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PhoneGap – Allowing Web Developers to Build Mobile Applications

January 22, 2014TechnicalJavaScript, Mobile application, PhoneGapMichael

I have been playing with PhoneGap recently and I have to say I’m really impressed. For those of you who may not know, PhoneGap allows you to make Smart Phone Applications using just HTML, CSS, & JavaScript.

As if that wasn’t awesome enough, it’s works on multiple mobile platforms. Meaning you can build your Application using the Web Technologies you already know, and run them on Android, IOS, Windows, and several other mobile platforms.

So whats involved exactly? PhoneGap is based on the Apache Cordova Project. It’s essentially a build system. You put your Web Application in one side and mobile application for each platform pops out the other side.

No weirdo Dev environment to use or any other funny business. You can use whatever tools you want to author your HTML, CSS, & JavaScript. You also get access to the device(s) hardware via the PhoneGap API by way of a JavaScript library.

What’s the downside? It’s not as fast as writing a native application. I wan’t to be clear here however, It’s fantastic for the types of applications Web Developers would build. The performance concerns are really related to game development. Even then, there are many examples of games built using PhoneGap.

To sweeten things even more, Adobe is involved in the way of offering PhoneGap Build as a service. Rather than downloading the bits yourself and running PhoneGap locally, you can use the Adobe PhoneGap Build Service. In this scenario, you build your app, upload it in ZIP format or point to a GitHub repository and they take care of the rest.

The Adobe service is just awesome and executed very well. There is even a debug feature that allows you to get debug information from an application running on your phone in real time. It’s pretty amazing. The service cost ranges from free to cheap and is well worth it.

I will be talking a lot more about working with PhoneGap in the weeks to come. If you can’t wait, hit the links above.

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Meet the new media, same as the old media

January 14, 2014Code camps and conferences, Inside DiscountASP.NET, Internetmjp

Dino Dogan claims that the first Tweet was sent 30,000 years ago when someone blew a plant-based dye out of their mouth and made an outline of their hand on a cave wall.

He compared cave paintings to social media during a panel discussion at the New Media Expo a little more than a week ago, and I think he happens to be spot on.

Though I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s not a message that a lot of people who make their livings through social media would necessarily be comfortable with. Because in order to sell a service (or sell yourself providing a service) these days, it’s important to appear to be on the bleeding edge of everything that comes down the line to someone’s computer, tablet or phone.

But if you take a step back and look at what we’re doing on all those computers, it’s not substantially different than what we’ve been doing for centuries:

Having conversations
Looking at pictures
Listening to music
Getting the latest news

Of course none of those things are “new,” by anyone’s definition of new. So what is “New Media”? We’re dealing with new delivery methods, for sure, but what are those new methods delivering?

Conversations
Pictures (some of them moving pictures on YouTube)
Music
News

We humans haven’t evolved much in the past few centuries, even if our technology has. We still want to do the same things we have always wanted to do; talk, find out what’s going on in the world, hear some music and look at some art. It’s just easier to do all of those things now, and we have technology to thank for that.

This social media stuff changes rapidly – at least the tools we use to engage in it do – which is why I continue to go to the New Media Expo. When you attend a conference like that you’re one short, fragile step ahead of the curve, and you get yourself involved with a lot of new things (maybe even before you want to be involved with them). In our business that’s important, because you guys talk to us using half a dozen different platforms, tools and methods. We stay on top of the technology because we value our communication with you.

But technology aside, I think a lot of what is discussed at conferences like NMX could have been discussed at a television or radio conference in 1965. How do we better communicate with our users? How do we get our message across to them without being boring or worse, not recognizing what they want and need? Those are questions we’re always asking.

The point Dogan was making when he called a cave painting “the first Tweet,” was that cave painting and social media have the same essence, and that is one human communicating with another. The same desires and skills are at work, as is the same fundamental need to connect. We can dress it up in new technology, but the result is the same.

So talk to us! On our forum, on Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and whatever else you’ve got up your sleeve. We’re here.

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Images: Photos by Trav Williams, Broken Banjo Photography; www.BrokenBanjo.net

January Updates

January 10, 2014AnnouncementsRay

Happy New Year, and here are our Web Application Gallery updates for January:

Acquia Drupal 7.24.26
BlogEngine.NET 2.9
DNN 7.2.0 Community Edition
Gallery Server Pro 3.1.0
Joomla 3.2.1
mediaWiki 1.22.0
mojoPortal 2.4.0.0
nopCommerce 3.20
Orchard 1.7.2
phpMyAdmin 4.1.4 *NEW*
Silverstripe CMS 3.1.2
Umbraco CMS 7.0.1
WordPress 3.8

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Top 10 Things we Accomplished in 2013

January 2, 2014Inside DiscountASP.NETTakeshi Eto

And another year goes by… Happy New Year!

