MasterCard Site Goes Live

MasterCard recently (today) launched their revamped Priceless.com.mx website for Latin America. The reason I'm mentioning this? EdgeInova RSVP is the tool they are using to handle the restaurant reservations. It is always a good day to see some fruits of labor hit. So, if you are travelling to Latin America and wish to make a reservation at one of several premier restaurants, head on over to priceless.com.mx.

Revv

We recently updated some features at EdgeInova and created a new service/product for business who need to reach out to their customers. The new product is called Revv (that's Rev with an extra "v").

The goal of Revv is to make sending newsletters to a business's client base both simple and cost effective. We provide templates and ideas on how to promote goods and services so a business owner can concentrate on getting people in the store.

One of our clients, Gerty's in Bozeman Montana, used our Revv Tools to reach their customers. In their newsletter, Gerty's offered a simple single-day promotion to receive 10% off if a customer brought in a hanger. That promotion was a hit, and in turn they experienced their largest single-day sales ever.

If anyone is interested in finding out more about Revv, please contact Tiffany Olsen at 406-582-0494.

Forever a Balancing Act

It amazes me how many times an organization has to adjust itself in order to stay in alignment. Business needs seem to change rapidly and seemingly hit both sides of the pendulum. On one side, features rein king. Without this particular feature, x is not possible. On the other side, Customer Support needs better documentation, more responsiveness to customer feedback, etc. With limited resources, decisions have to be made as to which feature or task wins.

Now comes the agile part. A commandment which states all else takes a back seat. However, without this ability to alter course rapidly, certain business opportunities are lost or severly delayed. I don't believe in forever shifting tasks to accomodate potential business opportunities, but some opportunities need to be taken advantage of or the business suffers overall.

This is where we have found ourselves over the last few weeks (task prioritization). I've been watching the business side (specifically Anthony Nettuno our COO) and I'm glad to say things are going well. Nothing is without its problems, but if everything was easy none of us would have jobs.

Javascript Compilation?

I've been messing around with some reflection methods to accommodate more dynamic communication between javascript and web services. The web services do more of a pass through to a DAL/BAL layer for further processing. In order to do some server side help for our javascript / EdgeML (form markup) to work, we are attempting a semi-compiler style approach to lessen the blow on the client system. Meaning, we have integrated some server tags in our EdgeML to reduce web service calls later.

This only works for items that are more static since we cache several bits, but no one can complain when we can reduce the number of web service calls in half. Overall, it's a very fun and interesting implementation. Sometimes it even feels like we are near the cutting edge ;)

EdgeInova Finally out of Stealth Mode

It looks like we are finally out of stealth mode and entering the sales/marketing mode. EdgeInova.com is up and our President/CTO Kevin Nessland has started a blog discussing a few of our technology gems.

Team Foundation Build Server Issues

Lately I've been trying to dig into the world of TFS Build Server with limited success. Primarily, it seems the documentation side of this coin is left to blogs and various MSDN articles. Things I thought would be simple to accomplish required some digging into the xml based project file for a build, re-ording the build sequence from the default added list, and finally bypassing a build error. The specific error was:

error MSB3491:
Could not write lines to file "obj\xxxx.csproj.FileList.txt". Access to the path 'PATH\xxxx\obj\xxxx.csproj.FileList.txt' is denied.

Luckily, this blog entry by Sven Cipido saved some time.

Overall, it's a very cool extensible tool but (at least for me) came at a price of digging around websites to figure out how to use it. The most comparable tool to this (difficulty getting my hands around without some guidance) was MIIS.