X.U Web Chronicle

My First .NET MVC Project 1 | Part 4 - Brainstorm from a visual perspective continues

Liming — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:35:00 GMT

In my last post, I discussed about the application from a user's profile perspective, today, I thought I will mock up how the site will look like on the home page.

Instead of typing plain text, I thought I would better try out some professional mock up tools and using the product from balsamiq, I'm real impressed. I highly recommend everyone who wants to do a quick & dirty mock up to give it whirl.

Anyway, without further ado, below is what I came up with using Balsamiq such far.

Nothing Fancy.

1. Home menu is where I aggreate most of the stuff

I thought most people would care about reading health or medicare related news on this web site. So I thought why not give it a column and have users share those news with fellow medicare users?

2. Latest Concerns - are bascially questions asked by people on this medicare sites. Again, nothing fancy. I added a few stats to it though, such as

- People also interested, how many answers there are so far, how many tips was recommended to answer this questions, and how many repliers are similar to the current users (by parameters set up by the user. more on that later on)

3. Popular Tips - as the name describes, are tips wrote down by fellow members .

Stats include: How many says, it's a great tip. How many says "YMMV(Your mileage may vary)", etc etc. Exact types are yet to be determined

4. Advertising - As with any sites, you need some advertising to keep it operational right? so I thought, some of the candidates could be insurance companies, pharmacy companies, doctors....

5. Other menus are self explanatory. "In my same shoes" menu though is intended to read/ask/answer everything from people who are similar to the user. Exact detail, I have yet to think it through, but that's the general idea.

Other things to think about.

- Since we are providing advertising, i would like to provide a different kind of profiles for companies and doctors. The reason is that they are very different. They probably will use real names, provide their details, what they have to offer, what type of insurance they accept, etc and in addition, I would like for instances, encourage the doctors to paticipate and address other's concerns and what not. In addition, from fiancial perspective, later on in the future, charge for these type of accounts, run ad campaigns and etc.

- Given companies and doctors are registered, we might provide a separate sections for companies / doctors, so that users can search for them if they want to and on the flip side, we can charge for listing as well.

My First .NET MVC Project 1 | Part 3 - Brainstorm from a visual perspective

Liming — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:29:00 GMT

Previously, I discussed my inital draft of what entails the applicaiton, as I thought this through, I think it will be ideal to present a visual view of what might be helpful to the users and from here, brainstrom what else need to be added.

I first decided to approach from a personal profile point of view. This is where a user is able to view their own history in regards to issues in Medicare.

Profile Info

*Note: We strongly discourage users from register their real names for protection
++++++++++++++++++++++

User           : EdMedicare2012
Medicare for: Father

Father's Information
===============
Age
Joined Year
Plans
Insurer
Location
Zip
Prefered Primary Language:
Other Lanugages:

**Note: Above information is not required by default. However, if users choose to filter and find others of those parameters, then it is required that they in return, fill it out themselves. In addition, preferred primary language helps ethnic minorities to target their community for questions/answers

Symptoms
========
- No known symptons
or
- High Blood Pressure
- Diabetes
- Etc etc

Tips To Remember
================
**Note: This is more like a blog but only entered for tips learned.

1. Standalone Part D will disenroll Part A/B advantage plans
2. Pay Drug Perscription from the start, or else penalty will be applied
3. Etc

Liked Tips by Others
============
1. By JohnDor101 - Special Election Period
2. Enroll with Kaiser
3. Etc

Interested Issues
==================
1. When to enroll? by Lin083
2. When to disnell? by Dgab20843
3. Why enroll advantage?by Bege20154
4. Is Kaiser Permente HMO Good by Eedf2013?

Concerned Issues (Questions asked)
============================
- Glucoma perscription
- Got disnrolled from Part A/B
- Where to get cheap Latantoprost perscription?
- Got disnrolled from Part A/B

To Do List
==================
1. Check mail for enrollment (expect to receive in Sept to Oct)
2. Enroll in Medicare
3. Choose a Medicare advantage plan from private insurance company
4. Etc etc

Tag Used
=======
Glucoma, Part A/B, Part D, Drug Perscription, Enrollement, Dis-enrollment, Traditional Medicare, Insurance, Anthem, Humana, etc

Suggested Readings
===============
1. Headline 1
2. Headline 2
3. Headline 3

Etc

I think this gives me a good overview of what might be useful as I write the application.

To be continued.

How NOT to listen to your customers. Know your job.

Liming — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 14:40:00 GMT

The title might seems strange, you always listen to your customers correct? Customer is god, they should be treated with the greatest respect.

I was reading an article by Mark Cuban http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/222501?cm_mmc=Market-_-Outbrain-_-NA-_-NA, and at first, I was not all too hot about the title "Why you should NEVER listen to your customer", however, after reading the whole article, he wrapped up his points with the following quote

"Your customers can tell you the things that are broken and how they want to be made happy. Listen to them. Make them happy. But don't rely on them to create the future road map for your product or service. That's your job."

