John Mendez

I just got done launching the product website for XDev Biz (demo and blog are to come shortly). As you can tell in the name, it was created by myself with the help of another colleague of mine for some other ideas. 

This is designed for small businesses and start-ups that need a professional solution to get an internet presence out there within a quick time frame.  XDev Biz allows a small business to not worry about having to pay an independent consultant, or worry about hiring an "IT" guy to get a site up and running at a low cost. 

Our pilot website is Painting Face to Face.  This only went up a few days ago (at the time of this writing), so the owner still needs to enter in some data.


XDev Biz differs, because we design the site for you and add on custom solutions only if you want/need them. Otherwise the base website should be able to provide a small business what they need.

There will be many more modules added to this product in the future so it should be exciting.

General

Well it's an early saturday morning and not much is going on in the house right now, except that I am monitoring the sprinkler system in the backyard right now.  Have to get it ready for the summer grass.

I had multiple questions this week about what I have installed on my laptop for developing. I thought I would post what I have installed so all of you can see what tools I use to develop, or try to use to develop :)  So here is the list:

Windows 7 Ultimate - 64 bit
IIS (installed most features)
IIS Media Service 3.0
IIS URL Rewrite Module 2
IIS SEO Toolkit 1.0
SQL Server 2008 Standard
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate (full install except SQL Express)
Silverlight 3
Silverlight 4
Deep Zoom Composer
ASP.NET 2.0 AJAX Extensions 1.0
PHP 5
Expression Studio 3
Expression Blend 4 RC
Windows Phone 7 Developer Tools
XNA Game Framework (via Windows Phone 7 Tools install)
Windows Media Center SDK 6
Firefox
Safari
FileZilla
Paint.NET
Beyond Compare
Foxit Reader
Virtual Clone Drive
WinRAR

As far as javascript libraries I use the CDN's so no need to keep them on my laptop.

Also, my choice of WYSIWYG editors is TinyMCE.

Another mention. I'm not a big fan of putting beta software on my laptop because I can't afford to keep uninstalling/installing the releases.  Also I don't want it to interfere with the work I do. I will put RC on as I feel necessary.

That's about it. This is what gets me through all my projects. Since I do 95% web development in one way or the other, I don't need much more than this installed.

General

Well there definitely has been a lack of posting on here by me.  I apologize for not putting any content on here recently.  I have been quite busy since the beginning of march.

Anyway, I thought I would let you know what I've been up too over the last, almost, couple months.


I was busy working with Run N Gun Sports on implementing Club Dynamix.  The reason this implementation took a bit longer was because Run N Gun Sports is more of a "League" website instead of a "Team" website.  So there were a few things we needed to figure out how to handle and if they were ok with how the Club Dynamix product worked. They provided excellent feedback on the product and improvements were made to it over the month.

Good news out of the Run N Gun Sports project was that Club Dynamix does pretty well at handling data for leagues!

Next, I decided to take on another project of something I knew nothing about.  This website is for Sports4Charities.Com.  Reason I didn't know anything about this is because it uses X-Cart for the website.  The owner of the website purchased it and needed help changing the look of it.  Problem for me is that this is designed using the Smarty Template system in PHP...yikes! I'm not a PHP developer!  In the end after taking the time to figure out how the template system worked and some basic PHP code all went well and we are in the final stages of getting the site live for him!

Note: Turned out the the template system in PHP is not much different that master pages and user controls in ASP.NET.

Third, I have been working on my idea and design for version 3 of Xtra Knowledge. This is an ASP.NET Knowledge Base software.  The first version I designed about 6-7 years ago and has been a personal project over the years, but now I am making it open source and this will be designed in the following:

ASP.NET 4
Entity Framework 4
SQL Server 2008 (nothing special though)
Silverlight 4
WCF 4

So far I have the DB designed, WCF service designed and the Entity Framework Model.  This will be a great learning experience and a good project in the end...well at least I hope so!

Fourth, I've been making additional improvements to Club Dynamix. I changed the architect design a bit for better maintenance and deployment. I also added a few more modules to it.  I added the ability to have a simple content management system and also the ability to change the images in the image rotator on your own and order them as well. 

Fifth, I have implemented TFS 2010 and upgraded to VS 2010. This took a bit of work to get my code organized how I wanted it.  I must say TFS 2010 was pretty easy to get setup. Then again, I didn't do it for an enterprise either.


Last, my wife and I had our 2nd child!. A little baby boy.  Needless to say, that takes up all of someone's extra time!!!

Oh and you can't forget Spring Training, start of the MLB season and also the NFL Draft. In my opinion the AZ Cardinals has just an OK draft...could have done better. Best pick was Daryl Washington out of TCU for LB.

General