Brandon Watson

I was listening to the most recent TWiT where there was discussion about the recent algo change at Google.  During the conversation, there was an off-hand comment about whether or not the following relationship held water: Google:Social as Microsoft:Search That one kind of bent my mind around a bit.  There isn’t any new thought here.  Social is presenting all kinds of problems for Google, and despite their success in South America and some other locales with Orkut, they really haven’t made much of a dent in social.  A fact made more known by the recent additions of the talents of Marissa Mayer to the task. Some have argued that social isn’t in the DNA at Google, and that’s the source of their problems. It’s not too hard of a stretch to make the same claim about Microsoft: that we never had search in our DNA. The analogy, however, breaks down when you spend a bit more t... (more)

Crawling the Windows Phone Marketplace

I have been asked by a few people how sites like WP7AppList get their data.  The Windows Phone Marketplace, which you access on your PC via Zune software, uses XML to get data over the wire.  I wanted to share a couple of code snippets which might help an erstwhile data junkie on their way.  This code works.  It may not be the most elegant solution, but it works, and I wanted to share it with others in case they wanted to see how to parse the XML, or how to write LINQ queries against it. Caveat – this is a geek enthusiast post.  I used Fiddler to figure out how to parse the XML.... (more)

Amazon, Google, Microsoft - Big Three Cloud Providers Examined

Brandon Watson's "Many Niches" Blog There’s been quite a bit of chatter on the web about the Azure Services Platform. Obviously I’m excited to see people talking about our new platform, especially when there is plenty of good, some bad, and some good if not somewhat rambling. There will be no shortage of guessing as to what Microsoft is “really up to” with our development efforts. I wanted to take a crack at that one, but from a completely different perspective. I want to frame the discussion centered on the motivations of the platform providers, and let that be a guide to understa... (more)

ASP.NET – Membership Hides Its Privileges

One of the problems I have had thus far with my foray into ASP.NET has been a simple concept.  How do you deal with users logging in.  Not so much the actual mechanics of it, but where is the data, and how can I get to it?  By default, when you are using forms based authentication, that data is stored in tables that you cannot easily get to, and certainly not in the Solutions Explorer.  Essentially, nothing is showing up in your “App_Data” node, and there is no .MDF file to add from your project directory. What then are you to do when you want to have direct access to your membe... (more)

Chrome OS Screenshot Leaked

It’s Friday, and it’s sunny out here in Seattle, which means that no work will get getting done.  In lieu of work, I did some digging with my contacts on the interwebs, and it turns out there is are a couple of screen grabs of the new Chrome OS floating around out there.  I like how Google is taking their minimalist design philosophies for their search engine and applying it to their OS. At the very least, you can expect that the UI for the OS won’t change for 10 years, that the OS will work only about 80% of the time (the other 20% it’s will be working on some personal project... (more)