March 06
Technically speaking..
Today's blog entry is going to appeal to the inner geek in all of us. We've prepared a few questions for one of the star developers on our team: Doug. To understand how dedicated Doug was to getting our product launched, in December he volunteered not to shave until we launched. We thought (or rather hoped) he was joking.. unfortunately he wasn't and we have the before and after pictures to prove it (see below)..
Anyway, on with the questions:
Doug, tell us about your favourite feature in the service today.
I love the social networking aspect of our site, specifically the “Buddy Listings” module on the home page. It’s always nice to check in and find out what my friends and co workers are selling. I think this feature may take a while to catch on because your buddies need to post things on Expo before they you see it, but once it does, I think users will tell their friends about it and the we’ll see the use of our service explode.
OK, what was the most difficult feature to create and why?
Believe it or not, I think the most difficult front end feature were the “sliders” used to set the search radius and social networking level constraints for searching. For those who haven’t discovered them yet, click “change” next to the large orange words in the upper left of Expo. The client side javascript to make those work correctly was very difficult. They’re a beautiful piece of work.
What was the best technical thing you learnt during the development process?
Wow, this is a hard one. While trying to frame an answer I’ve considered and rejected several ideas because I can’t isolate just one. Among the contenders were: Unit testing in Visual Studio 2005, new features in SQL Server 2005 and AJAX techniques. Web development is one of those disciplines where you never truly master it all. There’s always room to learn. I assume that anyone who’s read this far is into development so let me end with this: the new Microsoft .NET 2.0 platform is so rich and compelling that you’re doing yourself a disservice by not upgrading. I’m sorry this answer ends on a shameless plug for our company, but it’s the honest truth.
Finally, what is your favorite listing on Windows Live Expo at the moment?
Thanks Doug, it's always a pleasure.. Also, you can catch some more tech-talk about our product on
MSDN's channel 9 where we recorded a video back in November (when Expo was still codenamed 'Fremont').
Hey, isn't it time you headed back to
our site to find that thing you've been looking for?
- Team Expo
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