Skierkowski LLC Blog

Over the weekend I worked on a project I call TempDump; hence the domain http://www.tempdump.com/. This is no novel idea, just a simple one. There exist many solutions today to enable people to share files fairly easily, email provides (like gmail) a way to send email with attachments, services like folders.live.com are starting up, and older services like xdrive.com have been around for a while. All of them are great, but all of them have limitations when it comes to easily using them.

Scenarios exist where you or someone you know needs to share a file, but they might not have Gmail, so they can’t send large emails. You could ask them to use a collection of services, but sometimes that is a fairly involving process. There are also things like FTP, which are even more involving than any of the web-enabled services.

My design for TempDump is to enable easy file sharing in the least involving form. As you enter the site the very first thing you will see is the “Browse” button which allows you to select the local files you want to share. You press “Upload” the files get uploaded, and after doing CAPTCHA verification you will get a unique URL that for 24 hours (may be subject to change) will allow you to download the files. If you uploaded numerous files, you will get a zip file.

There are a couple cool things I want to call out:

• Eye Candy: A very “Web 2.0ish” look and feel to it.
• Free: hopefully will be advertisement supported.
• Great UX: Instant feedback on your progress both in steps, as well as the upload progress.
• Fast: The page never does a full refresh, everything is componentized and refreshes as needed.
• Easy: No need to login, no need to register, no need to click through several pages to get to what you need. When you are done, it makes it very easy to share either by copying the URL allowing you to send an email to whomever.
• Secure: will validate that a person is using this so that others don’t try to impede on the service. Will in V2 also provide a mechanism to generate a one-time-password for the URL.

Fauxto (http://www.fauxto.com/)

This is like Photoshop but made in Flash and usable online. I have played with a collection of online versions of traditional rich desktop applications and I am always disappointed. Fauxto on the other hand actually has a pretty good intuitive user experience. Despite it not being nearly as feature rich as Photoshop, and may never be or may never want to be, this thing has great potential.

http://www.biztalk.net/

http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=317646

I heard about this “BizTalk Services” at Microsoft as I belong to an organization that delivers complimentary technology as a part of a bigger vision. I didn’t know much about the technology other than a bullet point or two during some All Hands for my division. Last night in a part of my usual future technology exploration quest I stumbled upon these couple links. I dove into this stuff a bit and played around a little bit with the SDK.

John Shewchuck, a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer, is basically taking the concept of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), and extending the concept beyond the enterprise firewalls to the internet; hence, the new name “Internet Service Bus.” Amongst many enabling scenarios, the connectivity services, or simple “Relay” is something that excited me.

Composite applications, which are applications that compose of a collection of services, solve many problems of traditional single-server applications; however, they also introduce a collection of problems. The problems, as identified on the website, include things like firewall traversal. This is a common scenario in enterprises when company acquisitions occur and the IT departments need to merge their collection of services across the internet. Typically custom solutions are developed which are painful and costly as the logic to knit topology forest is no picnic. The ISB solves this key scenario, but what makes it beautiful is that the architecture also addresses a collection of other enterprise and non-enterprise challenges.

I won’t attempt to regurgitate John and Dennis’ so please check out the couple links I opened with.

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