This quote is golden and should always be remembered even though the title of the article is a bit misleading.

The issue at hand is do you always do what the customers ask? The answer should be no. Let me explain.

It's too easy to create a product in version 1 where everything you developed is how you envisioned a product should be like, albeit, missing some essential features that yet have to be developed.

Then your customers storms in and they provide their own set of requests.

However, this is where the dangers start.

When customers start to ask about various sets of features, as an entrepreneur, you should ask yourself, who are your targeted audiences? Are these features in synch with your market? For instances, say some people go to Starbucks and might want some pizza as well (I know I know..but it's an example), then as the owner of Starbucks, do you or do you not offer pizza as part of your service? Customers requested, you should listen right?

Well, if you are the owner, you should analyze who is your targeted audience. Starbucks customers are the people who wants to meet briefly, chat, browse web, light meal and be on their merry ways. Pizza while a lot of people like it, it simply doesn't fit the crowd. In my mind, therefore, this should be a request to be denied.

However, offering sandwich is okay, because it's light enough that people while chatting, can still eat a piece of two.

Starbucks is not just about coffee which is over expensive in my opinion, but rather, it's about a culture, an environment, by staying on track of this focus, that's why they can charge your $4 bucks for a cup of hot tall coffee.

As Mark Cuban puts it, you should listen to them, but do not let them define what your business is, it's your job.

Such as you venture onto your future releases and upgrades, it is very important for you to pick and choose the features that make sense for your audiences and discard other features that do not fit your intended crowd. Do one thing and do it well. There is a fine line between a focused, quality product and a diluted - all you can eat buffet but nothing great product.

Lastly, that doesn't mean you should be a d**k to your customers and show them my way or the highway. Be courteous, and be professional.

How your approach will truly make it or break it your company.

Liming — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 16:31:00 GMT

In my earlier post "Identify a market or identify a problem? How you approach your idea makes a difference!", I've described two approaches to a product / service. This post is a reminder of another concrete example of how the two approaches comes to play in reality.

As I discuss further with my business partner Jackson Lin, we came across the example of buying / selling cars. I realized, my type of approach have a serious short coming.

When it comes to cars, I rarely think about in terms of features. Such as

- If they have an advanced navigation system
- If they can lower and higher their body like a range over
- If they can parallel parking like the Lexus
- If they can provide on-star support like the ones from GM
- If they can detect someone in the car like the Volvo
- 0 - 60 mph under how many seconds
- Backup camera
- Heated seats
- Removable seats
- Stereo systems
- Design of the engine compartment, easy/difficult to take things in/out.
- Design of the battery compartment, whether it's easy or difficult to take in / out.

I just care about the following things

1. Reliability If not reliable, then find a more reliable more.
2. Maintenance / Warranty. Does it offer a 60,000 miles / 6 years or better factory warranty. Less hassle and worries for me
3. Price. How much it cost out of my pocket.

The problem with my ways of thinking is that I completely missed out a vertical market where cars / manufactures differentiated themselves by offerings convenience through feature sets. Of course, once my 3 major factors are satisfied, only then I will take a deeper look into the features they offer, however, the point is, that's not how I would approach this product and if I am the head of these motor companies, I probably would miss out a huge potential customer base. I wouldn't have build a Lexus when there is Toyota, I wouldn't have build Mercedes nor BMW when there is Volkswagen Jetta, just because my focus is all in the wrong area (or should I say, limited, as I'm only focusing on one area)

Now, take another look at electrical car. When you tell me, I'm developing a car because it can run on electricity. You are describing a feature change. I'm not that excited. As it's just geeks talking just because they can.

However, when you describe that the gasoline price is sky rocketing. Oil supply around the world is diminishing. The trend of having a car that does not rely on gasoline but rather more depend on the more obtainable electricity, I go wow, a huge market, I see it, I love it.

Now, the same electricty car, if it's in an era where gasonline is plenty, oil price is low, I simply will completely ignore this concept as I see no reason to waste time on it.

Of course, the reverse can also be said for someone who is not happy with the car they have. They want all the features like heated seats, backup camera, kick ass navigation, USB support, wireless internet, electricity based, parallel parking, heart beat detection, advanced airbag protection system, abs, 0-60mph in under 6 seconds, the list goes on and on. Only after they build it, they realized that it has a high price tag, can not offer mileage guarantee beyond 10,000 miles / 1 year, reliability is no where to compete with the likes of their competitors, and scratch their head trying to figure out a market for themselves.

Now this is just an example in the context of building / selling cars. However, to me, it is equally applicable to building modern day software / services.

Shame on Google. The two sides of getting yourself indexed.

Liming — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 15:06:00 GMT

The news just got in. Please read http://blog.mocality.co.ke/2012/01/13/google-what-were-you-thinking/.

