StoneShare is a Bootstrap Awards Finalist

I’m proud that my company StoneShare has been nominated as a finalist in Ottawa’s Bootstrap Awards as one of the fastest-growing self-funded startups in the last three years. Here’s the press release:

OTTAWA (January 31, 2012) – Following a record number of nominations, Exploriem today announces the finalists of the 2012 Bootstrap Awards. Finalists in the 12 categories were narrowed down from a pool of 97 nominations received in the last six weeks.

“This year we see a 45 per cent increase in nominations which is testament to the self capitalized talent and growing entrepreneurial culture in Ottawa” says Dr Bruce Firestone, Executive Director of Exploriem and mentor to many local businesses.

Winners will be announced at the awards event and tradeshow from 10.30am to 2pm at the Centurion Conference Centre on the 23rd of February, 2012. Ottawa based Liverpool Court – who manage all of the audio visual for Bluesfest – have stepped in to help winners maximize their post event publicity. After the awards, each winner will receive a vignette showing an overview of their company including footage of their win and acceptance speech. Mayor Jim Watson has also confirmed his attendance at the awards.

The 2012 Bootstrap Awards finalists are:

Fastest Growing Start-Up (Last 3 years)

1. Capital Home and Staging

2. Gazaro Inc.

3. Renaissance Repair and Supply

4. StoneShare

5. YOUiLabs

 

Wish us luck!

Introducing Clockwork Web Framework for .NET

In 2003, I read a book, “Making Space Happen”, by Paula Berinstein. It’s about the efforts of entrepreneurs to open up space to the public. It’s the kind of thing that gets my propeller-head spinning, and after reading it I resolved to create the best website on space travel on the internet.

So, I sat down in a park and within two hours I had covered several sheets of paper with scribbles and scrawls of what my website needed. I had notes on authentication, web components, search boxes, themes, dynamic images, language toggles, and all kinds of stuff.

Being a good little programmer, the more I designed, the more intricate the design became, and pretty soon I was knee-deep in code. Flash forward six years later, and I have yet to write a single page of that space website!

But I do have a web framework :)

What It Is

Clockwork makes it easy to build powerful .NET web sites. It’s completely free, open source (under the Apache 2 license) and you can use it in proprietary or open source projects, as you like.

Some of the ways it makes web development easy:

• Database-agnostic data access
• Dynamically displays content in different languages
• Leverages the .NET 3.5 framework, including the Provider Model, generics, LINQ, automatic properties, and more
• Integrates with popular web services such as those provided by UserVoice, LinkedIn, Google and Yahoo!
• Makes it really easy to use object-oriented programming standards like Dependency Injection / Inversion of Control, Repositories, and Specifications

Under the hood I use many popular components, including NHibernate for database access, Castle Windsor for Dependency Injection, and log4Net for logging.

Although today marks the official public release, the framework is currently at version 3.x because I’ve been using earlier versions of it in production websites since 2004.

I’ve built Clockwork using as many web standards as I can find, as many of the latest .NET elements as possible, software best practices, and a lot of love and stubbornness.

What It Will Become

Well, it’s obviously too early to say. But I am committed to continuing to develop it, I have a long list of things I plan to add, and I’m hopeful a community of .NET developers will adopt it and push it into areas I can’t even imagine today.

Please take a minute to visit the website and learn more about it. I hope you find it helpful.

Many thanks,

Nick

Griffon Solutions - Startup Diary

About four years ago my partner Marie-Claude and I started developing some custom ASP.NET websites for small businesses.

The company name - Griffon Solutions - comes from a lovely little village in the Gaspesie region of Eastern Quebec called l'Anse-au-Griffon.

What began as a part-time effort on evenings and weekends slowly started to get a little more organized over time. Two years ago, before we moved to Australia, we registered the company in Quebec.

Our reason for coming back from the Lucky Country last year was to focus more on this company, with the eventual goal of having a fun and challenging full-time web solutions business (software and consulting services) that we could run from anywhere.

We'd love to have an "open source business" - not just by writing Open Source software but by transparently sharing what we're up to, and how we're going about it, and learning as much as possible from the web community as we go.

Website Redesign

We’ve just launched a redesign of our website, www.griffonsolutions.com. We had a couple of pages online before, but the site was put together very very quickly as a placeholder, and needed a lot more love. In fact I’ve always been reluctant to publicize it :) As the old saying goes, “the cobbler’s children run barefoot”, and we never made the time to fix up the site, until now.

As a result of this SharePoint blog, I was contacted by Mario Hernandez, at Designs Drive. Mario has been looking into SharePoint and wanted to know a bit more about the LDAP integration I’ve written about. After a few email conversations he was kind enough to volunteer some of his time to help us redesign our website.

