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I’ve spent my entire career at start-ups. I’m use to small. I once worked at a big table with everyone else employed at the company, resulting in pure bliss. One company that I started with three other guys got up to eight people before we were sold to a company with close to 7,000 people in 40 countries. I am most comfortable working side by side with my colleagues; unfortunately over the last 10 years it has not really worked out that way. Ten years ago I started Corzen with my partner Bruce. Our first office was the Starbucks on 6th and W 57th street in Manhattan. We got...

Listen to Part 1 of our Agile Q&A Panel with my guests Steve Porter and Joel Semeniuk

Bullwinkle: “Hey Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of a hat!” Rocky: “Again? That trick never works!” Bullwinkle: “This time for sure!” In the last week or so, I’ve heard mixed reactions to Scott Hanselman’s eye-popping announcement that, in addition to ASP.NET MVC that is already open source, that Microsoft is releasing ASP.NET Web API and Razor as open source as well. Further, and this is the big deal: Microsoft is going to take contributions on their open source ASP.NET components and ship those contributions in the box for future major releases. Of course, this is big news on the face of it, but some...

The news today is buzzing with the announcement of Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram for $1billion.  Instagram co-founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, literally had a billion dollar idea. The idea for Instagram was also Systrom and Krieger’s Plan B. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger raised $500k of seed funding from Baseline Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz while working on Plan A in early 2010. The original idea for Instagram was called Burbn, a check-in app that competed with Foursquare and allowed you to check-in to locations and add photos and videos to your check-in. Burbn’s focus was suppose to be a mash-up of Foursquare and Mafia Wars (where the name Burbn...

Last week I mentioned my top five Visual Studio 11 designer improvements for ASP.NET development which took a look at some new goodies for us ASP.NET devs in VS11. One of these items, the Page Inspector, did get a bit of a spotlight but I think a paragraph or two cannot contain the sheer awesomeness that is this tool. Now I can hear some of you asking “What is this Page Inspector, and what makes it so special?” Well, let me tell you :) The Page Inspector found in VS11 brings in some of the most useful features within our favorite modern browser’s...