Jeff's Junk

Anatomy of an ASP.NET site for amusement park fanboys

Jeff — Thu, 15 May 2008 16:04:00 GMT

This is a post I've meant to write for a very long time. Since 1998, my part-time job of sorts has been to maintain a number of community sites. One of those, started ten years ago, was Guide to The Point. "The Point" in this case is Cedar Point, an amusement park an hour west of Cleveland and about two hours from Detroit. It's home to more roller coasters than any other place on earth, and for people how grow up in the region, it's a summer ritual. In 2004, I joined forced with a friend doing another site, and we called it PointBuzz, inspired in name by my woefully neglected general coaster enthusiast site CoasterBuzz. These sites have become a business to a certain degree, since the ad revenue isn't exactly small coin. And if you can make money doing something you enjoy, why not?

Late last year we rebuilt the site. The old version was still running on v1.1 of .NET, and frankly a lot of the code was vintage 2001 stuff built on the beta of .NET. Our goals for rebuilding it were to concentrate on what we were good at: news, forums and photos. Our previous attempt ended up being a huge array of content that, frankly, was just as easily found on the official Cedar Point site and we didn't really have time to maintain it. A secondary goal was to boost performance (the site peaks around a million page views a month, sometimes as much as 100k a day) and get the code base into something maintainable. Let's face it, in 2001 I barely understood what OOP was, and even in 2004, prior to writing my book and having experience in a giant company, I had a lot to learn. The app as a whole was rather fragile when it came time to change something.

Naturally the first priority for me was rewriting POP Forums. The benefit of experience is that I know how many things I did poorly in the previous version from late 2003. I've tried to eliminate much of that legacy, but there are still things I find in my code, often inconsequential, that should be different, like checking for a string to be empty or null instead of String.IsNullOrEmpty(). I spent literally years trying to make it work with Membership and Profile in a way that I liked, and generally it did, but I abandoned that cause. You had to give stuff up too often when making efficient database calls, and that annoyed me. It's not that there aren't logical architectural solutions, it's that I was spending all kinds of time worrying about it, when I was the first and primary user of the app!

What was important to me was using a little AJAX where it made sense, and using the ASP.NET AJAX framework for any client script I had. The version you can download doesn't have it yet, but the version running on PointBuzz does, and I'm very pleased with the way you can encapsulate it and reuse it. The primary use is to load stuff into the page, like user profile data, dynamically. Most forums who you the user's name, number of posts, astrological sign and other useless shit that doesn't advance discussion, and I've always been annoyed by that. (Heck, you've been able to turn off signatures and profiles in my app, also annoying, since 2003.) So I just load that when a user chooses to view it. I also do first post previews this way, but not as tool tips the way vBulletin does (because I find that annoying too). Finally, I refactored the mess that is my rich text control, dating back to 2000 at least, so that it uses the AJAX framework.

The forum app does a whole lot of caching, but not to an extent that it isn't necessary. In old versions, I found that it wasn't holding on to much because the cache collection got enormous and it was always cycling items out. I also didn't cache on a paged basis, so if you viewed a topic with 1,000 posts, it read and cached the whole thing. That was silly. I've found that nearly all of the performance tweaks have to do with the database and caching, which I guess is certainly no surprise.

Custom controls were also a big part of it, using list controllers to handle UI elements based on the data they created. I had mixed success with this, because the thread page still has a lot of code in it because of all the stuff going on. On the other hand, the forum index page is pretty lean in code-behind. Doing custom templated controls also helps, because you can easily drop in an ad, for example, in between forums, topics or posts.

I prototyped a search engine for the forum way, way back in 2004, and after some tweaking I got something I'm pretty happy with. The SQL is incredibly ugly, but the performance isn't bad. Basically, when a post is updated, it's marked for indexing. A background thread on a timer dissects all of the words, throws out the junk and scores them on frequency and appearance in the title. I think the scoring formula needs some work, but most of the time I get pretty relevant results.

