Well it has been a long time, and much has been happening.  Most notably on the technology front is byZero’s adaptation of Microsoft’s MVC3 (soon to be MVC4) web platform.  Microsoft’s MVC guru Scott Guthrie has a prolific body of MVC Framework expository and example, if you are uninitiated and wish to learn more start HERE on his blog for a technical overview.

I may espouse the virtues of the Microsoft MVC Framework generally in another post, today I am all giddy about the extensibility afforded through NuGet packages, and specifically the excellent Data Annotations Extensions package produced by Scott Kirkland.

Form validation has long been a tedious necessity on the road to producing robust Web based applications.  Web Forms offered a framework that lessened the man-hours required for that task, but in the end even a moderately complex web application requires custom validation.  In the end the Client ends up paying the Developer to reinvent the wheel for every car produced. The reason for that is largely due to the tight binding between the validation mechanism and the GUI, or more accurately phrased, the LACK of binding between the Object Model and the validation.

The core MVC Framework Data Annotations functionality goes a long way to transferring the validation away from the front end into the View Model, where it arguably belongs.  But the implementation is no-frills, and just covers the basics.

http://dataannotationsextensions.org/  takes that all a step further with the addition of the following validation types:

• CreditCard
• Date
• Digits
• Email
• EqualTo
• FileExtensions
• Integer
• Max
• Min
• Numeric
• Url

Today a client project called for form validation over a range of input data types.  A year ago, this task would have added three hours to the project.  Today, I installed the Data Annotations NuGet package, annotated my View Model, made a minor adjustment to the View to display the results, and fifteen minutes later the task is done.  It is a good thing.

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Many people think the choices with Gmail are either myname@gmail.com or a $50 per user custom domain option.  The fact is that Google Apps offers a free Standard Edition that has all of the features most small enterprises will ever need.

Part 1: Choosing your Google Account Type

Google Account versus Google Apps Account

A Google Account is what most people refer to when they say Gmail.

A Google Apps account is basically a Gmail account that incorporates your own custom domain.

Both Google Apps and a Google Account provide the user with most of the same applications:

• email (Gmail)
• Google Docs
• Calendar
• Google Sites

The primary difference between a Google Account (a regular old Gmail account) and a Google Apps account is that Google Apps integrates your own domain name into the services.

This difference makes Google Apps the suitable choice for businesses and organizations, and a Gmail/Google Account the choice for personal usage.

Google Apps Versions

• Standard Edition is free for up to 50 users inside a single domain
• Premier Edition costs $50 per user per year

Click here for Google’s comparison of standard vs. premiere editions.

There are also editions available for Government, Schools and non-profit organizations.  See the Google Apps home page here for more details. 

For most small business or organizations the clear choice is the Standard Edition, which will be the subject of the rest of this article.

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Some of you may have noticed the byZero site had gone dark for three weeks in September.

We’ve been prudently pushing our clients to our affiliate Cloud hosting provide Level Traffic for well over a year now, and we’ve finally followed our own advise.  After ten years of trusty service we have shut down our data center hosted XEON servers for good, and we are finally practicing what we preach.  byZero is in the cloud.

We’re changing a few things about our web presence as well.  No more billboard web site.  In ten years I don’t believer we’ve ever gotten a single new client by random browsing.  We are and have always counted on our strong circle of associates and positive word of mouth referrals to grow our business.  We are changing to a blog-style web presence -  a stream of consciousness of the happenings at byZero.  Next we will start off with a feature on switching to the Google cloud for not only email, but document sharing and collaboration.  This is to be accompanied by online code samples as we integrate Google Analytics with our client Internet Rain’s TechnicalHotlineSolutions.com ecommerce back end using the Gdata API. 

So no more selling, just telling.

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