Marie-Claude and I picked a graphic design template we were happy with, and then Mario worked hard to make sure it was transformed into valid Xhtml and CSS. We all felt it was important to adhere to web standards and avoid table layouts if at all possible. We’re very happy with the end result.

Thanks so much, Mario, for contributing your time and your knowledge to us!

I think this is an interesting trend, especially in tough economic times…Here we have a couple of guys working in Los Angeles and Quebec who have never met, trading their IT skills and time to each other online. I know we’re not the first ever to do this, but it shows how small the world is, and how many opportunities there are for people to collaborate and work together.

The Framework

Incidentally, our new website is built on a custom .NET web application framework I’ve been working on constantly for the last 5 years.

The framework has been very much a labour of love. Sometimes it has been very frustrating and dispiriting, while at (most) other times the work has been fascinating, challenging, and deeply educational.

I’m finishing up the architecture on it and aiming to release it this Autumn as supported Open Source (probably Apache 2). This means that other people can use it (even in proprietary software).

In plain English, the platform has two goals:

1. Provide a foundation of Enterprise-level capabilities to any .NET application.
2. Integrate with popular software, databases, and web services in a simple, stable, secure, and flexible way 

It is standards-based and fully multilingual right out of the box. It uses NHibernate so it can support most databases without any modification.

From a technical perspective I’m still nailing down the shipping features, but currently it includes all of the following:

• C# 3.0 / .NET 3.5 Framework
• Generic business Entities to model common web software concepts such as users, websites, documents, and web pages. These are implemented via interfaces so you should be able to integrate them with your existing code without much modification
• Common metadata and provider information for all Entities, such as Creator, Date Last Modified, and Data Source
• Basic LINQ querying for all Entities
• Entities can be exposed via a variety of formats including JSON and XML, or through web services (such as REST and SOAP) or web feeds (RSS and Atom)
• Full multilingualism down to the level of an individual piece of data
• N-tier codebase, using object oriented best practices
• NHibernate database-agnostic data storage
• log4Net for robust logging
• Application Integration layer to make it easier to consume and provide information from a wide variety of services, software, and other sources (such as RSS and Atom feeds)
• OAuth authentication for authenticating to web services such as YouTube or Google
• Some strongly typed web service managers and web controls to make it easy to use popular services like LinkedIn, Yahoo FireEagle, and Google
• Strongly-typed, standardized file access to a variety of file storage sources including Amazon S3, Http web servers, FTP servers, and Windows file systems
• Uses the .NET Provider Model (especially for Roles and Membership)
• Presentation layer with prebuilt base controls, pages, and master pages, as well as some server controls
• Includes basic website project with Robots.txt, Master Pages, sitemap, XRDS file, and Admin area to make it easy to start up and manage a new website

I’ve been using various versions of this framework in production since 2003 / 2004 so it is tested and stable (my current internal release number is 2.7), but it’s nowhere near where I eventually hope it can be, which is why I’m hoping to build a thriving community around it.

Right now I’m in talks with a group that wants to evaluate using it to integrate their software with a popular web messenging service. If you too would like to evaluate the framework around the Q3/ Q4 period, drop me an email (address below) and we can have a chat.

I’ll provide more updates on this framework during the summer, as it nears RTM.

The Future

Obviously there’s a lot going on. In the future, this blog will speak not just about SharePoint and related technologies, but about business and technology issues in general. I hope to learn as much as I share, and I hope above all that the blog remains interesting and that you enjoy reading it :)

Cheers,

Nick

P.S. You can always email me at nick@griffonsolutions.com. 

The Code Factory - A Hangout for Ottawa Startups

I’ve started renting shared workspace at the Code Factory, a “collaborative co-working space” at 246 Queen street in downtown Ottawa. I’ve purchased about 40 hours of time so far. I can use meeting rooms, internet, coffee machines, lending libraries, and even some entertainment in the form of a foosball table and a Wii.

 

The owner, Ian Graham, calls himself a “Management Consultant and Entrepreneurial Catalyst”. He’s very enthusiastic about the startup scene in Ottawa, and definitely wants to help act an incubator and organizer of it.

It’s a neat place to hang out and meet entrepreneurs. There’s at once an informal and exciting vibe, and every time I’ve been there I’m come back amped up. Although I mostly work out of a home office it’s worth it to rent a bit of space because I like the chance to meet people, and I’m learning a lot about what’s going on in Ottawa and especially in the startup community.

It’s great to see such a place in Ottawa, which has tons of IT knowledge and has done for many decades…The Ottawa high tech scene actually has some very deep roots, due to the presence of government research and development agencies, a highly educated workforce, a strong telecommunications sector, and (more recently) some major hardware and software firms such as Nortel, Cognos, and Corel, which generated a lot of spinoffs. To prove the point, there’s a neat family tree on the wall showing the genesis of Ottawa-Gatineau startups and their sources (government, research, telecom, and so on).

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