In short, a company called Mocality, who painstakingly build their comprehensive business directory in Kenya over the years by investing in money as well as human resources, got hijacked by Google as they PRETENDED they were working in collaboration with Mocality, contacted all the business owners listed on the directory and tried to up sell products and services.

What does it sounds like? Do you own any mortgages? Have you ever received letters from certain loan companies whom knows exactly who you loaned from, your loan number as well as your loan amount and your loan dates, in order to help you "refinance" and lower your monthly mortgage?

This story reminds me of what happened to Yelp. Now, Yelp itself has its own set of problems and questionable practices, however, if you recall a year or two ago, Google gave them this option. Either you let us list your reviews on Google Place (which will make Google Place more powerful and such earns more revenue from advertisers), or we are going to completely take you out of Google search index.

I've had talks over this tactic with others before. Others have a valid point, it's their service, they can do what they want. However, to me it all too much sounds like another form of blackmail. Imagine a police station whose job is to protect the public in their district, comes up to a business and say, unless you give out free stuff to our officers on duty or "donate" your products willingly to our charity events (to raise money for the department) or else we will de-list you from our protection, no 911s, no firefighters, no ambulance. When people rob you? That's too bad.

*Note: Once again, Yelp itself has its own questionable practices and it's really a case of a thief met a robber, but I decide to focus on Google right now.

Now you might say, that's comparing apples or oranges. Businesses pay tax and such they are not using the police for free. Well, my argument is the same. While Google is providing traffic to businesses, however, they are also getting paid by advertisers from having information from these businesses. Businesses is hardly the only beneficiary here and Google sure is not the all mercenary charity, doing a favor for human kind either.

The CEO of Mocality described it the best in my opinion.

"Our database IS our business, and we protect and tend it very carefully."

This statement is the key. So when you build your next start up, you should seriously think about what type of businesses you are trying to build. While getting indexed is a good thing especially when you are a small company, you are using Google's influences to get to your potential customers, consider two sides of the same blade.

Anyway, I digressed. In Mocality's case, it's not just that. It also involves fraud, as Google this time went a step further. Cold stealing customers while pretending to be working in collaboration with Mocality, to gain people's trusts.

In my honest opinion, all they had to do is ask Mocality, if they may use their index and use it to sell their services. Hell, just use their services without telling any customers they are in collaboration with Mocality, Google's reputation itself should have been convincing enough.

*Shake heads*

Identify a market or identify a problem? How you approach your idea makes a difference!

Liming — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 15:50:00 GMT

The other day, my business partner Jackson Lin and I had a rather interesting discussion.

Background
------------------------------------------
It all started by an article discussing the differences between Tumblr and Wordpress, how Tumblr was able to build a service that looks similar to Wordpress and yet, able to build a huge base of audiences to themselves.

I started by expressing that the reason in my point of view is that they identified a crowd, a market who are looking for "light blogging", an environment where NOT all piers create long postings that seems as if they took an hour to write, an environemnt where it's fun, light and easy to record something quickly and share with their friends as well as strangers.

In my opinion, they identified a market, came up with the idea of Tumblr and then started to think about how to tweak a blogging service to fit this market.

Interesting enough, Jackson expressed a rather different view, however equally as valid.

Jackson expressed that Wordpress platform itself is not as "friendly" of a service to a lot of people. It's not as easy to use and it's more intimating to beginner or light blogging users. The workflow / UI in a way, forces you to think about what to write, how to write and definitely try to write well. Tumblr recongized that fact and build a friendly UI/Workflow where it's extremely easy to blog, you can quickly categorize what type of posts you want to blog, might it be Text, Pictures, Links, Movies or whatever. By implementing these critical features, it succeeded in pulling in their unique base of audiences.

In Jackson's opinion, they identified a problem in an existing software / platform, by fixing the problems, it generated a new base of users that is both unique and loyal to its services.

Approaches
------------------------------------------

As we discussed, we realized that we've always been this way. Jackson would always find one services or two and identifies the problems with them, how it would be nice if they did do or did not do certain things, how a service failed because they provided too much or provided too little of this feature or that feature. He wants to build an alternative service that fixes these problems.

While I, most of the time don't think too much in terms of " features & problems". When you tell me there are people and a lot of them are looking for certain things or if there are a lot of people are unhappy of a certain service due to a range of things? I see a market. I get excited because there is a potential for us to build something and grab their attentions. I want to build an alternative service for these people.

Solutions and Problems
-----------------------------------
Jackson and I often would agree on this one service that we both want to build, however, we never realized that we wanted to build for two different reasons. Without realizing this, there are problems when it actually comes into implementation.

Jackson would build a product from feature perspectives, and we would discuss what features to put it, what to get rid of and what to improve. Throughout the process, I would think of features as well that are super cool and make the software more "powerful". In my mind, the more, the merrier, the more powerful that is, the happier my customers will be..

The problem is, we would both go off the rail and forget completely the reason why we wanted to build it in the first place.

Jackson would explain the product from the feature perspectives, what it offers and what it does. If potential customers, whoever they are like what they see, they then would form a unique customer base themselves.