Here is my annual Top 10 list for 2013. As in previous year’s lists (2012, 2011, and 2010) there is a lot to talk about, so here we go.

1. Windows 2012 R2 Refresh: ASP.NET 4.5.1 / MVC 5 / Visual Studio 2013 Support

Q4 2013 was a busy time for us. Microsoft released their Windows 2012 R2 update along with Visual Studio 2013 and updates for ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC. We have always done our best to keep up with all the new Microsoft technology releases, so we quickly refreshed to Windows Server 2012 R2 for our hosting platform and launched support for ASP.NET 4.5.1 and ASP.NET MVC 5. Our hosting platform is Visual Studio 2013 ready!

2. Shared Team Foundation Server 2013 Hosting

Along with Visual Studio 2013, Microsoft released Team Foundation Server 2013. So we launched support for shared TFS 2013 hosting in our US and UK-based data centers. TFS 2013 adds more collaboration tools like Team Rooms, has enhancements to improve productivity like un-dockable details panes, and includes GIT integration. We posted a Getting Started with TFS 2013 Hosting video.

3. Snapp beta – .NET PaaS with Staging

!Snapp-icon100x100 In May we unveiled Snapp – a .NET platform-as-a-service solution that comes with a staging and production site for each application. Snapp is built on top of Windows Azure Pack – the same technology that runs Windows Azure. The Snapp service is currently in free beta mode so interested developers can sign up and test it out and provide us with feedback. Over the year we’ve launched some enhancements including hostname support, scheduled deployment, an asynchronous task notification alert system, and enhancements to the exception management system.

4. DevPro Best Hosting Service Bronze Award

With huge companies like Amazon moving into the hosting space, smaller independent companies like DiscountASP.NET find it increasingly more challenging to fight for mindshare. But despite the entry of the giants, for the fourth year in a row, we’ve placed in the top 3 for the award for Best Hosting Services in DevPro’s Community Choice poll. Thanks for your votes, and for your continuing support that allows us to remain independent, agile and responsive to your needs.

5. Google-on-Air

We expanded our activity on the Google+ platform in 2013, hosting a few Google Hangouts and going live with our own Michael Ossou conducting some great Google-on-air interviews with top-notch developers like Chander Dhall, Scott Allen and Dan Wahlin. Add us to your circles! If you aren’t on Google+, you really ought to check it out.

6. TeamExpand Partnership

We partnered with TeamExpand to offer a fully-managed hosted TFS Timesheets solution. TeamExpand’s TX Chrono application installs on top of TFS and is a web-based tool that allows developers to submit Timesheets for project work items and provides project managers with the ability to review and approve Timesheets.

7. SQL 2012 Reporting Services

We launched SQL 2012 Reporting Services as a new add-on option for our hosting customers.

8. Standalone TFS Build-as-a-Service

Some of you asked if it was possible to use just the build portion our TFS service. The idea (and challenge) intrigued us, so we created and launched a standalone TFS Build-as-a-Service solution. If you host your TFS repositories on-premises or at other TFS hosting services but require a customized TFS Build solution, our Build-as-a-Service is right up your alley. The Build solution is fully-managed and customizable. We can support FTP or WebDAV access and install code signing certificates and customized test frameworks. You can install Web Deploy and deploy straight from the build server. We can support complex build solutions that require multiple build servers and multiple build agents – in other words, all the flexibility of a custom build environment with none of the maintenance headaches.

9. Microsoft Gold Partner Status Renewal

I mention this every year as an accomplishment because in recent years it has become increasingly difficult to attain Microsoft Gold Partner status. While we’ve seen other Gold partners drop by the wayside, we’ve been able to maintain our Gold status for eight years running. Every year is a challenge and we’ll continue to do our best to maintain our Gold status.

10. Free Community Hosting Sandbox

We truly enjoy helping the development community, so as you may know, we offer a lot of free beta hosting programs. This year we worked with Microsoft to offer free hosting sandboxes to allow developers to test out new technologies like ASP.NET 4.5.1 on Windows 2012 R2 and Web Matrix 3. We will continue our tradition of offering beta hosting via our labs program whenever we can.