Honestly I could probably talk about the forum as a stream of consciousness forever, so I'll move on to photos. The truth is, we have too many. Walt, my partner on the site, went through a document everything phase, and we have over 6,000 photos to prove it. This is honestly not a totally solved problem. We have categories and albums as units of navigation, and we also have tags. The truth is that people generally go to photos of the roller coasters or to albums we link to from news items. We don't know if that's good enough, and we have thousands of photos untagged.

From a code standpoint, we started testing the photo app months before re-launching with live data. Contrary to the advice a lot of people gave me, I decided to store the photos in the database. My reasoning had mostly to do with ease of backing up. HttpHandlers serve the images and the thumbnails, and frankly I've not encountered any performance issues at all. I also kept permissions for editing the photo collection as abstract as possible. There's a simple HttpModule that does the required plumbing to map forum user data into the photo app. I can just as easily wire it up to anything else.

The news management is nothing special, and as such doesn't exist as its own project. The only interesting thing is that it will replace the first post of a special forum topic with a user control that has the news item in it, so essentially there are two views of it, either in the forum or the regular news page.

That's really the bulk of the site. The forum is used for all the member handling junk and e-mail.

Incidentally, I do hope to have another beta of the forum out soon. In addition to the items I listed on the PF site, I've also rewritten the private messaging.

A question I get a lot is, "Why not just use stuff that's already out there?" Aside from being my own code monkey, all of the stuff out there tries to be too many things to too many people. I don't have excessive database tables to deal with, superfluous UI, rigid style elements, etc. The forum is a lot of code, sure, but overall the rest of this stuff isn't hard to roll on your own. If you've got the skills, why not?

Video, Flash and Silverlight

Jeff — Thu, 15 May 2008 15:21:00 GMT

I've been having a good time messing around with video this week, even though I haven't been able to commit a lot of time to it. As I mentioned before, it's a little frustrating that I essentially have to relearn Final Cut Pro shortcuts and such over and over since I don't do it enough.

Being a former broadcaster with the salary of an in demand programmer has really allowed me to stay in the loop with video gear and own "real" HD gear. (I have a Panasonic HVX200, for which the major expense is the solid state media.) It's funny how I've thrown a lot of convention out the door with regards to how I edit, since you're not constrained by the "package" mentality of broadcast news. Especially when you're dealing with fanboy type content, you can go with nice long cuts of stuff they just want to see.

In any case, I've been a QuickTime fan for many years. Back in the day, this was because the Sorenson Pro codec was easily the best in terms of quality. Then H.264 came around, and I declared it as the future years ago, back when most computers didn't have the nuts to even play it back.

These days, the action has been in Flash, for the obvious reason that it's so universally available. The recent adoption for Flash to playback H.264 QT movies makes it a total slam dunk for me. The primary benefit is one of work flow. It's easy to export these from Final Cut Pro very quickly.

I've started to play with Flash, the authoring application, to try and hack out a slightly customized video player. As an IDE for writing code, it absolutely sucks. ActionScript is not terrible, but I kept hitting obstacles in trying to get moving. So many articles online are behind subscriptions, and the documentation isn't organized very well. I'd kill for Intellisense.

Silverlight v2 has a lot going for it, though I haven't had any time to mess with it. I've barely touched Silverlight v1.x. Assuming that adoption skyrockets with the Olympics, I can see moving toward it for a lot of different reasons. Aside from being .NET-centric, the server-side of things have a lot of appeal. I remember the demo for the media server at Mix where they showed how you don't have to stream out the entire file too far in advance when there's potential that part of the video may never be watched. That's awesome stuff. The price is right too (free).

The only big negative to Silverlight as a video platform, for me, is the work flow issue. I can't quickly and easily get the video there out of the tools I use, and these are tools that the bulk of people in the field are using.

When I stop to think about it though, I left broadcast about nine years ago, and it's still not quite where I thought it would be with regards to video on the Internet. I mean that in terms of quality, which is no longer a function of CPU power, just bandwidth. Hopefully the US can catch up in that regard.

