MillsMash

As i mentioned in my last post I have recently taken a position with The Brand Union in the Middle East. Having only ever worked for IT / Online marketing companies branding is not something that I have given much consideration for. I’ve always realised it’s importance but just left it up to someone else. Obviously now that i work for a branding agency my views and insights have substantially changed and so inline with that some of my posts going forward will feature an element of branding and this is going to be the first.

Mozilla have just released new functionality for their Firefox internet browser which allows users to easily and quickly download a new look for their browser. This feature provides consumers with a great new way to personalize their browser around a brand. This could be utilised as an excellent feature for brands like the Premiership or the GAA where there is a big fan base. In fact, on of the persona’s already made available, one is for the Champions League football tournament.

To use the persona you need to download a new plugin for Firefox which places a fox logo in the bottom left of the browser window. Clicking on this presents you with a wide array of pre-created persona’s for you to select from. Rolling over each persona enables you to preview the persona. What’s also neat is that if you visit a website with persona’s on it, simply hovering over persona on the page will preview the persona in your browser and simply clicking on the thumbnail will install that persona in an instant.

The personalization of the browser allows for a background picture to be applied to the main bars at the top of the browser as well as the status bar and for a different colour scheme.

Read more here: http://www.getpersonas.com

David Cameron has recently stated that:

“Fibre optic broadband is changing the way people work and do business, and it has the potential to completely transform our economy.

“It could open up new markets for our creative industries, promote innovation, create new, family-friendly jobs as people can work from home - and help reduce carbon emissions.”

Really? What in the same way that we would have paperless offices and remote working within the last 10 years? I’m curious as to what basis he makes this claim.  I don’t see that fibre will bring anything other than a faster more reliable internet service. It will allow for IPTV, IP Telephony and a better on-line experience overall. As for working from home, current broadband allows for this and for the vast majority of what people need in as such that they can:

• receive and send large emails with attachments,
• use skype and other comms programs even with video
• remote desktop into work computers
• use online services such as salesforce.com, google docs etc

What would Fibre-to-the-home give them that they have not already got? And even with broadband things have not improved  within family life. In fact with faster connections, blackberries and the like it seems that people are working longer and harder causing a larger drain on the individual and the family. You could argue that faster ubiquitous communications are actually putting a great strain on familys as we all spend more time in front of the computer and not interacting with each other.

Businesses definately need faster internet connections as more and more personnel use the company connections for work and pleasure. Homes also need faster internet connections as more devices come online, with more laptops in the home and soon more appliances ‘needing’ internet connections we do need more bandwidth. I’m all for faster internet and Fibre-to-the-home but it won’t make the massive impact that Cameron is promising. Just another headline grabbing political gimmick!

I recently came across this great way to create YouTube virals that incorporate the “Choose your own adventure” story format.

The viral is based on a series of snippets of a story around one and a half minutes long. At the end of each snippet the user is presented with several options on how the story should continue with each option then taking the user to another YouTube video. Not only is a clever use of YouTube but the directing, editing, and soundtrack are also very well put together. This highlights the way in which YouTube (and similar sites) can be used to successfully market a company and it’s products online. Brandawareness can be just as valuable as physical sales in that it can directly and in-directly lead to future sales.

The point of the video, other than being comical, seems only to bring awareness to specbox.net and a number of similar online foram sites for geeks and gamers. However i can’t belive it will be long before similar online campaigns are being launched by larger agencies. Although similar campaigns have been done in the past where there have been online treasure hunts using a variety of mediams from PPC adverts through to GoogleMaps (Eqtr used this once as a Xmas campaign) this is the first I am aware of that soley uses YouTube in this fashion. Please do let me know if you are aware of any others.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=AQhSLcTlUBA&feature=related 

As I’ve previously written i’ve been spending some time recently catching up on with the .Net community and exploring some of the new tools that are out their to assist and speed up development of ASP.Net projects. One of the tools I have come across and been playing with is a new ASP.Net web site administration starter kit created by hunzonian which uses the ASP.NET Membership Provider. The starter kit is basically a template to produce an admin front end website for the ASP.NET Membership Provider. It looks good and works well however i have found the following issues:

• Although i have yet to fully develop using MVC, it would be nice to see this implemented using the framework. The main reason for is would be the clear delimitation between functionality and presentation.
• One of my main gripes with the ASP.NET Membership Provider is the way it stores profile data as one long CSV string in a single field. This means to run any queries against it you have to extract the data from the field and manipulate it to seperate the values and then run your query against it. I much prefer having each profile setting in a seperate database field and there are providers out there that will do this.
• Currently to add new profile fields to the schema you have to edit the web.config and then add the fields manually to the forms. Not a lot of work but would be nice if the admin site had a way to do this.
• The site currently uses CAPTCHA for logging in and another number of area’s. While this is a useful tool I would life some way to easily turn it on and off.