Me, on the other hand, try to satisfy my audiences as much as I can. As long as our competitors don't offer it, then we will try to implement it. I want the market. I try to make it appealing in all different types of scenarios. The problem is however, the product will end up loosing its focus,to a point where customers can't identify what is the software EVEN THOUGH it offers all the features they need. When customers can not associate with your service, they simply don't buy it nor join it no matter how powerful it is.

Lesson and Conclusion
-------------------------------
The lesson here is, know your audiences and knows yourself, what is your identify and who you are. Don't lose your focus and try to do a little bit of everything. Even if you mange to do everything well, but if you can't identify who you are, your customers certainly won't be as well.

My First .NET MVC Project 1 | Part 2 - Brainstorm Application and Use Cases

Liming — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 18:32:00 GMT

Previously, I wrote a post titled "American Healthcare - A maze needed to piece together by seniors", I realized that it was somewhat difficult to piece together the information out there on the web. Maybe it's due to a lot of Seniors are computer illiterate or simply there aren't that many young people willing to spend time into helping them.

A simple search of "Medicare forum" on Google, did not turn up any place truly helpful. Let along, search for Medicare information useful to immigrant patients who still prefer reading in their native languages. So, let's humor ourselves this time and think about a useful website that can assist Seniors shall we? Not really a sexy idea, but hey, we are trying to brush up our .NET skills with a sample application aren't we? Might as well serve some purpose.

Technical requirement is mentioned in [Project 1 | Part 1 - Technical Requirement].

First Draft : Jan 06, 2012
==================

Goal:

To create a website / application where Seniors (and their kids for that matter who are helping them) to be able to plan out their Medicare, connect with other Medicare users who are in similar situations, get ideas and learn from others who have ALREADY been in their shoes, get tips, to-dos and discuss Medicare / insurance / doctors / patient care related issues.

Basic Requirement

1. Users can remain anonymous - Let's get this clear first. I simply don't dig the Facebook / Google + policies. Medical information is private and some questions would be embarrassing to ask in public under your real name.

2. Users do not have to register in order to view the content. At anytime while viewing however, we give the users the options to fill out some information to help them find others who have similar situations, such as age, with spouse, no spouse, spouse's age, zip (some insurances are only offered in certain areas), currently have traditional medicare or medicare advantage (Part A + Part B) or Part D, etc

3. To ask questions, user need to register and if the user was an anonymous user, all previously entered information while filtering the information will be auto transferred as part of registration process.

4. All questions will be able to have multiple tags such as "Medicare", "Part D", "Enrollment", "Dis-enrollment", etc

5. All questions have the option to seek specific audiences such as

- age 64, soon to be medicare users
- age 65+ users
- age 65+ users who have medicare part D
- age 65+, Part D, living in Virgina
- speak Spanish, or Chinese or etc.
- Income Level - Under $10k, under $20k, etc.. As it does have an impact for people with Mediaid (no that I understand the details of it)
- Existing Conditions - Such as Glucoma, High Blood Pressure, Diabetes, etc etc etc.
- Professionals such as healthcare provider, agent, etc

6. People matching the quarteira will see a list of questions targeting them, in addition to a separate section of an up to date complete list.

6. People viewing the questions can mark a question as "I'm in the same shoes" to get notified of the answers

7. People viewing the answers can mark "I agree with this comment" or "I disagree with this comment".

8. People answering questions should be able to submit "Google" / "Bing" search engine keywords they used to get their answers from to help other people.

9. Due to the nature of laws changing every year, it is important to list questions and answers relevant to the year in question. All questions / answers will be sorted and highlighted clearly to indicate if it's current year or past year.... and users are able to filter questions/answers based on the year as well.

10. In addition to questions/answers. you are able to find / add people who are similar to you by your demographic. Read their questions / answers

That's it for now. I will have to brainstorm some more and revise in the next few days before I narrow down the scope and what else to add / remove.

To be continued...

American Healthcare - A maze needed to piece together by seniors.

Liming — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:59:00 GMT

First, let me note down a bit of a background.

My parents are over 65 and they are on Medicare. Due to the language barrier, I had to chip in and lend a helping hand. It's not that they can't speak English, but to navigate through the maze that is Medicare, it seriously takes hours and hours of conversations with agents and customer services, therefore, it's important that they don't misunderstand any details.

Now, their basic requirement is simple. They are looking for private insurance companies who offer Medicare packages or sometimes called "Medicare Advantage". However, they do not want to pay any more premium in addition to what they already paid to Medicare. This means, we had to search for $0 premium "Medicare Advantage" plans. We found it and it was Humana "Medicare Advantage" - HumanaChoice Regional PPO which covers Part A and Part B of the Medicare, with no prescription drug coverage. In the profession of Medicare, they call it the "MA" plan.

**Note: Medicare Advantage plans are regulated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS or Medicare) and implemented by private insurance companies (such as Aetna, Humana, and United HealthCare).