.NET is teh suX0rz!!11! (And Ars' editorial standards are on the decline)

Jeff — Mon, 05 May 2008 17:41:00 GMT

I love Ars Technica, but I think they're slipping. While the articles they post in the legal realm are fascinating, when they get down to writing about bits, they get the most uninformed jackasses they can find. Check out this steaming pile of crap on why .NET is a failure, and count how many times you see the term "API" (take a drink every time!).

It's an opinion piece wrapped up as fact, and one of many pieces you can find that people will buy in to the credibility where none exists (just read the comments). What's more annoying is that this is presumably setting up the author's Mac zealotry, which as a Mac fan and a .NET developer I could really do without.

I'd love to see this guy's resume to see just how much experience he's had. Heck, maybe we can lump him into one of his neat little categories of developers.

I suppose just linking to the article is some sort of validation, but my real intention is to show that this is the sort of stuff in the online tech quasi-press that is of the least value, and it's starting to permeate RSS feeds. It's basically Brit/Lindz gossip. No platform is quite perfect, but you know, there are millions of us doing really sweet things with this one, and not because of some evil monopolistic power either.

Craptacular!

Twitter and more disconnection

Jeff — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:05:00 GMT

It's weird how bloggers, gossip types and "Web 2.0" company founders and execs have developed into this strange pseudo-celebrity sphere, where many of them are constantly stroking each other. What's unfortunate about it is that the podcasts, blogs and other media I've consumed from the tech world are becoming hopelessly out of touch.

I know I've previously blogged about this with regards to Leo Laporte and the This Week in Tech gang's comments about how "nobody uses .NET," but reverse awareness is also getting out of hand. This post from Scoble is one of countless about Twitter, and it's hopelessly out of touch. The comments on the post seem to concur. Twitter has become something of a flagship for attention whoring, especially in that pseudo-celebrity community. Seriously, I'm so tired of hearing about it, about how great it is and it's changing the world.

I'm not generally one to be a poopy pants about new technology, but I agree with the comments about how this thing is a niche feature for something else, not a business. VC's keep sinking money into it, and for what? It feels like 2000 all over again.

And it wouldn't be so damn annoying if it weren't for the constant, "This is our attention whoring party and we're so awesome," kinds of posts and comments. Seriously, take it to your average high school, and they'll be like, "Yeah, I can send text messages, what do I need this for?" Even kids who live for attention don't see the value in this.

The pseudo-celebrities are living unbalanced lives, as far as I'm concerned, which probably contributes to their lack of perspective on Twitter's true impact. I don't think it's an over-generalization to say that most people outside the valley don't feel any need to share when they take a dump to their followers, or know when the followers are taking a dump. There are so many more important things going on at all times, and this constant connection noise is, in my opinion, a waste of time.

Do any of these people turn off the electronic devices and spend time with their kids, pets, a book or a movie or whatever? Is this "knowledge" about what everyone else does really that important?

"Gonna go ahead and..." Please, stop!

Jeff — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 18:44:00 GMT

For the love of God, please, if you do screen casts or live demos, please try to let go of the "gonna go ahead and" verbal crutch. I've noticed countless people who otherwise do amazing demos in person and in video screen casts say this over and over and over and over and over and over (see, it's annoying!). Aside from being Lumburghian and said to be made fun of, it's a huge distraction. It's much, much worse than saying "um" over and over.

So I'm gonna go ahead and push publish now, then I'm gonna go ahead and get a glass of water, then go ahead and get back to writing code.

Observations on VS2008, .NET v3.5 after four months

Jeff — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 17:39:00 GMT

Wow, can you believe the new versions have been with us already for one-third of a year? Time flies! I launched a site using the new versions shortly after release, so I'm happy to say that my experience in production has been mostly positive. Here are some loosely coupled thoughts...

First off, the IDE is a leap in the right direction. Compiling stuff in particular feels much faster. The only real performance complaint I can find involves the rare case where I need to switch from code view to WYSIWYG when dealing with HTML. And heck, that might be caused by ReSharper for some unknown reason. Ditto for the crashes I get frequently when editing CSS. I don't find the CSS features that useful, so I don't encounter those problems very often.