If it looks like we were busy in 2013, we were! But we have something up our sleeve for 2014 that we think a lot of you will enjoy, and we’re not going to make you wait too long to see what it is. Stay tuned! Things are about to get interesting…

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Social media fatigue among DiscountASP.NET users in the U.S.?

December 19, 2013Inside DiscountASP.NET, ResearchFacebook, LinkedIn, social media, TwitterDr. S. Hadi

We started to collect data regarding the social media usage among DiscountASP.NET users in our surveys conducted in March 2012 and continue up to the latest survey in October 2013.

We thought it would be interesting to compare those four surveys from 2012 to 2013 on which social media services our customers are using and see the trends.

In all four surveys, we received a total of 3,007 responses from our U.S. based customers, including 701 responses in the March 2012 survey, 822 responses in the October 2012 survey, 840 responses in the March 2013 survey, and 644 responses in the October 2013 survey.

We asked our users to rate how active they were in using Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook and to select from four options, including “Do Not Use,” “Set up account, but never use,” “Use occasionally,” and “Active User.” Similar to our previous post that was published in December last year, we only show the percentage of the “Active Users” for each of the social media services.

The results from the four surveys showed that Facebook continues to be the top social media site actively used by our customers in the US. Based on the four surveys, an average of 41% of our clients are active users of Facebook. In the latest survey in October 2013 the percentage was at 37%, or a drop of 4% from the average level. If we compare this with our March 2013 Survey, we see a big drop of 8%.

LinkedIn continues to hold the second spot averaging 28% of our clients being active users across the four surveys. We see that LinkedIn usage has continued to increase among our clients from the first survey back in March 2012, hitting the highest level of 35% in March 2013, and then dropping 4% to 31% in the latest survey.

Twitter captured the third position averaging 21% of our clients being active users across the four surveys. Similar to LinkedIn, Twitter usage continued to increase from 16% to 24% over 2012 and remained at a steady level in March 2013. But once again, we see a 4% drop in our most recent survey.

The data spanning four surveys show some interesting results on how the usage of these social media sites has evolved within the past two years. In summary, the latest survey in October 2013 showed that there has been a drop in active use of social media services like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

While we cannot state the exact reason we are seeing this drop, it is interesting to note that this could be an instance of social media fatigue as social media experts have recently discussed [1, 2]. Another explanation may be in the rise of social media newcomers that are taking away some market share of “attention” from traditional social media services.

In the next survey we may look into other emerging social media providers from different regions and adding those into our survey questions.

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Managed TFS Timesheet Hosting Services

December 17, 2013Announcements, Team Foundation ServerTakeshi Eto

We have partnered with TeamExpand to offer a fully-managed hosted TFS Timesheets with TeamExpand’s TX Chrono application that installs on top of Team Foundation Server.

TeamExpand’s TX Chrono (TFS Timesheets) is a web-based tool that allows developers to submit time spent on project work items and provides project managers the ability to review and approve timesheets.

Traditionally TFS Timesheets have been adopted by businesses using TFS on-premises but through this partnership TeamExpand users have a hosted option as well.

For more information about TFS Timesheet hosting, check out our web site.

For more information about TFS Timesheets, visit TeamExpand.com

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Getting Started With TFS 2013 Video

December 11, 2013How-to, Team Foundation Server, Videomjp

tfs 2013 Michael Ossou is back with a new video, Getting Started With TFS 2013.

If you’re new to TFS, or to setting up users in our Control Panel, check it out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jH54v3qFtM&rel=0

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ASP.NET 4.5.1 and MVC 5 Hosting Available!

December 6, 2013AnnouncementsTakeshi Eto

We are happy to announce that we are now supporting the latest Microsoft Web Stack on the Windows Server 2012 R2 platform – including ASP.NET 4.5.1 and MVC 5.

With this new addition we are officially ready for web apps created with Visual Studio 2013.

.NET 4.5.1 includes a lot of improvements, but maybe most significantly, improved performance. In the past, if your site had a period of inactivity the application pool would be recycled, causing a potentially slow startup next time your site was requested due to the time it took to recompile and spin up the application pool. Now, when your application pool is recycled, it is paged to disk, so a new request after a period of inactivity should start up significantly more quickly. Microsoft says up to 90% more quickly.

The .NET 4.5.1 upgrade also includes MVC 5, which a lot of you have been asking for. It’s here now, and it’s ready for you!

It’s worth noting here that .NET 4.5.1/MVC 5 are only available on our newest servers. So if you want to start using them now, you may have to migrate your site to a new server. The good folks in tech support can help you with that, so feel free to open up a ticket with them and they will take care of you.

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