Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Oct 31st == Nov 30th && Shared plans == win!

So much for that beta by Oct 31st. I've had a lot of petty life things distract me from what's important: Red, White, And Blue! It is coming together though and I have high hopes. There are some interesting obstacles involved with keeping many clients in sync (quasi sync at least), and all the bugs that can occur when you have a client that loses sync with the db.

I have a really annoying issue where a browser's cache will prevent users from downloading a new client, so should I rename my client on every update just to trigger a download? Sounds clumsy. I don't think I would like old silverlight clients pinging my services either, so will I have to check a version string on every login? Seems so.

I am relying on the fact that all of my WCF sessions will exist in the same AppDomain, so I can use a single static to keep track of users. Risky and clumsy, I know, but I'm already stretching the capabilities of a shared hosting plan about as far as possible. I don't know many websites on shared hosting plans using WCF services, Ajax style PollingDuplex binding, Linq2Sql , hosting silverlight. This stuff came out last night (pretty much), so I've been happy with how much I can get away with on a shared hosting plan.

It really is a tribute to the computer industry when you can get so much power for a measly $100 / year hosting plan. This is our one up on any other industry: the low barrier of entry. Can you even imagine something similar in the auto industry? Investment banking? The factories, connections, and brown-nosing needed to do the most trivial things in other industries makes me love my field that much more.

See you next Sunday and have a happy thanksgiving!

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