Jason Aaron Kiesel

Now that CitySourced is on Microsoft’s Azure cloud services, I’m a huge fan of what it offers both developers and startup companies. That being said, I wanted to put a quick note out there about a fix to a bug I found to help spread the knowledge I’ve gained getting into the nuts and bolts of it. With CitySourced, the original application was written in .NET (C#, 3.5 Framework), so the port was relatively simple. Once we started playing around with it though, the development app fabric kept crashing on us for no apparent reason. I searched Google (and Bing) and came up with nothing. Upon closer inspection of the code, it appears that if you redirect and specify the “EndResponse” flag as true, the app fabric bombs. So, in summary:

This BOMBS -> Response.Redirect(“~/my-new-url”, true);

This WORKS -> Response.Redirect(“~/my-new-url”, false);

I guess Azure doesn’t like ending the response prematurely. Luckily, we had abstracted any and all redirects to a utility class (eg, ContextUtil). So we updated our code in one place and viola! Our code worked perfectly.

I’ll be doing a pretty in depth post on our complete migration, what I like, what I didn’t like, etc. Stay tuned!

I wanted to give a shout out to an LA startup that I feel is doing incredibly well – and they’ve killed it at the two events that they’ve been involved with. That startup is SquareShare, and they have some really cool technology. In a nutshell, SquareShare allows anyone to promote their offline content (think flyers, magazine & newspaper content) directly into the social online world (twitter, facebook, etc.) to facilitate meaningful conversations. They use QR codes, and have built technology that allows anyone with a smartphone to share items that have been tagged with one of their QR codes. A QR code is basically funky looking barcode that holds information inside it. When you scan the barcode, you unlock the contents and that’s where the magic begins.

Anyway, I just thought that I’d share some cool tech with everyone. I’ve embedded a squareshare code directly in this post. If you have a smartphone, please feel free to scan it and share it!

Check out the news on SquareShare and their success at the TechCrunch LA Meetup…

Thanks!

NOTE: Full Disclosure – I serve in an official capacity as an advisor to SquareShare.