On one hand, I like that the framework now ships with all of the right goodies together, including the AJAX framework. What I don't like is the mess of a default web.config you need to get it all to work. It has not grown gracefully, and it's a pain to manage as you migrate older stuff to v3.5. The further distinctions using IIS7, which I haven't had to use yet, are also annoying.

I feel to a certain degree that VS isn't "done" without ReSharper, and I'm anxiously awaiting JetBrains to v4 moving forward. The most recent nightly builds are actually pretty sweet and mostly work, but every once in awhile it dies and brings down VS with it. That's the price you pay for being an uber-early adopter, I suppose.

While the AJAX framework has actually been out for about a year, I find that I'm just now getting deep into using it, especially the client side of things. I still have a strong distaste for JavaScript, but the framework does make it less painful to use. The challenge is thinking the way the authors want you to think, and once you make that leap, it's not nearly as hard to get functional code quickly.

The client-side debugging in IE is hit or miss. Sometimes it doesn't work, and I'm not even sure why. More often than not, I find myself ending up in Firebug and debugging that way. I think the biggest complaint I have is that it's still meant to work around the F5-and-run model, which is still not ideal in the Web world, where the URL's you use may frankly not even map to actual files, or you want to run off some current form state or user session data.

Beyond those minor issues, I'm enjoying the tools, and when I actually manage to buckle down and get something done, it's fun to write code.

The ASP.NET community's only real problem is education

Jeff — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 16:35:00 GMT

After reading this post from Dan Hounshell (via Rob Howard's post), I'm drawn to more questions about "what's wrong with the ASP.NET community," and I'm still convinced that people are asking the wrong questions.

To really understand where we are, I think we need to look at where we've been. There's a history when it comes to this platform, and I don't think you can really get to the meat of the platform's development and community without having that context.

In 2001 and 2002, I was yet another person beginning the transition out of the horrible ASP 3.0 world to ASP.NET. I was immediately active on GotDotNet, and then the asp.net forums. I posted a ton in CrystalTech's user forum, and was designated .NET guy of the year or something on SitePoint's forum. I was all about trying to help people out because, by extension, it strengthened my own experience.

Let met get back to that in a moment though. In the pre-ASP.NET world, as I mentioned, we were in ASP. Visual Basic 6 and other previous versions were about as common as Windows itself in little shops in every IT department. That Visual Basic world was powerful because you didn't have to be a programming genius to make stuff work. And in the world of drag-and-drop, you didn't even need to be all that handy with code.

ASP really required us to know how to write script, but by the very nature of script, we were focused on simply getting things done in the fastest and easiest way possible. These were very task-driven days. Thinking of a Web site as an application was more or less unheard of.

It isn't surprising that a great many people, I'm even willing to bet a majority, came to ASP.NET from one of those two worlds. That's a very different world from those who had experience with C++ or Java. It's something that was apparent in my experience with the various communities I frequently visited. I might have been an early adopter and forced myself to better understand the OOP world, but maybe that's because I was in an unemployment phase and had time to learn. To this day, a lot of questions in these communities are along the lines of, "How do I do this in ASP.NET" or "What's the command that does this." These are the wrong questions. A lot of people, in an effort to make something work, are looking for classes as if they were keywords in the language they're using.

In my book, I say in the first chapter, "The classes you write are not any different from those written by Microsoft in the .NET Framework." I'm surprised when I run into people with questions that they don't really understand this. It's the first problem with .NET education, that people aren't learning what objects are, or instances, or how a class is different from an instance. Most people fast forward to, "How do I save a cookie," without the slightest understanding or care about the moving parts like HttpCookie or the request/response lifecycle of ASP.NET. That's a problem.

I've felt that the lack of instruction involving object-oriented programming and how ASP.NET itself works is a huge problem. It's a problem that I wanted to further write about in my book, but was bullied into the chapter list I ended up with. Honestly, how to do "Hello World" with a Label control is like chapter 10 in my mind, but that's not how it is approached by anyone.

