling block. The proxy client generated by Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 doesn't handle fault…
Well, I've officially relocated my blog here, to jdconley.com. The old blogging engine I was using really sucked. This one seems a lot better. And if I don't like something,…
By now everybody who knows what Facebook is, knows they announced an open platform for integrating with it. Interestingly enough Microsoft was a launch partner of theirs so…
AsyncOperationManager... die! We have a new invitation system coming out soon for SoapBox Communicator and I was doing a little premature optimization, err, I mean, capacity…
In XMPP (the messaging and presence protocol SoapBox uses) you can log in simultaneously on multiple systems. How your contat list is displayed and how messages are routed are…
One of the most common things to do in a multi-threaded .NET Windows Forms application is to use the ISynchronizeInvoke interface on a Control to marshal things into the UI…
Usually everything I post here is serious business. Well, not today! Today, we're going to look at how to get the raw video stream for YouTube videos. Why, you ask? Well,…
One of the most common, and tedious, tasks that comes up while writing software is validating user input. "Don't trust the user," the mantra goes. Even with current development…
Due to the enhanced security in Windows Vista, not all Coversant products are able to be installed out of the box. Luckily, this is really easy to work around and rest assured,…
Here at Coversant we're Microsoft partners. We have MSDN subscriptions for all our developers/testers, and we share the same set of license keys. Rather than give everyone…
I ran into a behavior in the 2.0 Compact Framework today that was most vexing. It wasn't hard to find like a subtle race condition. It wasn't an issue that only duplicated with…
I'm not known to get easily frustrated or publicly rant about something, but here goes. The public web site and soapbox.net IM service for Coversant is hosted with GoDaddy…
We use Gentoo for all our Linux development (yeah, we do Linux -- coming very very soon). In fact we are currently putting together a test lab with quite a few computers using…
Our customers do some very interesting things with our platform, including: RPC – The asynchronous nature of XMPP along with its addressing and our platform make it ideal for…
I think we are one of a very small set of companies out there building consumer grade, shrink wrapped products on .NET. Why? Well, I'm not sure. It might have to do with…
We have added two new data access providers to the upcoming SoapBox Server 2007 release. We now support PostgreSql and MySql as well as Microsoft SQL and Oracle. The code for…
I'm sitting on a plane on my way back to Sacramento (a whopping 1 hour flight) and I thought I'd try to give a little more information about the interop event. After two days…
Today was the first day of the first ever official XMPP Interop Event. In fact, it was probably the first day of any open instant messaging and presence interop event, ever. We…
I'll get this out of the way from the start. This series of blogs will have nothing to do with ASP.NET or web services. However, if you plan on writing you own implementation…
As a self proclaimed geek and MSDN subscriber I feel as though it's my duty to explore all the new software that Microsoft comes out with. This last week I have been embarking…
Every couple of weeks I spend four hours doing something that should take five minutes. It just happened, and now I feel compelled to take another few minutes and explain so it…
I was born and raised an entrepreneur (I'm pretty sure that's how you speel that). During my lifetime my dad never had a single "real job". He has always been a small business…
There comes a time in every project where the developers realize we are building software for the users, rather than for ourselves. A user's perception can be the difference…