The confusion started when we wanted to look into the drug coverage or Part D of Medicare (an optional choice). In order to enroll into Part D, you have to make sure that ever since you were eligible, you never had a period of more than 63 days (I think) of gap in coverage. If you had, then you will incur a penalty at the rate of 1% of national average premium for the time you did not have coverage FOR AS LONG AS YOU CONTINUE the coverage MONTHLY. Did you understand that? Read it again! (Source: https://questions.medicare.gov/app/answers/detail/a_id/2255/~/late-enrollment-penalty-(lep) )

For instance, national average premium for 2011 is $31. 1% of $31 is $0.31. If you had no coverage for 24 month in previous years, then you have a penalty of $0.31*24(month) = $7.68 penalty. IMPORTANT. This $7.68 will now add to your monthly premium for as long as you continue the converge. IT IS NOT A ONE TIME late payment!!! If you premium is suppose to be $15 a month, that means now, you will have to pay $22.68 a month, every month, every year from now on!!

Okay. Fine. Better to join early than late or else, the monthly premium penalty will increase month after month and year after year. So we chose Humana Walmart Preferred RX Plan for prescription drug coverage or what the professionals called - "PDP" plan, and this is when all hell broke loose.

You probably would figure by now, that okay, I have a "MA" Plan that is HumanaChoice Regional PPO, and now a "PDP" plan that is Humana Walmart Preferred RX Plan, I'm good and covered completely in Medicare Part A, Part B and PartD correct? NOT SO!!!

After hours of conversation and navigates through a maze of representatives, we found out that there is a rule from Medicare, not Humana, that you may not enroll into a standalone PDP plan without being dis-enrolled from a MA plan or a MA Plan with prescription drug coverage (or what the profession calls a MA-PD plan). In our case, by enrolling into a standalone PDP plan, without any acknowledgement, Humana auto dis-enrolled my parents from their MA-plan!!

The end result is now they are back to traditional Medicare (the red and blue card) + a PDP plan.

From this lesson, I realized the following

1. We should have known this rule, but then again, there are SOOOO many.

2. Humana should have given us a huge warning that states - "Are you sure you want to enroll into the PDP plan? If so, you would be dis-enrolled from your Humana Regional PPO medicare advantage plan due to regulation!!?"

3. Medicare system - Made by lawyers and politicians. Way too complicated.

It's a learning experience and it truly makes you think about the innovations that is desperately needed in the Healthcare industry.

Ready....Go! My first .NET MVC application Project 1 | Part I - Technical Requirement

Liming — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:26:00 GMT

I have a simple ideal application for learning MVC and below is a list of the technical requirement I wish to achieve

1. Use MVC 3 / C# (MVC 4 looks like it's still in developer's preview, so we'll skip that for now)
2. Use Entity Framework 4.1 (See what's good and bad about it)
3. MySQL Server
4. Master Page needed using Razor View Engine
5. Theme is a must
6. Internationalization / Globalization is needed. (driven by database, no resource files)
7. Need Restful API with authentication enabled.
8. Ajax based. JQuery with (either backbone.js or knockout.js). JQuery Template needed.
9. Webgrid helper - use that to generate the default grid upon loading. use JQuery/Template for manipulation.
10. All form fields have to be validated server side with globalized error messages.

The application itself is a somewhat simple website. Hopefully it will give me insight into the various technical aspects needed to build a modern web application.

To be continued....

A Programmer's New Year Resolution

Liming — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 18:33:00 GMT

Really, it never works, but I have to try.

ASP.NET MVC (3/4) is something I have to get on board this year. Learn it well and converts all my .NET 2.0 applications this year and have them up to date.

I'm still somewhat sketchy on the lambada expressions (Yeah, I'm really behind now) and whatever is new in C# 3 / 4. This will be a pretty exciting new year.

In addition, mobile development has became main stream and I predict that in the future, mobile development will become an essential skill required by application programmers, after all, what good is it to have a website but not have a native mobile app along with it? This is another goal I will try to obtain this year. First and foremost, I will focus on Android platform as I'm equally experienced in Java and learning Android development will be the best place to start. Second, comes with Windows 7 Mobile. IPhone will probably be my last just because I need to buy a mac to develop on it (or I could hack a PC to run Mac OS. Tiring process....)

Lastly, I plan to blog more often whenever I learn something of interest along the way.

Anyhow. Below are the resources I've found so far for references. Happy New Year everyone!

