Dave Campbell is a Silverlight MVP and the author of the Wynapse.com and SilverlightCream.com sites. He is the Phoenix, Arizona Silverlight User Group Leader, and a veritable font of .NET knowledge. He was kind enough to agree to be the first, in what we hope will be many, customer profiles.
Hello Dave, please tell us a bit about yourself.
I’m an independent software developer and a Microsoft MVP. My MVP is in Silverlight, but I’ve done many years of .NET and win32 development. My primary website is WynApse.com. This is a data-driven site with Many articles and tutorials primarily on WPF/E and Silverlight. I use the site as a portal of sorts. The menu on the right-hand sidebar is a collection of good reference links, and the tag cloud listed on the left-hand sidebar is a gateway to over 10,000 blog posts. My secondary site, SilverlightCream.com is a database application backing up my blog, providing search capability for users.
Which technologies are you using for the sites?
WynApse.com is a hand-rolled .NET C# MS SQL web application. I’m pretty certain the application began life as .NET 2.0, and is probably still at 3.5. Considering how long the site has been up, it is probably SQL 2003 or 2005. I can’t remember (I just searched email and found it is actually SQL 2000, unless it’s been upgraded under the covers).
How long have you hosted your site with DiscountASP.NET?
It was December of 2003 that I started hosting with DiscountASP.NET.
Wow, you were an early user, that’s great. Why did you choose us as your web hosting solution?
DiscountASP.NET had a good reputation with the folks at AZGroups (Arizona .Net User Group).
What do you consider to be the key benefits of using the DiscountASP.NET web hosting solution?
Uptime is amazing, plus you’re on top of all the technology as soon as it hits. Knowledgeable people to work with, too. I’ve recommended DiscountASP.NET to many people and have not had anyone give me negative feedback on that.
That’s what we like to hear, thanks. What are the future plans for your site?
It’s due for a makeover. I don’t know if I want to do it in Silverlight or not. I keep evolving my secondary site, SilverlightCream.com, and the next thing in the works for that is an OData feed of the database there.
Which future technologies or trends are you most excited about?
Obviously Silverlight, since that’s my MVP, but I’m also interested in what we’re going to learn at the conference this fall, BUILD.
We would like to thank Dave again for taking time out of his day to answer our questions.
Would you like to be featured in a profile? Let us know what you’re up to.
Sup Dave 😉
You gave me a grin with the WP7 Flashlight.
Dave and silverlightcream are awesome!
Dave, hope to catch up with you at BUILD. Thanks for the interview.
In the introduction, you say that Dave is “a veritable font of .NET knowledge” but then he says “I’m pretty certain the application began life as .NET 2.0, and is probably still at 3.5.” How can “a veritable font of .NET knowledge” not know which version of .NET he’s using?
Regarding SQL Server, this answers baffles me: “it is probably SQL 2003 or 2005. I can’t remember (I just searched email and found it is actually SQL 2000, unless it’s been upgraded under the covers).”
-how can you not know the version of the database you’re using?
-the fact that you’re using SQL Server 2000 (and you were not sure about it) shows that you’re not that interested in the latest Microsoft technology (the latest version is SQL 2008 which has plenty of new features that you are clearly not using) which contradicts the next statement that Dave likes DiscountASP because “you’re on top of all the technology as soon as it hits”
– Why did Dave have to search emails to know which version of SQL Server he was using? It looks to me Dave doesn’t use the DiscountASP control panel very often….. If he did, he would know that it takes 2s to login and that it’s extremely easy to manage SQL Server from there (and therefore find out the version he’s using).
Well, I see why you might get that impression. But I don’t think being a little unclear on what you’re using on a site that’s been up and running for years is that unusual, and it doesn’t preclude working with new technologies elsewhere.
I’m sure dave is busy and you’ll notice that he does say that he wants to do a makeover of his sites. We’ve got experts in a lot of areas working here at DiscountASP.NET, but none of them are Microsoft MVPs. Dave is a Microsoft Silverlight MVP, and he has our respect for that.