First Blog Post

Howdy,

Since everyone seems to be doing it ¹, I decided to start my own blog to write about my day to day experiences with web development and programming.

¹. yes, I realize that I’m starting way too late on the blogging phenomenon timeline, but better late than never right ² ?
². what better way to start a blog than with a cliché?

Who am I?

My name is Andrei Alecu and I’m a C# developer with over 5 years of experience in .NET, owner and lead developer of Tachyon Labs, a company that started as an outsourcing studio but later developed as a .NET component developer and web development company. Tachyon Labs is also the company behind SharpSpell, a real-time spell checker control for ASP.NET and WinForms.

We ³ first launched SharpSpell back in 2004, and I was the sole developer of my company back then. The thing about SharpSpell was that it was the first real-time wavy underline spell checker for the Web.

This amazing ⁴ functionality was actually implemented by chance. I was approached by Dave Frank of the Best of the Web directory, looking to buy a spell check product for their administrative back-end. He eventually suggested that a real-time spell check function like in Microsoft Word would add huge value to the product, but in my own mind I thought something like that would never be possible using pure HTML and JavaScript in a web-browser. Flash maybe, but pure HTML never.

After a couple of months of work, I managed to get the first working version of a wavy underline spell checker using JavaScript and Internet Explorer’s DOM model. The code was really messy, but the tech demo made a great impact on the community and I received many words of praise from both interested parties and random people thinking how cool it was.

Since then the component was rewritten several times, and is now at a state where I could safely say, without false modesty, that it is the most technologically advanced spell check component on the market.

Over the following blog posts I’ll describe how I managed to overcome the obstacles I came across when first writing SharpSpell, and other development experiences and setbacks I came across.

³. I
⁴. It was definitely “amazing” back then, when AJAX was just a term you heard about in technology news feeds, but there weren’t many concrete examples of what it was and did.

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