Closing on 2007 means closing a major turning point in my life. In one short year, I've had another son, built a house, left one great job for another, gotten remarried, made new friendships, lost old ones, deepened my involvement with RETS, and set about building the best MLS in the country. It truly has been a pivotal time in my personal history.
RETS, RETS, RETS
A good portion of my brainpower this past year has been focused on improving RETS, the Real Estate Transaction Standard(s). It's simply fantastic to be involved in such a high-profile standard with so many great Real Estate technology professionals. My thanks particularly go to the rest of the "core" Schema team: Paul Stusiak, Gina Accawi, Peter Spicer, Michael Wurzer, Gregg Petch, Eric Petersen, Sergio Del Rio, Chris McKeever, Joshua Vosper, and Jaison Freed.
It's also easy to overlook the wizard behind the curtain, but a great debt is due to Mark Lesswing. In a single year, he's transformed a motley crew of interested participants into a gen-u-ine organization. Beyond this, his grasp of the technology proposition to Real Estate is virtually unparalleled. Regardless of his other accomplishments, it's hard not to consider him one of the great RE technology luminaries of this decade.
On a related note, Michael Wurzer (RESO Chairman and President & CEO of FBS) posted an open letter to the mass listing aggregators of the world. Proving the value of the Web 2.0 world, enough responded that some sort of open discussion will take place at Inman's Connect NYC. Mike's certainly shaping up to be a luminary himself.
<technical>
My consequential involvement with RETS is the Query language, dubbed RQLX (although it's a bit of a grandfathered name that lacks significant meaning). Through numerous posts between myself and Sergio Del Rio on the RETS-DEV mailing list, I countered the necessity of a number of staid data archetypes (dictionaries and vocabulary) in RETS 2 that existed largely to resolve the problem of unique particle attribution in RETS 1.x. The reality is that the RETS 2 Schema have evolved into a fairly monolithic namespace, which makes UPA a distinct reality without needing alternate representations of the data set. My only wish is that I could learn ANTLR well enough to (quickly) write a functioning, provable grammar... but I'm getting there.
</technical>
How to Build a Great MLS in 10 Easy Steps
As if. As much as my background may have prepared me for this effort, building the new, ground-up version a large-scale MLS is no small feat. Amidst the travails of the past two months, moving 1200 miles and traveling nearly 20000 more for various professional and family events, I've also had to re-align and rebuild a development team for MLSPIN's next great release in 2008. I have two open development positions if anyone's interested (or if you know someone) with ASP.NET and heavy MSSQL skills.
Thanks to Microsoft's [un]timely releases of VS.NET 2008 and, more significantly, LINQ, I also have about two weeks to decide whether we write against the (proven) ASP.NET 2.0 platform or the far more streamlined ASP.NET 3.5 platform. Any insight or feedback is also welcome.
On the corporate side, I can't understate enough how valuable it is to have faith from your leadership: with Kathy Condon (my CEO) and Tony Mastroianni (my CTO) providing such solid backing, I'm confident we're going to release a monumental MLS system and make significant strides in raising the MLS bar. To that end, I also owe a bit of thanks to Michael Wurzer (FlexMLS) and Colby Ackerfield (RealGo), both of whose candor and guidance is deeply appreciated.
Family Notes
Lucas is nearing his first birthday, growing into a character of his own by the day: He's such a great baby. Ben just started Montessori school and continues to amaze us with his intelligence and compassion. Kerry is continuing to acclimate to the geography (New England's a far cry from the Southwest) and a new station in life as a stay-at-home mom. I probably don't tell her enough, but she's held up wonderfully. I couldn't ask for better kids or family, period. Almost all of our Illinois houses are sold and that will be a great relief as we look to buy a house next Spring. It's all coming together, finally!
Comments (3)
Great post, Matt. I look forward to seeing what you build, as I'm confident it will push us all in the right direction. Also, your contributions to RETS are greatly appreciated and I know you're going to have a big impact this coming year with RESTful RETS and the query language. Lastly, congrats on your move and getting settled. I've only been to Boston once, but it seems like a very cool place to live.
Posted by Michael Wurzer | January 5, 2008 12:23 PM
Posted on January 5, 2008 12:23
I just got done doing an e-commerce site w/ Visual Studio 2005, ASP.net 2.0 AJAX & SQL 2005. So, my next gen knowledge isn't where I'd like it to be and I'm going to be in similar boat.
I think upgrading to SQL 2008 is a no brainer due to the new FileStream, Geospatial support, and MERGE commands. Also, the Virtual Earth & the SQL Geospatial teams being buddy-buddy and good bloggers, can only mean good things for us RE app developers. When I wear my e-commerce hat, Geospatial support doesn't excite them like it does when I wear my RE.net hat.
I'd also upgrade to Visual Studio 2008 because of it's much improved web development functionality (CSS refactoring, Javascript intelli-sense, etc). And it supports multi-targeting (so you can compile to ASP.net 2.0, 3.0, or 3.5) with from one IDE, so if you decide to start with 2.0, you can move to 3.5 without buying new tools.
I haven't seen enough of ASP.net 3.5 to know how compelling it is (integrated AJAX support is one big reason). Having read ScottGu's blog, I know good things await C# wise. Having read Phil Haack's blog, I know the ASP.net guys are thinking about being more MVC like in the future. Also, it's seems like much of the new ASP.net goodness is coming via C# language & IIS 7 upgrades. Honestly, I think thats more an ignorance issue on my part, than a lack of features on MSFT's part.
LINQ seems a cool idea, but i dunno know how well it'll handle dynamic SQL scenarios, multiple recordset scenarios, SQL 2008 geospatial types, etc. Also, I kinda like having the control with stored procs. I think it'd be great for simple scenarios, but for complicated ones I'm skeptical.
IIS 7 seems like another worth while upgrade (real FTP support, much better PHP, ASP.net integrated pipeline, etc), but I'm wary of Windows 2008 server because of the smell Vista left.
Also, my re.net apps have a 3rd party dependency on Red Gate (SQL tools), Component Art (ASP.net controls), so I don't want to move, until they move. Fortunately, they both move pretty fast.
I'd probably get the new tools, DB & OS, and target ASP.net 2.0 with them in the near term, and then as you discover how to best exploit the new functionality, you can upgrade your code base, with out upgrading your tool chest. It seems like the leap from ASP.net 1.1 to ASP.net 2.0, was more disruptive than the move to ASP.net 3.5 will be.
One thing I always do is sign up for and attend a free MSDN event at http://msdnevents.com/. You usually spend half a day in movie theatre some place while MS tech evangelists demo the new hotness. If it's something you're going to use, you got free training, info & demo code, and sometimes free products. If not, you're a little smarter and got a free popcorn out of it.
Posted by Robbie | January 6, 2008 12:35 PM
Posted on January 6, 2008 12:35
I assume you live near Westborough, MA? Check out the MSDN Events: What’s New in IIS7 and Extending ASP.NET 2.0 Application Services. You might get more insight into what the future holds.
Posted by Robbie | January 6, 2008 4:14 PM
Posted on January 6, 2008 16:14