First AWS Elastic Beanstalk .Net Application

Ok, this is very simple. But I have just deployed my first AWS Elastic Beanstalk ASP.NET application. This is not my custom application. But something AWS lets me create with few clicks.

It is very good that they have a Free Usage Tier for about a year to play and get familiar with. I will be deploying a live project sometime soon. But, you should check it out. More details on AWS free tier http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/gettingstarted/latest/awsgsg-freetier/deploy-sample-app.html

As for my free sample AWS Elastic BeanStalk website, click here. It only gets better from here :)

Expore soccer world cup team statistics

If you are a soccer (football for rest of the world) fan, check out this cool interactive team level world cup statistics from 1930 to 2010 on worldcupreference.com

Couple of trivia questions:

  • Which teams have maximum number of draws in a given tournament and how many?
    • Ireland in 1990 and West Germany in 1978 with 4 draws each.
  • Who has most wins in a single world cup tournament?
    • Brazil had 7/7 wins and ended up being the winner in 2002 with 18 goals.

Well, you got the idea. Browse around and have fun with your friends. For even more details on all things soccer/football, head over to goalface.com

 

First MVC4 Live Application

I finally got to play with and host a live website, indianchurch.us, built on ASP.NET MVC4 beta. I didn’t get to use all the goodies in MVC4, but it was nice to be able to do a bin deployment using MVC4 Beta dlls.

Currently, it is a very basic website that lets you search Indian Churches in USA. I have few more features in mind and hope to get them out sooner than later. Please feel free to drop any comments.

In addition to MVC4 beta, also got to play with Entity Framework 4.1 Code First for data access, Twitter bootstrap as css framework, Bing Maps for mapping & geo-location, and jQuery.

In a later post, I will try to go into detail of this project and may be one day open source this (I have some cleanup before that).

Beginning of a unique GoalFace fan page on facebook

I am on a quest to create one of a kind unique GoalFace.com fan page on facebook.

In case you don’t know yet, I have had been working on a football (Soccer for us, living in USA) venture, GoalFace.com, for a while with a group of football fanatics! Happy to say that we are now on alpha and please feel free to check it out to experience best football community experience.

Few weeks ago, while I was having my daily dose of techcrunch, I stumbled on this post about creating One-of-Kind fan page on facebook. Not having done much on facebook, I have decided do something like that for GoalFace.

My initial version simply followed the directions to a static custom home page for GoalFace (with a home page screen shot). Then, I felt little ambitious and started exploring ways to make it dynamic. I came across this post while looking for ways to bring the dynamic content.

With simple show/hide logic at my disposal, I ventured into creating GoalFace Tour page on facebook. Well, after couple of hours later, I have a simple, slide show looking, GoalFace fan page on facebook.

My team has some very innovative ideas on extending our facebook presence. I will be updating my blog as I bring them to life. Mean while, please feel to drop a line or two.

ASP.NET MVC, JQuery, and SuperFlyDOM

What is JQuery? “A new type of JavaScript Library” Jquery really made my UI developement Fun. If you are not familiar with JQuery, i strongly suggest you check it out. We can do more with less code using JQuery.

And then there is ASP.NET MVC to make make web development clean and TDD friendly. If you are not familiar with ASP.NET MVC you should check out Scott Gu’s Blog posts on different previews (currently Preview 4).

There are quite a few articles on how to integrate ASP.NET MVC and JQuery to make our lifes happier. A simple google search for “ASP.NET MVC with JQuery” return quite a few articles.

Continue reading ASP.NET MVC, JQuery, and SuperFlyDOM

ASP.NET MVC Live Example – DealFlakes

I have had been using DealFlakes.com as my technical playground for a while. I have experimented with some cool AJAX JSON based communication and some nifty Server side tricks. With the arrival (well, the previews) of ASP.NET MVC, I was so excited that i wanted to re-write the DealFlakes.com on MVC framework (not a lot once i know what i wanted to do and how to organize the data).

DealFlakes is basically a Deal Aggregation portal !

  1. JQUERY (for communication and User Experience effects)
  2. LINQ – (Linq-to-SQL and Linq-to-XML to talk to my data stores)
  3. And at this point ASP.NET MVC Preview 4 (I love the caching and Authentication modules in this preview)
  4. SQL Server (2005) with some XML files
  5. And hosted on IIS7 (Windows Server 2008)

I have learned quite a bit of JavaScript while working with Jquery and i encourage all of you to have a look at it. I am sure, you are going to love it. And my CSS skills are getting better :) Well, layout is kind of similar to Digg, umm(they invented the wheel)!!!

Any how, if you are a bargain hunter and would like to keep some money in your pocket (May be more available balance on your credit card) you should check out dealflakes.com. I am going to keep this as a serious website and not going to play with it any more (at least that effects the Functionality and User Experience). And yes, i will be adding some very exciting features very soon. So, stay tuned.

Go DealFlakes…

Budigelli

Moved to Windows Server 2008 Hosting

The move to windows server 2008 is mostly done. I have the sites hosted on server 2008 and i still need to update my mail servers. It took a while to get them running but i am happy that its done.

I had some trouble with web.config file migration in the beginning (need to migrate web.config file to work on server 2008’s integrated mode).

All the projects i am working on going through a face-lift at this time. I will update the progress as i make them available.

Thanks for your time..

Misguided AdSense ads from Companies-Is it right

Misguiding advertisements on AdSense? How bad is it (if at all)!!!

I have couple of blog posts on my journey to find a reasonably priced (read, under my budget) windows server 2008 host with decent SQL Server 2005 data storage space. Like you find in most blogs, i have AdSense all over my blog:( So, i was going through the blog the other day and found a new advertisement for SQL Server hosting.

Having done substantial research on the existing hosting providers, i was surprised with this new provider. For a second, i thought may be i didn’t really search right!!! With Google’s AdSense TOC in mind (i believe i should not click on the AdSense links on my own site :) ), i patiently opened a new window and typed in the site’s name. Well, I got a web site that has nothing to do with either SQL Server or Hosting. I guess they choose to bid on SQL Server hosting related keywords (May be they are cheaper compared to the right keywords in the market sector they are in).

Continue reading Misguided AdSense ads from Companies-Is it right

Google finds something wrong with this search

Today, I was trying to find some good resources on Forms Authentication for ASP.NET MVC framework. So, i typed in “asp.net mvc forms authentication”. Google surprised me with the search results.

For some reason, the search phrase “asp.net mvc forms authentication” looks like an auto-generated search! Umm, i am sure i have searched before along those lines with out any problem. Any one ever had this issue!!

Check the below screen shot..

Continue reading Google finds something wrong with this search