Ricardo D. Sanchez

Programming, Startups, Life

With TidyContact I am scratching my own itch, really.

Let me start by explaining how it all started… I promise it won’t be a super long read but it also won’t be as short as you would like I imagine. Back in 1999 I had a bad experience at one of the national tax preparation firms and decided to learn and do my simple tax declaration myself. After a few months of a lot of reading and browsing irs.gov I felt ready and waited patiently until the next year to fill out the tax forms on my own. One year after that I had a group of friends and family members asking me to prepare their taxes as well… yikes! In 2001 Sanchez Plus Services was born (officially) and at the time I had about 20 people paying me money to prepare their taxes.

Fast forward to 2005, that is when my family and I moved from Minnesota to Austin, Texas and at the time Sanchez Plus Services had about 100 paying clients and the little business was already very profitable! the interesting part is that we never opened an office or even had a website… in fact, we didn’t even met with our clients in person, it was all a phone/fax operation and I just worked on it after work during tax season (February – April). After the 2005 tax season I decided to stop preparing taxes for other people and started doing computer consulting instead since that was my day job anyway, at this point my wife took over Sanchez Plus Services which she had already been helping run for a few years already and knew how to handle it and get things done. Read the rest of this entry »

Installing Windows Home Server (WHS) Connector in Windows 7 64-bit

I bought a Windows Home Server about two years ago, I use it primarily for backups and file sharing in my home network. It is a good solution for a small home network such as mine because it is sufficient, it is not overkill and it is easy to manage.

A few months ago, I put together a new PC which I use for development when I am home and for gaming. I installed Windows Ultimate 64-bit in it and up until today, I didn’t worry about connecting it to the WHS because I didn’t have much to backup, now I do. Read the rest of this entry »

NuGet, The Package Management System for the .Net Platform

NuGet is a package management system for the .NET platform, it is supposed to simplify the process of incorporating third-party libraries into a .NET project during development. Basically, it is a great way to add (and update) open source libraries and the like to your .NET project. The first version of NuGet was released in October 2010 and it was originally named NuPack.

How to get it

NuGet can be installed from here or from Visual Studio’s Extension Manager located under the Tools menu.

The awesomeness of it

Before NuGet, the way we incorporated third-party libraries into our projects was by doing the following:

  1. Download third-party library (and any dependencies) from the web.
  2. Unpack them (as many of them come in compressed files) to a folder in our project, I usually create (or created) a folder labeled “lib” and placed all the third-party libraries there.
  3. Import to the .NET project.
  4. Make any necessary changes to the config file when needed.
Too much work right? With NuGet, you basically open your project in Visual Studio and type a command in the new Package Manager Console. For example, if you wanted to add NUnit to your project, you’ll type the following command:

Read the rest of this entry »

MIX11 – A tribute to Microsoft’s Web Stack of Love!

A few weeks ago I attended MIX11 in Las Vegas. MIX is an annual event where Microsoft showcase their new web technologies. This year it was all about new versions of existing products, such as Windows Phone 7, Entity Framework, Silverlight, ASP.NET MVC, IIS, etc… Below is a summary of what was shared on both keynotes:

  • Mango: code name for coming version of Windows Phone 7 (WP7).
  • ASP.NET MVC 3 Tools update
  • Entity Framework 4.1
  • Silverlight 5 Beta
  • NuGet
  • IIS Express
  • SQL Compact Edition 4
  • Internet Explorer 10 Preview
There were many sessions available, some of them really good and some others were not. One thing that I did appreciate was the endless supply of coffee, water and other drinks. Snacks were available as well between breakfast and lunch which were also provided by Microsoft.
All sessions are now available online as well as both keynotes, check them out!
As a software developer, the most interesting for me was the ASP.NET MVC 3 tools update, EF 4.1. Read the rest of this entry »
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