Web Development Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Ever wanted to be a Web entrepreneur? Startup 101 is an online serialized book that shows you what's invovled in becoming one.

"Startup 101" is a serialized book about the thrills and spills of starting a Web technology venture....Startup 101 is for first-time entrepreneurs who want to go through the whole startup life cycle - including raising money, building a valuable business, and making a lot of money by selling the venture or taking it public.

This is the tentative list of chapters -

1. 10 things to be clear about before you start
2. Are you really an entrepreneur?
3. How first-time entrepreneurs can work well with investors
4. Creating your vision, mission, strategy, and plan
5. Finding the right wave to ride (secular trends)
6. Working booms and busts to your advantage (cyclical trends)
7. Building your team pre-financing
8. Building an advisory board
9. Finding a URL and company name
10. Company registration choices
11. The Capital-Raising Ladder
12. How to pitch to a VC or angel
13. How not to get screwed by VCs
14. Understand the scale vs. profitability trade-off
15. Build an insanely great Web service
16. Learn to negotiate and close
17. How to be an effective executive
18. Steps in building a brand
19. How to get noticed
20. How to scale without losing your shirt
21. Maintaining focus, health, and passion during the grind-it-out phase
22. How to build the A-Team
23. How to hit your numbers
24. How to build an effective board
25. How to build age-appropriate processes
26. Planning your exit
27. When and how founders should hire a professional CEO
28. Read some great books for inspiration
29. Negotiating your exit
30. Congratulations! What's next?

At this moment, the first 17 chapters have already been published

Also see:
Free SQL Server 2008 Learning Resources
Learning resources on Design Patterns for .NET Developers
Free C++ Learning Resources

Labels: Learning Resources

Just in case you haven't heard of it yet or seen it, HOME is a documentary movie by Yann Arthus-Bertrand with breathtaking photography on how we can preserve the Earth before it's too late. It is available for free viewing on YouTube.

Synopsis of the documentary:

In 200,000 years on Earth, humanity has upset the balance of the planet, established by nearly four billion years of evolution. The price to pay is high, but it is too late to be a pessimist: humanity has barely ten years to reverse the trend, become aware of the full extent of its spoliation of the Earth's riches and change its patterns of consumption.

If you are concerned about the environment, you should also take a look at the book Blue Planet Run: The Race to Provide Safe Drinking Water to the World. It tells the thought-provoking story of the drinking water crisis across the world through 250 photographs by the world’s top photojournalists. You can download the book in PDF format for free from Amazon.

Labels: Environment, miscellaneous, PDF

Pete LePage, an Internet Explorer Product Manager discourages running multiple versions of IE on the same box (he calls them "Frankenbuilds") using tools like IETester.

There 2 good free alternatives for testing your web application in different versions of IE -

• Install the Virtual PC (VPC) images of IE
• Use Expression Web SuperPreview for testing across multi-platform versions of popular browsers

For help on using a VPC image, check this step by step guide.

Labels: Browsers, HOW TO, IE

Here are a few options I have come across -

• Use the jQuery Multiple File Upload Plugin. An example showing how to use it with ASP.NET with code in VB.NET
• Use a Flash based component to upload multiple files in a medium-trust hosting environment. This has a Progress Bar too.

Also see:
HOW TO implement AutoComplete with jQuery & ASP.NET
Generate Dynamic Tooltips with ASP.NET & jQuery
ASP.NET File Uploads: Threats & Counter-Measures

Labels: ASP.NET, HOW TO, jQuery

I plan to compile all the good stuff I find on Scaling ASP.NET applications here for easy reference. If you know of any other useful resources, please leave a comment

1) The freely downloadable Patterns & Practices guide Improving .NET Application Performance and Scalability has exhaustive info and is a kind of .NET bible. The guide is still relevant eventhough it has not been updated since it was first published in 2004.

2) Key points from the MSDN magazine article "Scaling Strategies for ASP.NET Applications":

• Specialize- break your application into smaller pieces in order to isolate the problem. Know where your slowest bits are
  
• Optimize the code before throwing more hardware at it. Test to measure improvements
  
• Implement load balancing - add servers, duplicate the application across them
• Eliminate affinity for effective distribution
• Minimize Payload by 1) turning on compression 2) reducing ViewState 3) using AJAX (discriminately) to make initial render times faster and reduce perceived size of the payload by spreading it out over time
• Implement caching - ASP.NET supports three forms of caching: page caching (also known as output caching), partial-page caching, and programmatic (also known as data) caching.
• Partition databases into readers and writers. The reader databases are read-only; they receive their data from the writer databases via replication. All data queries go to the reader databases, which are optimized for reading data as fast as possible. All data write requests are sent to the writer databases, which are partitioned and tuned to write efficiently.

3) Jeff Atwood offers some food for thought on scaling -

Scaling up and scaling out are both viable solutions, depending on what problem you're trying to solve, and what resources (financial, software, and otherwise) you have at hand.

...scaling out is only frictionless when you use open source software. Otherwise, you're in a bit of a conundrum: scaling up means paying less for licenses and a lot more for hardware, while scaling out means paying less for the hardware, and a whole lot more for licenses.

Also see:
Approaching ASP.NET Application Performance and Scalability Improvement
SQL Server Performance Audit Checklist

Labels: ASP.NET, Scalability

Just like Jules Verne's ideas on submarine in the book Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea have turned out to be prophetic, the idea of a gestural interface in the movie Minority Report seems to have inspired many researchers and such a UX technology could be commonplace in the near future.

Scott Hanselman recently interviewed Johnny Chung Lee, a researcher in the Applied Sciences group at Microsoft who works with the Project Natal team. Project Natal is the code name for a hands-free motion-sensing technology by Microsoft for the Xbox 360 video game platform.

Science is hardly a topic on Indian prime time TV, but last Sunday the channel CNN IBN started a series called Superstars of Science which featured among other innovators, Pranav Mistry, who is working on a wearable gestural interface at MIT Media Lab.

Labels: miscellaneous

It is interesting to see how the Web is increasingly being used to help as a reputation/recommendation system.



On the work front, there is a good chance that LinkedIn.com can give you some background about a person you are about to meet for the first time. For many, the ratings & recommendations for books on Amazon.com help in deciding on making a purchase. StackOverFlow.com is a unique forum for software developers that not just has answers but also ratings for those answers through "crowdsourcing".

I hope the infrastructure/frameworks for building such reputation/recommendation systems become more easily available & configurable so that developers can build more meaningful websites.

Dear Reader, what websites do you frequently look up for recommendations or validating information?

Related:
Preparing your online profile for employers
If You Liked This, You’re Sure to Love That

Labels: Websites