Who's who in the Software category

I plan to use this blog to discuss software architecture and construction, using various Inner Drive Technology projects as examples. (I may also use client projects as examples, with the names changed to protect the guilty.)

Company projects

Inner Drive Technology Company Site

Most of the upcoming changes to Inner Drive Technology's public site are minor, except that the demonstrations will become gradually more interesting.

Also, I plan to cross-post the Software part of this blog to a new one under the inner-drive.com domain

Inner Drive Extensible Architecture™

The IDEA™ underlies all of IDT's software. Sadly, about 30% of its features—the configuration and messaging parts—duplicates functionality in the Microsoft Enterprise Library. Microsoft and Avanade had a lot of good people working on it for a year; I had one guy for three months. So, my next task is to integrate the Microsoft Enterprise Library with the IDEA, and concentrate on the stuff that makes the IDEA a good deal for our customers.

Weather Now

I spun wx-now.com off my personal site seven years (and two days) ago. It got a total re-design in 2002, when I migrated to .NET and built a massive 7.4-million-item gazetteer (places database) that is bigger than the United States Geological Survey's and the National Geospatial Agency's combined.

I'm already well along another total redesign that will:

• take advantage of all the neat features of C# 2.0;
• totally separate data from presentation by using XML and XSLT for everything;
• actually increase the size and power of the gazetteer; and
• finally, finally allow users to choose their language and measurement systems.

A lot of the heavy lifting for this already exists on the Inner Drive Technology website, including the language-and-measurement-customization features.

Plus, my good friend Katie Zoellner (neé Katie Toner) is doing the look-and-feel design. She created the original logo in 1999, and taught me some tricks that made it a visually appealing site.

Personal projects

This blog

I want to get this thing working on Windows 2003. This may involve debugging it on the only computer on which I haven't yet installed .NET 2.0, or I may just port the whole thing to .NET 2.0. It's open source, after all.

braverman.org

I started my personal site in 1997 and last redesigned it in 2002. It's showing its age.

It's getting a complete re-write, starting early next year. I haven't resolved some key architectural issues yet, like whether to make it a portal-type site or even to steal code from DotNetNuke. (Since DNN is a VB.NET 1.1 application, and these days I'm trying to use only C# 2.0, I probably won't.)

What it will do, though, is everything it does now, only better. It will be the testing ground for some tools I'm developing to publish and create websites in general, and it will have a much better database of jokes. Not to mention, I'll finally fix an annoying bug on the photo page that makes it almost unusable.

New fun sites

Anne has given me some ideas about applications she would find useful. Keep your eyes peeled for:

• An application to help runners train for races;
• A tool to figure out the nutritional content of home-made food, based on user-defined recipes; and
• A user-friendly site that helps vegetarians and vegans find places to eat.

The last one came out of our recent visit to San Antonio, which has about three vegans and the possibility of getting vegan food at, maybe, six restaurants—none of which is on the Riverwalk.

Client projects

All of this goes on while I work on three client projects right now, so please be patient.