There is a lot of failure to throw around in that arena, none of which is attributed to any specific individuals or organizations. Books are written assuming OOP understanding or to learn whatever in seven days. Web articles, blogs and forums have zero cohesive vision, and it's a Google-and-go world. The only way I can think of to overcome this is the desire on the part of the individual to dig deeper, and you can't force that.

So by now you're thinking, "Dude, this isn't what community leaders and bloggers are even talking about." Yeah, no kidding, that's my point. That pyramid on Dan's blog post, you see that enormous part at the bottom? That's who we're talking about. The conversation, however, gets into whether or not you should use NUnit or the VS testing framework, or whether or not some new framework is open source or community developed or Microsoft developed or whatever. It's like this horrible "inside baseball" conversation that is totally irrelevant for the bulk of the community that the self-appointed thought leaders are talking about.

Before you get all up in my grill, I'm not suggesting that these aren't some important things to discuss. I'm just suggesting that these subjects are self-serving for a very small constituency of the community. To the cookie guy, this is like string theory, and there are a lot of cookie guys out there.

Since we're talking about it, I'm extremely happy with the direction that the platform has gone the last two years or so. Guthrie's various teams are kicking ass and adding value to their products in a way that makes my life easier. Ultimately, that's what I want from a company when I'm buying their products. C#3 and VS2008 were like the ultimate Christmas, and their ongoing open efforts, delivering something early and often (MVC comes to mind) is awesome.

In any case, I think the thought leadership needs to step away from the computer science and development methodology religion and think a little more about how we get those developers up to where we'd like them to be. God knows we'd like to hire more people like that.

Leo Laporte and TWIT are getting out of touch: "Web developers don't like Microsoft"

Jeff — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:43:00 GMT

I was listening to TWIT #136 and, wow, Leo Laporte is totally out of touch. Patrick Norton is not far behind. Listen starting around 36:30. I've found that lately these guys are hanging out in Pundit Valley and completely missing what's going on in the rest of the world. He's actually got the balls to suggest that Web developers don't like Microsoft, and that believing in Silverlight is akin to drinking the Kool-Aid®. Had Leo actually gone to Mix08, I think he'd feel differently.

You can throw all kinds of sites out there that use ASP.NET today, like Chase, Match.com, Sharebuilder, Schwans, Ars, and this little start-up I work for called Insurance.com, and he still would believe something different. The funny thing is when they go on to say only a million people who use Twitter, which, I know this comes as a shock to the non-blogging valley types, most people don't have any desire to use. Put the Calacanis Twitter attention whoring aside and put it in perspective.

Mix08 was certainly a coming out party for the part of Microsoft some of us already knew about. Going back to 2004 when I started writing my book, I was surprised at the way things were opening up. Today, you can debug the .NET Framework code, the very sweet MVC framework is being developed with full source exposure, and (gasp!) unit testing. Silverlight is cross-platform and finally nails down the designer vs. programmer problem. We can make fun of Windows Vista and Office all day long, but if you're paying attention, you'll see that Microsoft has amazing tools, shipping, today.

I'm not qualified to say that they're better, because I don't have time to learn every new technology that comes around. But, Patrick Norton, .NET has been shipping and improving now since 2001's "go live" beta license. I have a site written using ASP.NET v1.0, and running on v3.5. Before you start pontificating about the platform, maybe you should talk to people who actually use it.

This Web developer loves Microsoft, in particular Scott Guthrie's entire division. Come to Mix next year, Leo and Patrick, and get clued in. You guys cease to be credible pundits when you stop paying attention.

Mix08: Some overall impressions

Jeff — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:17:00 GMT

I've got two more sessions to go, but while it's fresh in my mind, I'd like to rattle off some overall impressions of this conference. When it's over, I'm going to purge my brain with alcohol, gambling and shows.

First off, what I dig about this conference is that it's very diverse in its content and target audience. Most conferences are endless code demos that make you want to kill yourself. I consider myself a well-rounded person who enjoys the code, but also the creative side, the business and the culture.