MVC3 and Entity Framework
http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese/archive/2011/01/06/developing-web-apps-using-asp-net-mvc-3-razor-and-ef-code-first-part-1.aspx

IOC Container
http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese/archive/2011/09/22/autofac-my-choice-of-ioc-container.aspx

MVC and KnockoutJS
http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese/archive/2011/08/21/building-javascript-mvvm-apps-in-asp-net-mvc-using-knockoutjs.aspx

MVC and log4net
http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese/archive/2011/07/18/user-activity-logging-in-asp-net-mvc-app-using-action-filter-and-log4net.aspx

MVC 3 Buildin WebGrid
http://weblogs.asp.net/andrebaltieri/archive/2010/11/01/asp-net-mvc-3-working-with-webgrid.aspx
http://mvccontrib.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Grid
http://trirand.com/blog/jqgrid/jqgrid.html

WCF REST Services Inside MVC Projects
http://geekswithblogs.net/michelotti/archive/2010/09/22/wcf-rest-services-inside-mvc-projects.aspx

MVC Attribute based Routes
http://maproutes.codeplex.com/

MVC Restful Web Service
http://shouldersofgiants.co.uk/blog/default.aspx

WCF, WCF Data Service, MVC
http://weblogs.asp.net/cibrax/archive/2010/10/08/asp-net-mvc-wcf-rest-and-data-services-when-to-use-what-for-restful-services.aspx

Raw, how to present REserful web services using MVC
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/dd943053.aspx

Design Change and the Impact on Products

Liming — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 18:51:00 GMT

It's funny how a simple design change can impact your product.

I've been a loyal Yahoo Mail customer for years and years, and to me, email is email. If I don't have obvious reasons, then I don't see a point of switching. Recently, after accidentally clicked the upgrade option, I was upgraded to the new Yahoo mail. Before, I always had the option to switch back to the classic version, however, this time, that option is no where to be found.

I can see why Yahoo wants everyone to upgrade to the new email interface. Ajaxed, resembles outlook, gives Gmail a little competition, so on and so forth. However, there are two features that I used the most are missing in the new email interface. I really want to stay with the new GUI, however, with those missing features, I simply can't manage it.

On top of it, because I couldn't find a build-in way to switch it back to the classic version, for a short second there, I almost wanted to abandon my long used email address.

The missing features are "Read all unread" emails and "From Contacts" emails.

Over the years, I signed up a few services that I want to look from time to time. If they are interesting in the subject line, then I take a look. Otherwise, I delete them. Sometimes, I'm out for a whole week and I will be back with 40-50 emails waiting. I typically pick the messages from family members and friends first (and such I used the feature "From Contacts") and when I'm done, I click "Read all unread" messages, give a quick scan, nothing interesting? Delete them all. Simple and easy to manage. No need to setup custom filters, no need to mess with tags/flags like in gmail. I was a happy camper.

With the new Email Interface, the only thing I could do was "Sort by Unread messages" which makes unread messages appear on top. However, to delete them all, I have to click each check box one by one individually, all 40-50 of them every time as oppose to "Check all". That was just too much.

Luckily, since I figured the new UI is javascript heavy, what if I turn off Javascript in the browser? Tried that, and voilla, Yahoo gives me back the option to switch back to the yahoo classic. Enable Javascript again, I'm back to my dearly loved (but somewhat lacking) classic interface. Within the next 2 minutes, I deleted 100 unread emails from different services and other non important messages from friends like jobs, jokes and the mass bcc kinds.

It makes me really ponder on the design decisions a company makes on their product. From this experience, as you can see, as loyal as I am to Yahoo mail, when a new feature comes up and takes away a really small but important feature that I absolutely need, that's all it takes to scare away the existing customers.

It's interesting that this experience of mine coincide with the release of Facebook Profile change. A lot of people love it, a lot of people hate it. It's true, you can never make everyone happy, however, a big design change such as the new profile "Timeline" feature, I really wonder if that will take more users away from Facebook than attract more new users. With G+ on its heels, to me, retain their existing loyal users are more important than attract new fresh bloods. This is a gamble that is unnecessarily risky..

Random observations from a random experience, life goes on, eager to see what other exciting things companies have for us in future.

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Await .NET 4.5

Liming — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 18:10:00 GMT

I have been stuck on the .NET 2.0 bandwagon for the longest time.

During the development in the past few years, I have watched Microsoft giving birth to .NET 3.5 and .NET 4.0, the features came out of them such as LINQ, LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework, Enterprise Library, MVC and others. I read them, I had an idea they existed, but because I was focusing on improving the product I'm making, other than MVC framework, I simply haven't had much time to dive into the details from most of them, overtime, I got seriously behind the curve.

Lately, my interests have been largely focused on asynchronous programming in.NET as I'm concerned of the performances that the traditional synchronous operations have on the servers. While asynchronous programming has no direct impact to the end users per say, however, it is absolutely vital to end programmers such like me to leverage it, get the best values out of the CPU / CLR Threadpool and as a result, maximizing the full capabilities of the hardware and such delivery a better product to the end users. I'm glad .NET 4.5 took an emphasis in this area.

In addition, real time live updates in the past has been nothing short of difficult. The only solutions you had were to ajax poll on a regular interval or implement your own comet solutions which involves long persisted connections with asynchronous programming implemented on the server side. This effort itself is not for the faint of heart and I'm glad that it too has been addressed in the upcoming .NET 4.5 with the WebSocket namespace.

