My 2009: less writing, more code
I'm back to blogging after a year or so. I'm not particularly original by saying that a lot has changed around us in this time. For me, it means less writing and more code.
I will still be writing books and articles as long as there's a publisher with some concrete interest :) But I'm more active in the consulting arena and following two key projects.
One is IntelliMaker from AppAround.com. It is essentially an application to cover the last mile between sources of data and end users. The concept of a data source is quite wide here as it includes Office documents, SharePoint catalogs, anything under OLE DB and ODBC, Web services. Mapped to an IntelliMaker data set, any data source can be exposed as an object including a subset of the native properties and creating any sort of relationships, joins, and groupings. The final data set is then available to feed forms and workflows to model business processes. It is an ideal tool for the consultant engaged in system integration projects and for companies who can't afford developing ad hoc front-ends for their data and processes. Massively RAD, IntelliMaker is an ASP.NET 2.0 application and will go to the cloud quite soon. If this sounds interesting to you, go ahead and pay a visit to AppAround.com. In particular, have a look at Office Extensions.
The other cool project I'm working on is a new social networking application entirely done in ASP.NET and jQuery. It is named iBrii and is the electronic and cloud version of the old faithful yellow sticky notes. You have unlimited space to create notes that include videos, links, and images and can publish them to a permanent link and share them with other users. You can also simply send them out via classic emails. Your notes remain up in the cloud and if shared with other users they can receive changes instantaneously. The primary reason that convinced me to use iBrii is the possibility of storing in a single place all the content of otherwise long emails threads, especially when the thread goes on for a few minutes, contains valuable information, but you won't be using it soon and want to save it for further reference. Sharing data with groups of people and publishing it is the driving force of iBrii. Not just as Twitter; not just as Facebook, not just as Google Documents. If this sounds somewhat interesting to you, and you want to give it a try, register today here and let me know. It is still a beta and works great with FF3, IE7 and IE8. My account there is despos. Send me your notes then!