Overall this is a very good starter kit and certainly looks better than anything i could have put together on my own. It’s also worthwhile bearing in mind that the full source code is there so you can easily amend functionality.

Enjoy and let me know what you think…

Well it seems there has been some confusion in the community about the future of LINQ to SQL and Microsoft has tried to clarify their position and reassure developers & companies alike in a recent posting. The first item to be clarified is that LINQ (Language Integrated Query) will continue but LINQ to SQL development may stall.

So what’s the difference? LINQ is a language which allows developers to easily construct statements (like SQL) to be exectuted against a data source. Its a great language which allows developers to quickly and easily construct powerful queries without tons of code. To use LINQ against a data source an interface has to be provided, e.g. to execute LINQ against a dataset, XML data or SQL. This is where the problems arise, MS have produced an interface for LINQ to connect to SQL (LINQ to SQL :-)). MS are also working on another data interface called EF in which it seems they are putting all their Eggs. As i said before i can understand their want to concentrate development but many people are asking why can the two technologies not co-exist? Especially those that have tried both and found difficulties, e.g. Chad.

So, what is the situation? Well MS is saying that LINQ is definatley not going away which is great. However they are probably going to stop developing LINQ to SQL at some point in the future however they will continue to do some development based on “Customer Feedback”, whatever that means and whoever that is. MS say they are just trying to be open about future paths they are going to take which is appreciated. However most people, including myself, who use LINQ would like to see support for LINQ to SQL continuing. So we’ll just have to watch this space to see what happens…

Recently I have taken some time out of work to sell and move out of my house and prepare to move to Dubai. I also wanted to use this time to read up on the latest .Net techniques, frameworks as well as explore a few other development platforms. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed this time and it has made me realise how important it is for developers, no matter in what position, to keep abreast of the latest developments within their communities.

Anyway, over the last month or so I have been playing with a number of new .Net packages (MVC, ASP.NET WSAT, Linq to SQL to name a few), using VS 2008, reading up on the advances in the .Net 3.5 framework and getting back in touch with the community. I’ve really enjoyed getting back into the thick of it and have been pleasantly surprised at how far .Net & ASP.Net have come in assisting developers to rapidly role out and maintain applications. I was even starting to feel quite smug with myself at learning new techniques and ‘tooling up’ for work. So imagine my surprise and frustration when it’s announced that Linq to SQL is being dropped by Microsoft in favour of ADO.Net EF!

Now I can appreciate that Microsoft wants to concentrate their development on ADO.Net EF rather than have two separate similar frameworks for data access and manipulation however Linq to SQL was/is a great fast & simple way to access data sources without all the hassle of data sets and Stored Procedures. Having only played with both for a short period of time and not having used either on professional projects I’m not able to fully argue the pros & cons of either framework however what I can say is that by dropping Linq to SQL, Microsoft is in danger of losing the trust of the community and preventing development at the cutting edge.

Think of all the projects which have used SQL to Linq which are now redundant, all the time people have spent creating documentation and assisting other developers in learning the new techniques which has now been a waste of their time. Why should they continue to support emerging technologies for them only to be pulled, who’s employers are going to continue to let their developers experiments with the latest Microsoft techniques if they fear they will not be supported going further? A great example is the new stackoverflow.com website which has been developed using some the latest cutting edge .Net techniques including MVC & Linq to SQL. To ensure easy maintenance going forward they will now have to consider re-writing their DAL using alternative technologies otherwise future developers working on the site will have no idea how it works.

The one saving grace may be that Linq to SQL was released to the community so perhaps some people will take up the baton and drive it forward. While Microsoft is making some great moves to work with the community by releasing code on CodePlex as well as the being more open about development but all this risk’s being in vain if the community turns its back.

Suppose I better get on with learning ADO.Net EF and pray it doesn’t get pulled too.