Kevin Junghans

I recently became interested in Tropo to easily develop applications that support voice and SMS.  Tropo is another service provided by Voxeo .  Voxeo also has the Prophecy platform which allows you to develop voice applications using VoiceXML that can be deployed in the cloud or as an on-premise solution.  The VoiceModel framework lets you easily develop VoiceXML applications using ASP.NET MVC and C# and it has been extensively tested on Prophecy. So why the interest in Tropo? How does it differ from VoiceXML development? Tropo is interesting to me because of its pricing structure for putting applications into production in the cloud.  With many VoiceXML platforms, like Prophecy, there are some up front costs to deploy your app and the pricing structure depends on the amount of minutes you intend to use.  You often have to agree to some minimum minutes that you will use per month. With Tropo it is a simple pricing model. There are no up front costs for going ...

I recently gave a presentation at a .Net Developer Group meeting about the architecture of VoiceModel  and how it promoted reuse by using ASP.NET MVC as the underlying technology. After the presentation I was having a discussion with the attendees and one of them said, "I heard that MVC is a dying technology." I was kind of taken aback by this comment and wondered where he got this information from. Did I miss some news flash from Microsoft?  He could not remember the source and went on to say, "Yeah, I heard that it is being replaced by ASP.NET Web API".  I assured him that it did not seem possible that Microsoft would abandon a technology that is obviously popular with developers and has an upcoming release with MVC 4, and that Web API is just an extension of MVC that serves a very specific purpose. For those of you not familiar with Web API  it is part of the upcoming MVC 4 release  and allows developers to easily create RESTful web API's using the familia...