James Senior's Blog

Jon Udell’s Innovators show this featured Hugh McGuire who is launching a new project, BookOven, designed to aid collaboration between authors and readers during a book’s creation.

His post got me thinking about how since being in the US I have spun up two subscriptions to magazines where prior to my move I had consumed all my content online.  The two magazines are Wired and GQ and the thing that drew me to their subscription was the price - $10 for a year long subscription.  This to me, was astonishingly cheap and given that I’ve been an avid reader online I felt it was my duty to give back in this small way.

Living and working in Seattle amongst so many technophiles and geeks is always fascinating no more so than on the public bus - the 545, that ferries us all from Seattle to Redmond.  Once onboard one can’t help but study the habits of individuals.  There are laptops and devices being used in most seats, grabbing the free wifi, whilst there are a few of us who are living the renaissance and reading – shock horror - books and magazines. 

There’s something romantic and soothing being offline, amongst pages you can feel and turn, that don’t make your eyes tired.  There’s no temptation to check your email with the gold Outlook logo staring you down – it’s nice. 

I consider it the perfect start to my day and it’s all thanks to a $10 a year subscription to a medium that is supposedly doomed.  It’s hard to believe that given the small amount there’s not a bigger draw to magazine subscriptions.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this little thought bubble, reading it online on your screen, for free.  Happy Sunday.

(Photo thanks to www.busdude.com and his final collection of bus photos from the Seattle area.)

As well as releasing Web Platform Installer Version 2, we’ve also launched a bunch of Web App Toolkits that show you how to accomplish common web development tasks with small sample apps.  We provide all the source code so that you can go from 0 to F5 in less than 60 seconds.  Check out the Channel 9 interview I’ve done with Jonathan on Web App Toolkits! The scenarios we’ve covered with the first round of Web App Toolkits include:

• Add Bing to your website
• Enhance your web app using IE8
• Mobile Web Applications
• Adding FAQ to your website
• Make your web app “social”
• Template driven email
• Add a REST API to your website

One of the Web App Toolkits that was close to my heart (other than the Social one, of course) was the Bing Web App Toolkit which shows how you can bring search a Web App Toolkit using the Bing API 2.0.  Aside from the cool Web Controls that we’ve supplied you get a sample app where we spice up the UI using JavaScript and the MS Ajax Library to to asynchronous calls back to the Bing API to get the results I need.

Then I took the Web App Toolkit one step further and added some jQuery UI effects to add that next layer of slickness.  Here are the JavaScript references for both Microsoft Ajax and jQuery playing nicely alongside one another.

In this example we have Client Templates and the MS Ajax dataview handling all the data fetching and binding whilst the jQuery UI plugin takes care of the UX.

The jQuery UI elements I added included a lightbox from Leandro’s cool website, for the images that are returned from Bing, and qTip from Craigsworks.com which provide some nice tooltip effects to display extra search information returned from Bing. 

Bringing these into my project is so easy. For the Lightbox plugin all you need to do is assign the repeating element in the template a class of “lightbox”.  In this example it’s the anchor element (see below) and the jQuery UI plugin will do the rest.

It’s a similar story for the tool tips where I just drop in a class of “tooltip” into the anchor element and the jQuery UI plugin does the rest.

I’ve posted the code for this app on my Skydrive account – feel free to download it below:

Stumbled across a nice feature in Hotmail today.  You can change your keyboard shortcuts in Hotmail to use either Hotmail/OWA mode or for users who are more familiar with Yahoo Mail or Gmail there is an option for them too.  The always useful help library for Windows Live has a full list of keyboard shortcuts for all modes which I’ve copied and pasted in all its glory here for your viewing pleasure:

Keyboard shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts can save you time when you use Windows Live Hotmail.

If you're more familiar with Gmail or Yahoo! keyboard shortcuts, you can use these in Hotmail too. If a cell is empty, there is no corresponding keyboard shortcut in Gmail or Yahoo!.

Innovation was rife and developers were coding like demons possessed at the Startup Weekend in Redmond this weekend as groups took ideas from whiteboard to demoware in a coffee fuelled 54 hours.  It was great to see a wide range of platforms and technologies in play from ASP.NET MVC web apps, AJAX and Silverlight RIAs and mobile clients on WinMo, Palm and iPhone. 

The big winner was an app called “Search Kick”, a contextual search app, who walked away with a cool $5000 in cash and a potential investment in the future from H-Farm, also for $5000.  Also in the top three was iPhone app, “Learn That Name”, a cool bit of software that helped you put names to faces.  The majority of apps (15 of 16) were being built on the Microsoft Web Platform – and everyone had a copy of the Web Platform Installer spun up at least once during the day!

The thing that made me smile was seeing so many passionate, creative people coming together as strangers to create cool software on different platforms, using different tools.  The teams had a great time doing so and the real winner was innovation and I’m really excited to see where these apps go as businesses.

My CTO Advice

Myself and Brian Gorbett were “CTOs for hire” and we had a blast brainstorming cool ideas with the teams and guiding them as they made decisions on which technologies to build on.  Here are my top tips that I was giving the startups during the weekend:

1. Leverage skills you have in your group

Everyone brings something unique to the table from database architecture, UX design to social media guru – delegate appropriately and get everyone working to their strengths – you are most effective that way.

2. Choose the right technology for the job

If you are building a table in your web app to show data, for heaven’s sake don’t use Silverlight – it’s overkill! Use HTML with some JavaScript from jQuery to make it slick and some client templating from ASP.NET AJAX Preview 4 to bring the the data from the server without refreshing the page.  Every technology has a time and place, don’t try and crowbar in a technology just because it’s cool – fit the problem to an appropriate technology.

3. Deliver something that pops

At these events it is easy to bite of more than you can chew.  Be aggressive but realistic and aim to deliver something within the time constraints.  It is far better to knock one feature out of the park than to deliver 10 half-assed features that fail to pop.

4. Watch the clock

Keep an eye on your time constraints and work in tight iterations.  The most successful teams were those that collaborated well and worked in hourly stints and then pulled together what they had done into one solution.

5. The Web Platform Installer is your best friend – use it

The Web Platform Installer is the quickest and easiest way to get a development rig up and running.  If ASP.NET is your thing or PHP gets you going you can get it all from server, through to database and tools.  The Web Platform Installer gives you everything you need on one hit without having to install everything separately.  Work smarter not harder – use the Web Platform Installer.

6. (Ab)use BizSpark

Get Microsoft’s software.  Get startup advice.  Use our investor network.  BizSpark is a (nearly*) free program and if you don’t use it, even just part of it, you are missing a few brain cells. *$100 enrollment fee (due when you exit the program)

Wrapping Up

Congrats to the winning teams and props to everyone who came along and coded their hearts out for 54 hours to deliver a wide array of cool solutions on various platforms.  There’s nothing like passionate people and innovation going on to make people stay awake for 54 hours building cool shit.

I’m looking forward to future Startup Weekends and am really interested to see what other groups of entrepreneurs and startups can come up with as Startup Weekend continues to rock the world!

Thanks to the Clint and Marc from Startup Weekend team for coming to Seattle and hosting the biggest event ever!