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About PeterBlum.com
PeterBlum.com is my personal effort to distribute many ideas I have for
the dotNet platform. I almost always think about what I write in terms of reuse
and subclassing. Why bother designing classes that others would find useful
unless you actually make it so others actually CAN use them?
To this end, I have been writing numerous dotNet projects with the level of
functionality that will actually help others get their work done faster. It
started with many simple offerings. Yet the simplest things can move someone
ahead.
The site itself was built quickly in early June 2002 and without any goal of
creating a business. I simply wanted to get my stuff in front of other users.
Who cares about a professional appearing site when you could get free code? One
effect of this decision was to select a site name that was my own name instead
of a cool business name. By July, my site traffic proved that others wanted my
dotNet controls. By the end of July, the total visits was about 3,800. There
was over 600 downloads for my first DateTextBox Control, which came out near
the end of June. Clearly something was working.
Peter's Polling Package, released in August 2002, was the first commercial
product from PeterBlum.com. It was started in April and quickly became a source
of ideas. The PropertiesEditor was first built to let me show the Poll control
functionality over the web. It became the first product released and set
precedent where I would offer many of my products for free and with source
code. By the time the Peter's Polling Package was released, it had generated
the DateTextBox Controls, GroupValidator, LengthValidators, Color Selector
Controls, AutoSortArrayList, and UITypeEditor classes that are available on
this site. (Several have since been retired.)
With the release of Peter's Polling Package, it was time to take PeterBlum.com
to a new level, both as a site and an business. I redesigned the site and
planned how to start making money. (A Tip The Programmer feature, added in
July, generated virtually no response.)
In looking for my second commercial product, I noticed just how popular my
DateTextBox Controls product was. Every week, there were over 100 downloads. It
was time to apply the numerous ideas and customer suggestions I had back into
the product. While much of the functionality of the DateTextBox Controls
product was due to its client-side text entry, this product focused on making
the popup calendar blow away the original (based on Microsoft's ASP.NET
calendar control.) Peter's Date Package was released in November 2002, after
two months of work (including writing a 100+ page manual - I actually enjoy
writing user documentation.)
After two months of outstanding customer response and sales, I decided to
upgrade Peter's Date Package. In February 2003, I released v1.1 which doubled
the number of controls and made an unbeatable combination of features for
anyone looking to gather date or time values. Peter's Date Package sales have
remained strong, enabling me to run this company full time instead of getting
"a real job".
At the one year anniversary, I released Professional Validation And More v1.0
("VAM"). I already had three products that included new validators built upon
the System.Web.UI.WebControls.BaseValidator class and learned of the many
limitations that class had. With the popularity of my GroupValidator and
LengthValidator products, it was clear that ASP.NET developers were looking for
more. That's what inspired Professional Validation And More. Even before the
product shipped, almost 200 people had retrieved the beta version. In the first
week it went on sale, I had my single best sales day and week to date.
With plenty of feedback from VAM customers, version 2.0 was released in January
of 2004. It added a number of new validators and other controls. With this
release, the product and PeterBlum.com started to really get customer
attention.
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Scott Hanselman, a Microsoft Regional Director, MVP, speaker and author,
published his experience with VAM in his
blog. His thoughts were no less than "Microsoft should buy this guy
and integrated the whole thing into ASP.NET 2.x.".
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I appeared on the
.NET Rocks! radio show.
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Scott Hanselman presented a session on Internationalization to the ASP.NET
track at VSLive! San Francisco. He used VAM and Peter's Date Package to
demonstrate how control vendors can contribute to making sites
internationalizable.
By April 2004, Peter's Date Package customers posted the most testimonials on
www.asp.net Control Gallery of any product there. VAM customer's
testimonials were the third most on that
site. Thanks to all who posted their thoughts!
While attending the Microsoft DevDays 2004 sessions in Boston,
Julia Lerman and I discussed how my validation framework could better
assist users to block hackers. Six months later, I released Visual Input
Security™, the first comprehensive solution for handling input security on
ASP.NET web sites.
April 2005 saw the launch of Professional Validation And More v3. It had grown
to well over 40 controls making it deserving of the term "suite". The product
also has such an enthusiastic following that it has reached the second highest
number of 5-star testimonials on the www.asp.net Control Gallery.
As ASP.NET 2.0 was preparing to ship in the fall, I was preparing updates to
both Peter's Date Package and Professional Validation And More so they could
take advantage of some of the great features of the platform. These products
were some of the first third party controls to directly support ASP.NET 2.0.
It had been 3 years since Peter's Date Package v1. I figured it was time for an
upgrade. As I started, I had a small list of 4 cool features and thought the
upgrade would be done in a couple of months. 8 months later, Peter's Date
Package v2 shipped. Its delay was in part due to a significant growth in the
features and the emergence of AJAX technologies that were incompatible with
some of the techniques used to develop ASP.NET web controls.
By the time Peter's Date Package v2 was finished, it had been 2 years since the last
upgrade to Professional Validation And More. I had long desired merging the Peter's Date Package
controls into VAM to allow the unique features of both codebases to be applied to the other.
I also had a huge list of customer requests and my own ideas gathered. It was time to deliver
something bigger than ever before: Peter's Data Entry Suite. The work took 14 months
and was delivered in January 2008.
With the arrival of ASP.NET Dynamic Data, I realized that I could take all of these
data entry controls and tools in a direction that I had long wanted to go.
It allows separation of concerns between the business logic and page development,
which avoids errors made during page development. It also created a very effective
way to deliver a user interface faster. Two prereleases of "DES Dynamic Data",
a new module for Peter's Data Entry Suite, have been published. The result
is tremendous expansion of building business logic and user interfaces when
using ASP.NET Dynamic Data.
The work is underway on more great ideas. Check in every so often and see
what's new.
--- Peter Blum, July 2009
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