It also has a bit of a rock star vibe. In addition to Microsoft execs being here, you get the authors of the books you read, "Web 2.0" (I hate that term) types behind major sites changing the way we use the Web, and people everywhere who might build the next big thing.

And there's something I haven't really touched on, is the conversations in the halls and at meals. Ballmer mentioned that you can get the whole conference, essentially, online, but that's not entirely true. The people you meet are a huge part of what you get out of it. I mean, I met a guy who works for Oprah's studio rolling his own media management software. How cool is that?

Silverlight is obviously a huge deal at this conference, and for good reason. I admit, I'm drinking the Kool-Aid now. It probably has zero application to my day job, but it's fascinating to me. The very clear separation of code and presentation is exactly what I wish Flash did. That, and I wish Flash used C#.

This conference is a good blend of now and future. There really isn't anything here that is pie-in-the-sky future porn. Yes, there's a certain level of Microsoft centricity, but that's to be expected since it's their conference. And as a Microsoft developer, I don't mind. Unlike some of the local events though, they're not pushing crap I don't care about.

Overall, this conference really delivers, and this one was even better than the 2006 event. It's ridiculously expensive, but they do take care of you in terms of food and such. The party sure is a nice touch. They announced that next year's event will be here at The Venetian as well. I hope I can attend again next year!

Mix08: The future of advertising

Jeff — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:47:00 GMT

Like a moron, I didn't realize that the added session on Hard Rock's Silverlight memorabilia site was first, not last, today, so I went to a really boring session on what Microsoft thinks the future of advertising is.

And the truth is, I don't think they know. The presenter said that the entire process of buying and displaying ads online is terribly inefficient (he neglected to mention it's not nearly as bad as other forms of media). The future is going to work more along the lines of ad exchanges, a la the stock market, which is something we've heard countless times in other places, so there's no new information there.

The problem as I see it is not a technical one. Sure, there's no question at all that we can achieve better targeting and transparency, but who is going to be willing to share their data in these exchanges? I'm a little skeptical there. For example, can you see Google saying, "Yes, we have about a half-billion ad impressions available for 30-something females who like bowling?" If they were willing to share that, my suspicion is that they'll want a cut for that, and as a publisher, I worry about the revenue being even further diluted.

Indeed, when you look at the fact that only 5,000 companies buy 90% of the advertising, you start to wonder if it matters.

I'm in the room now where the Hard Rock demo was, and I'm annoyed. I guess I'll have to catch that one on video later.

Mix08: ASP.NET MVC

Jeff — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:57:00 GMT

Not surprisingly, the ASP.NET MVC session last night was absolutely packed. Scott Hanselman, as it turns out, is a pretty dynamic speaker, and frankly pretty funny. MVC is a very computer sciencey kind of concept, but it's also a very neat way to generate Web sites.

The thing that's kind of hard to deal with is that Microsoft is going entirely the opposite direction from eight years ago, where a limited number of people saw something and we had a big bang release. This is something that is truly agile and being developed completely in the open. With that transparency comes the "when it's done" ethos, which is fine, but I worry that there's some expectation gap there for customers who have release and support expectations. I mean, until it's RTM, I can tell you that we'll never be using it at Insurance.com. (I'm not indicating we would anyway, I'm just giving an example.)

In any case, there's a lot of appeal to drive the site in part by the URI. What feels strange is letting go of the postback model, which you very much have to do in this case. That forces you into a very smooth and task-driven way of designing an application. You can see this in all its glory on pretty much anything built with Ruby on Rails today. There's a "forced" style of sorts you see in those sites (see any of the 37signals sites). I'm not suggesting that's bad in any way, because I think it's actually pretty cool. As Hanselman was quick to point out though, it's not ideal for every situation. What I'm anxious to see is how people are using it in the real world, and how they roll it in a meaningful way with Web forms and even the AJAX framework.

If it were out today, I have a personal project in mind that I'd love to try it out on, but even when it's a small "me" project, I don't know that I want to commit to non-final bits.

