Now you no longer pay me for Dropthings license instead you donate the money to a charity and I will give you the license. In case you don’t know what Dropthings is, it is a Web 2.0 Personalizable Dashboard framework that you can use to build Web 2.0 personalizable websites and enterprise dashboards. It is built using ASP.NET AJAX, jQuery, Silverlight, .NET 3.5, Entity Framework, SQL Server. It is in use in big companies like BT, Intel, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters; many government organizations like State Police, Canada Border Protection etc. Since it is a state of the art .NET 3.5 codebase, it is sometimes used as a starting point for an application with all the best practices already in place in order to build an N-tier web app using popular technologies, design patterns and testing methods. Dropthings helps you build web app utilizing extensive performance and scalability research that I have done to scale websites to millions of users. It also helps you build a codebase that is highly testable. It shows you how to test AJAX applications using automated test tools like WatiN. It has a business layer and a data access layer that is fully unit testable, nearly 100% test coverage and uses Inversion of Control pattern to the fullest.
You can find details about the Project here: http://code.google.com/p/dropthings/
There are two codeproject articles that show you how it was built, tested, deployed and the production challenges I had to overcome scaling this to millions of requests per day:
Build Google IG like Portal in 7 days
Web 2.0 AJAX Portal using jQuery, ASP.NET 3.5, Silverlight, Linq to SQL, WF and Unity
Finally, there’s a book on it, that takes you from the initial idea to design, coding, testing, all the way to purchasing right production hardware, deployment and production troubleshooting. It is a complete end-to-end guide for a developer/startup CTO to take an idea from design to VC funded successful startup used by millions. I have captured many experiences I have learnt from my startup years at Pageflakes that I co-founded and was the founding CTO.
Building a Web 2.0 Portal with ASP.NET 3.5 from O‘Reilly.
Let’s build great web apps and save the world at the same time!