The beauty of exploration or “planned vs. actual”

One of the fun things of exploring new things is that you know how it starts but you don’t know how it ends. One more thing I learned is that as much as you learn you know less. Why? Because you find out that there is much more to learn.
This is what happened to me right at the beginning and since in our environment you must be agile – I will be. Starting to play with the facebook toolkit for .NET I found out that I need a good idea for an application and until I’ll have it I put on hold the development of the facebook app and instead will develop a facebook windows app. Still need to complete the definition but I already have a high level idea. I’ll give it a try…

My first Facebook application

First application I’ve decided to develop was facebook. For that I needed first a facebook account (am I the last one to join the network?!). Creating an account was easy and I already have some friends :-)

Creating an application is also relatively simple. After installing the developer application and following the nice tutorial . Tip: at this point don't bother too much with most of the parametes (besides the app name) as you can (and will) change them later.

Now comes a surprise - the application should be hosted and I need to find a host for it. The web is full of free hosting services so which one to choose? Again, googled a bit and found out that joyent is a good choice. After trying twice (did not get a response for my first request) I managed to have an account, just to find out that it's not so simple as it requires php and linux knowledge.

I've decided to take it one step at the time and to start with the technology I know best (.NET).

Next episode - how to develop a facebook .NET application

Let’s start blogging

As a geek in the past I woke up one day and realized that I’m too rusty and not up-to-date enough so I’ve decided to explore some of the cool technologies existing out there.

My journey is starting! I got a tip from a friend, Benzi: “blog your journey”, so here it comes:

I’ve decided that I want to blog. Using what? After googling a bit I found out that there are 2 finalists (when it comes to free hosting): blogger and wordpress (check this comparison). And although most recommendations I found were for wordpress I chose blogger. Let’s see if I'll regret it or not.
Creating the blog was easy (besides choosing the name) as well posting this first post.

Next stop is facebook - let's develop a facebook app