Mix08: Silverlight porn

Jeff — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 23:59:00 GMT

In case you haven't already seen it, this is the drool-worthy thing using Silverlight 2. Gasp!

http://memorabilia.hardrock.com/

Mix08: The Steve Ballmer interview by Guy Kawaski

Jeff — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:08:00 GMT

Kawasaki took no time to take cheap shots at Ballmer, working in chair throwing jokes in the first minute.

Google he says they're definitely underdogs in the search and advertising markets. He says Apple also does good work in the music and PC space, and he hopes they can do a better job on their products.

Ballmer says he's driven by three things. Great products, great people and the challenges of the industry. This is the part I respect about him, and his excitement, even if it becomes funny video on YouTube.

He says that Silverlight is at its core their attempt to offer developers a no-compromise opportunity to develop what people really want.

Ballmer really stuck it to Kawasaki for his "heavy" MacBook Air, when he was asked "What's the deal with Vista?" Apparently it seems Kawasaki had it running on the thing.

He says Microsoft does two things well, desktop and enterprise, but they're trying to build new skillsets in the consumer device and online areas. He also says that driver and app compatibility has been an issue with Vista (no shit). Overall, he's been surprisingly candid when I've seen him make a lot of comments previously that are so head-in-the-sand. I think much of that is PR, because he's clearly not stupid.

Someone asked how IE got left behind while .NET has been quickly evolving since its release. Ballmer says they tied it to Vista, and shouldn't have, saying they needed to get things out faster and not tied in.

Another asked what MS will do with many of the PHP apps running in Yahoo, and he said they'd likely continue running. He says they'll do what makes sense, but not run two of everything. He said they want Windows Server to be the best place to run PHP.

Regarding synergies with Yahoo properties, he says that reaching a greater scale for advertising is important to be effective. The body of advertisers they have, as well as Yahoo, doesn't match Google, who can basically serve an ad for almost any search term.

Some douche from the Seattle Times asked a question about the Sonics. Ballmer shot him down.

Given my distaste for the OS wing of Microsoft, I still think there's enough going on with the smart people there that despite all the stumbling, they're figuring it out. Ballmer doesn't come off as an obstacle the way that I thought he might.

Mix08: Web 2.0 sustainability

Jeff — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 19:43:00 GMT

I just got out of a panel discussion that included the guy from Me.dium, a VC, Scoble, Kevin Rose, and some other guy I don't remember. Interesting discussion, and the general theme was do right by your users, and find the mix of advertising and subscription models to pay the bills.

I asked Scoble and Kevin the same thing I asked the King of Kong guy the other day, regarding the transformation of video delivery and monetization. They both said they're not trying to kill cable or broadcast, but rather serve a specific audience. The moderator was kind of a douche and wouldn't allow the discussion to keep flowing, unfortunately, and God knows Scoble had more to say.

After the session, I got a moment of Kevin's time to congratulate him on his success and tell him that his success is a real inspiration to schmucks like me who have a hard time turning ideas into real and sustainable businesses. He was very gracious about it. For a guy who's basically a rock star, he strikes me as a very down to earth kind of guy.

Mix08: Air and gender

Jeff — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 17:02:00 GMT

I'm sitting here in Nikhil Kothari's session on ASP.NET AJAX, and he's going through some of the more basic stuff to start. So I'm reading e-mail and kinda scoping out the room. First of all, there's a guy with a MacBook Air sitting in front of me. It's very cool. I couldn't help but notice he was looking at Google Analytics, and that his site has had 14 million visitors and 124 million page views in the last month. Gasp! I guess he can afford that laptop.

Here's something I did not expect. This is the first session I've gone to that was very heavily code/developer-centric. I'm very surprised to see how many women there are here. It's no secret that this profession tends to be a sausage party, either because of gender tendencies or some kind of discrimination (I honestly don't know or care). The only reason I even notice is because gender and racial diversity in work, to me, feels more like real life. It's hard to explain exactly.

OK... Nikhil's getting to the good stuff, gotta pay attention.