I submitted this to the UtahPulse.com feedback section earlier tonight.  Enjoy.

As a member of the Utah tech community I hoped to find UtahPulse.com as a place to connect, learn & find fresh utah oriented content.  Unfortunately that is not what I have found.  I hope this feedback finds a reader who understands that this criticism may seem harsh on a beta site but without such feedback this site won’t make it out of beta.

What I have found has been a drab site with little content (forgivable as its in beta) and what content I have seen does not grab the reader in any way shape or form. What I have seen is a press release aggregator. Zions bank is a great member of the community, but the link & image at the top of the page is more than enough to advertise for them, no need to reproduce every tech related topic from them and make UtahPulse look like a shill for them.  Additionally, there are no images for a story therefore making the content seem dry, newswire-like.

Integrating yourself into a community like the tech community of Utah will take much work but I don’t believe that it will be hard.  You need to get people into the community not just a site.  If you are to join the tech community of Utah then you must /join/ the tech community of Utah.  What I mean by that is that you should be networking with the networkers & utilizing the technology talent that is readily at hand.  Get local bloggers to blog about UtahPulse, get involved in the worldwide discussion. Join & use tech that excited the tech members of the state you are trying to grab the attention of.  What about a fan page on Facebook?  Thats pretty mainstream.  How about organizing a meetup using Upcoming.org?  Or how about getting really crazy and utilizing the bleeding edge that we are using like Twitter? Or how about grab a Qik account and broadcast live online from a cell phone some of the pivotal tech events that occur on a weekly basis.

The conversation is waiting for you, are you ready for it?

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I’ve been learning a ton about ASP.Net and its newest version 3.5 which contains some extremely handy feautures including some seriously awesome Ajax integration.  Needless to say my head has been stuck in tutorials, videos and example code for the past week.  Briefly I’m going to run down some of the features that I have found of particular interest.

I’m really glad that Microsoft has jumped on board with this and has put all the chips in so to speak.  With built in functionality for Ajax applications it makes ASP.Net a real contender in the space.  And with the Ajax control toolkit being a community project it makes it a real viable option to take and use Microsoft technology even for those that see Microsoft as the closed source behemoth it still partially is, albeit slowly lumbering in the general direction of community openness.  Now on to the features.

• Code Behind for js files (I saw this in 2.0, but haven’t seen it in 3.5… sure its still there just need to relocate it… All in all a really neat feature and something that a C# dev can understand)
• Extenders for ASP.Net controls (This is so very very cool and something that makes it really powerful)
• Update Panels (allowing you to drop in what you need to ajaxify it, and you know everything it should affect)
• JavaScript IntelliSense (Not fantastic but definitely invaluable)

So, what else is there?  Leave a comment telling me what I should be looking at and where.  Or, if you have an interesting thing for me to learn about send an e-mail my way: charlie.oliver {at} gmail {dot} com.

I’ve been attending activities in the social media scene here in Utah ever since the first Social Media Dev Garage held at Twelve Horses that hosted Jeff Barr who discussed Amazon Web Services,  and I’ve been hooked ever since.  From what I have seen of the technology community here in Utah not many are doing the sort of fresh and innovative work that Bungee Labs are doing down in Orem, Utah.  The tool that they are working on is an endeavor that could shake up the developer community in a big way.  That tool is called Bungee Connect.

First off they are hosting the IDE on their servers which allows you to work from any machine without having to install thousands of dollars worth of software.  Secondly, they are providing the hosting for your application, which can be a pretty worrisome thing for a developer to have another company host their application without them being able to access the files themselves.  Fortunately they mentioned that later on down the road they will be providing you with a bevy of hosting options so I don’t think this fear will be well founded for at least very much longer.  But I think the real trick with Bungee’s software is going to be the amount of ajax that is going on in the background that you really don’t have to worry about, and Bungee’s flatened MVC architecture that abstracts things out so each section can communicate quickly and effectively.  I don’t have much in the way of media to show you from them but they were exceptional hosts who took the time to sit with us and walk us through setting up our own application that was able to take advantage of some of the shared code base that one of them had been working on (Brad Hintze took and wrapped the Twitter API into an importable class allowing us to call the API without having to mess with the XML return)  But in the way of media I highy recommend Jesse Stay’s video on Bungee Connect.