I highly encourage anyone who are in the same shoes as me to read over the changes (http://www.asp.net/vnext/whats-new#_Toc303354469) and get a general idea of what's coming, dive into it and prepare for your future developments.

Overall, I think I will finally take the leap and jump off the .NET 2.0 / Web Form bandwagon. .NET 4.5 still have awhile before it can be released, meanwhile, migrate to .NET 4.0 is my top concern. Once we are upgraded to .NET 4.0, switching to .NET 4.5 will have a less impact as oppose to directly switching from .NET 2.0 to .NET 4.5

One thing though, I'm somewhat disappointed to learn that the Entity Framework still does not support the asynchronous model. To fully leverage the CLR Threadpool, Microsoft seriously need to put some energy into this area and gives us a full stack we can really use.

Lotus Seeds

Liming — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 02:17:00 GMT

It has been ages.

People who've lived in Asia loves to eat this delicacy. They are lotus seeds and in China at least, it's only available in summer time.

They are tender and they are mildly sweet, a summer must have when you wanted to chew on something.

Sigh.

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Touchpad Minus. I want one

Liming — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 15:38:00 GMT

Just went over to Techcrunch and read the article titled "Dear HP: Please Keep Making Those CrunchPads! Er...TouchPads", I have to say, I can't agree with it more!

Over the weekend, due to the $100 price tag, I was running around like maniac attempting to secure myself a touchpad or two, or three or four. Hell, if they had 8 left, I would've bought them all.

The reason is, I really just wanted a simple device to read yahoo/gmail, read CNN, Techcruch, Mashable, New York Times, chat with friends using GTalk or Meebo, watch movies (yes, that means flash) and skype. NOTHING else. I don't need Microsoft Office on it, I don't need to play games on it (but if you offer it in the browser, I'm fine with it), I don't even need to take pictures or photos on it. If I need to take notes, I'll head on over to EverNotes. If I need to take a picture, I'll pull out my phone or camera for it. If I need to do anything more serious, then I'll head over to my computer desk, upstair or in the basement, 3 workstations, 1 server, 2 different laptops, I have more than enough to do serious stuff.

So see, with $100, if you are able to give me all that and then some, why not? I will not only get one, I will get a couple of them because for instance, my mom is completely computer illiterate, it will be much easier to have her use it then learning a PC. I can take it with me while taking a #2 (excuse my use of number), use it as a digital picture frame / find recipes while in the kitchen, so on and so forth.

I know there are some cheap tablets on there, but you know, either I can't trust the brands or the review came out bad, really bad. However, for a brand like HP backed with WebOS, mentally, I'm just more willing to spend the $100 because even if it came out not as ideal, I trust the company in the future will back it up and improve it.

Too bad, this time, HP proved me wrong and pulled the plug on WebOS. I really wanted a Touchpad Minus.

Btw, if anyone has an extra Touchpad for sale, I'm willing to pay $150 for it. Thanks :)

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Amazon AWS Explained - In Layman's Terms

Liming — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 20:51:00 GMT

So my business partner Jackson Lin and I have been looking into a more reliable hosting option.

Our traditional "shared" hosting has been giving us some heart burns here and there. Throughout the past few years, we discovered a few distinct disadvantages as we grew our small start up company, things such as

Being shared, at times, the website is slowed down to a crawl
Have no control over the serve itself
Can not install our own software
Being an ASP.NET shop, "shared" hosting does not grant us "Full-Trust" permission. Limits our options (can not use the PayPal SDK for instance)
Can not dynamically increase our server load abilities
Unreliable email services (it's fine now, we changed to Google Domain for business)
etc

While traditional hosting company can and will work with you if your website is down or needs more capabilities, the downtime and the time it takes to bring the website back up with a more beefed up machine, it takes way too long and the experience is less ideal.

Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure for all intends and purposes, seem to address all of our concerns and such far, Amazon AWS seems to be cheaper of the two and so we tried to dig in and find out more about it.

The issue is? My god is it complicated!! We were thoroughly confused with the myriads of options and jargon. So after some research, I'll try to explain in layman's terms to the extend of my limited knowledge.

Amazon AWS - It's basically Amazon hosting. AWS itself doesn't mean anything. It represents the entire ecosystems of everything Amazon has to offer.
EC2 - They are basically the "machines" amazon has to offer to you. Windows or Linux. Though, they are "virtual" machines instead of a physical computer you can see and touch. For commoners like us, it doesn't matter much. We'll just consider them as real machines. It's easier to wrap our heads around.

For Microsoft Windows machines, , they normally come with Windows server (2008) equipped with IIS and .NET framework already installed. So we don't have to worry about server license. That's good.

On these virtual machines, they normally come with 1.7gb of memory, 1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit (like single core cpu machines) for small instance with 160 GB of disk space, which is good, but we probably wont' be using it (I'll explain it later).

