A quick snapshot of my morning, the culmination of days of grinding it out:
- We got StorageByMail's revamped, Rackspace Cloud-converted site launched.
- We've been prototyping a creative multi-product stealth-mode SaaS offering for a NYC-area startup. I've been acting in both consulting CTO and lead dev roles, and have had the first chance in a while to work with Java and Tomcat applications commercially.
- My work continues on a near-beta Twitter business services app; that app is now growing to include LinkedIn and Facebook as well.
- I continue work on a still-stealth multi-social platform biz app I'm partnered with a great team out of NYC on. (Public beta by mid-March!)
As part of these efforts, in the last three weeks I have:
- Started using ADO.NET Entities and LINQ to Entities instead of LINQ-to-SQL. Entities seem gosh darn piggish when it comes to RAM consumption -- even when managing repository lifetime in what I understand to be best-practice fashion. I don't recall that issue with LINQ-to-SQL. Generating the model/updating the model from the database is painful when it comes to some relationships that seem to require manual removal every regeneration. I hope Microsoft gets it right in 4.0.
- Got over my fear of lambda expressions, at least fairly simple ones. I still need to fully grok compiled functions. Baby steps.
- Realized yet again how much MS ASP.NET AJAX stinks. Obscure and painful to work with.
- Written a .NET consumer for the Twitter Streaming API. I haven't come across any other full implementations in .NET, though my basic incremental HTTP consumer is modeled after others' examples. I will probably publish this to Google Code soon.
- Started working with Google Buzz.
- Written a .NET PubSubHubbub subscriber client and callback handler. This has been published to Google Code.
- Worked with the new Buzzzy API on top of Google Buzz. Useful API for my needs, but the 250 requests/hour limit is kneecapping.
- Created my own Google Buzz firehose by crawling 4.2M Google Profile IDs (crawl in-progress now, finally got a nice multi-threaded crawler purring) and subscribing to push notification for all of their Buzz feeds through pubsubhubbub.appspot.com. Unfortunately 4.2M is still not the complete set of profiles, but it's a great start.
Haven't yet had time to catch my breath or catch up on sleep ... but there's light at the end of the tunnel! More launches/betas to come! And more aggravation, learning and ... "opportunities" along the way I'm sure :)
