Shane Henderson | Life at Match.com

Finally we are taking the plunge and migrating to Vault.  Today we received our licenses and are going full throttle to move away from Sourcesafe.  I am coordinating this so hopefully it will go smoothly.

Today we turned on geography detection by ip address.  The basic premise of this great concept is to take an ip address and look up a user's location (in this case the country only) and react on the result.  In our case it was to automatically route our users to one of our international sites automatically instead of them choosing their country through a popup or interstitial page. 

We purchased a product from Maxmind called GeoIP that seems to work really well.  They base their company on an open-source hybrid business model where you buy the data and they provide the open source API of your choice.  I used the C# class that they provided and changed it up a bit (I had to tweak the performance a bit so it could handle our load and add in our custom exception handling).

Right now we are only using the country lookup functionality but I hope to enhance it to include state, city, longitude, latitude, and ISP soon.

Today Jason Alexander (our user group President) & I toured several facilities for possible locations for our 1st meeting.  We finally settled on the Parr Public Library in Plano.  This library is not only an ideal location for positioning the user group meetings in a good area, but also an incredible building with a more than adequate setup for meetings.  We also got Match.com to provide the AV equipment until we get some of our own.  

As soon as we got our flashy new Plano Library cards ;) we booked our room online.  So now our first meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, April 7, and Rob Howard will be presenting for us.

Oh, and on a side note we ordered the officers business cards as well.  We got them really cheap so I hope they turn out well!

I am the new Vice President of the Plano .NET Users Group and I am very excited about how things are coming together so quickly.  We started up a web site, were able to get hosting through Easerve, acquired our first sponsor, and started taking new registrations on the site within one week!  The site is at http://www.pdnug.net.

I have been working hard on setting up the site with DotNetNuke (using the new beta) and it was very easy to set up.  I am currently working on a skin for the site that is based on a template that we purchased from a really cool design firm.

We are still trying to find a location, but I think that will come pretty soon.  If you are interested, go sign up!  We are going to send out newsletters to notify everyone who is registered when our first meeting is.  I think Rob Howard is going to present at our first meeting so that should be awesome!

Woot!  I am going to speak for a few minutes during the Dallas DevDays Keynote on March 8!  I can't wait to share all of the great things we have done with .NET at Match.com.  I was talking to Jason Alexander today about this and we think the rewrite of our site is probably the highlight of our careers.  Let me tell you...this project was HUGE, and I mean a HUGE project.  Wow, what a long road it has been and I can't wait to see what's next down the road.

Here is the case study that Microsoft did on our project.  http://www.microsoft.com/resources/casestudies/CaseStudy.asp?CaseStudyID=15011