What's good with these EC2 servers? In case of sudden spike of traffic increase, you can add 1 or more of the same type of machines on the fly (which will cost the same price of your existing one) and at that time, you can enable "Load Balancers", so instead of 1 server handling the traffic, you can have 2, 3, 4, 5, different servers to handle them at the same time, divide up the traffic. When traffic dies down, then you kill those extra instance (which is charged on a per hour basis), so you only have to pay when your traffic is super jammed.

The trick here is that cost. Instead of 1.7 gb of memory per machine (Small Instance), and you end up with 6 instances to handle the traffic, you should calculate that and see if you should increase it to have a large instance (7.5 GB memory running on 4 cpu) or extra large instance (15 GB memory with 8 cpu). They are more powerful and probably 1 single machine can handle x amount of small machines.
Regions and Zones - Regions is sorted like where Amazon's Data center is. In west coast, east coast, or somewhere in central U.S.A They also have regions in Asia like Singapore. Basically, in case some big disasters happen, your data is safe. Normally "Region" is just one big facility in a city, like an office park if you will.

Zone is then somewhat like individual buildings in the park. Say in East Coast Region (Northern Virgina), they have building 1, building 2, building 3, etc etc. So you can choose to have your server be served from multiple buildings, and/or multiple regions (East coast and west coast).

It's like you are trying to design for Armageddon, in case building 1 is on fire, your data is still served from building 2, so on and so forth. If ALL the buildings in the office park in Virgina (east coast region) is wiped out due to Zeus's lighting, you still have options to switch to the west coast.
EBS - It's basically the storage. Think of it as a network drive in your house, an external hard drive. Now I mentioned earlier that you should not depend on the 160GB on the virtual machine. Why? Because if the virtual machine crashes or a patch is need to be applied to the Virtual machine? It will be temporarily shut down and your data stored on there COULD be lost. EBS however is simply a network hard drive, so the data will always be there.

You can shut down your instance (in case of failing), create another instance with your webserver and asp.net files, point the existing EBS back to the new instance, bang. you are back online.
S3 - Also a storage. Now this is a bit confusing comparing to EBS and basically from my understanding, EBS is faster to read and write but with the limitation of HAVE to be in the same zone as where you web server is. Its' a network drive after all, in your house.

S3 is more like a hard drive on the internet. Similar to services like DropBox if you know what it is, where it's not confined to any particular zone. It's up in the "cloud" and can be accessed and shared from anywhere. Disadvantage? it's slower as it's crossing the "internet", not like EBS which is more like a drive in your own house. Another disadvantage? It's a bit more expensive than EBS. 15 cents per gb compare to 10 cents per gb of EBS. But hey, you can store your files in the "cloud" and retrieve from the "cloud", anywhere, anytime, even from another hosting company. EBS can not.

So when it comes to decide where do you want to store your files. Its' a matter of deciding do you store the file in your house or out on the "internet".

General consensus is that you store and install "software" like Database, search indexes on your EBS for fast access. And for static files, public files such as images, css and what not on S3 (which very conveniently, can be retrieved say from a website hosted elsewhere)

If you want to have long term backups, you can then take a snap shot of your database (scheduled) and other type of search indexes on EBS to S3 for long term storage. In case god forbidden, EBS fails, you can quickly restore back from s3.
Amazon RDS - Basically, it's a virtual server admins for database. What it does is that it handles backup of you database (by default once every day) and offer ability to restore your database in case of disaster. In addition to other services such as replication.

*Note, currently it's only available for MySQL.

Now, what is replication you ask? There are two types of replications

One is called "Simple read only replication". Meaning, they will create a mirror SLAVE instance of your database (two slave, three slaves, etc) and they are read only. So every time you save something into the master database? It'll auto replicated to the SLAVE instances. So what you can do is to have your application to read primarily from the slave and allocate write to the master. So for instance, your website have 1000 contributors to contribute news. But 1 million "view" consumers. You probably want to have all reads come from the mirror instances (to reduce load) and RDS helps you to distribute that. Downside? They are read only and whenever anything writes to the master, it MIGHT NOT be immediately replicated to the slaves. The fact it's in the same zone as your database. Meaning if you database is in building 1 of Northern Virgina, your slaves are in the same building. When building 1 say got bombed? Oops. your data is lost, both the master and slave.

Another type of replication is called Multi-AZ replication (which costs additional money). What this does is that whenever a master writes to the database, it's copied IMMEDIATELY to the slaves. Not only that. The slaves are in multiple zones within your region. Unlike simple replications which is in the same zone within the same region. In case of fire or air conditioning failure in that building fails, meaning "Building 1 in Northern Virgina is on fire and bombed", your data will be still available from building 2 and building 3.

So that's the overview in layman's term. As you can see, there are some very very annal people out there when it comes to hosting. Their ideal setup is probably prepared for the end of the world, but on the Internet? You never know. When people pours in, if you are prepared for it, it's heaven. If you are not? It's hell.