Our Story

We, Scott Forsyth and Jeff Widmer, founded Vaasnet in June 2008 on the belief that system administrators' and developers' lives could be so much easier if they had virtual machines preconfigured for them to use whenever they needed.

The problem with the traditional use of virtual machines was the inconvenience of installing, configuring, and maintaining them; often running short of system resources to utilize them fully. This time consuming process created a natural resistance for developers and system administrators to use virtual machines. In fact, we experienced this daily. Frequently we needed a virtual machine, but since there wasn't always one at our fingertips, either the task would not get done, we would make due with some other not-so-great solution, or we would have to go through the lengthy process of creating a virtual machine. These situations always seemed to come at the most inconvenient times.

That is where Vaasnet comes in. Vaasnet has a growing library of virtual machines just sitting in a saved state, ready for your use. This literally makes it a 60-second event for a developer or sys admin to be working (and we mean actually working, not just configuring) in a virtual machine.

The Team

vaasnet team

Jeff Widmer and Scott Forsyth are the founders and owners of Vaasnet.

Jeff is the primary developer and database administrator (he's the good looking one). Jeff's blog can be found here.

Scott handles most of the system administrator duties and knows a ton about IIS7, Hyper-V, and how to keep a machine up and running 24x7. Here's Scott's blog.

Many Thanks!

Of course we could not have done all of this without the valuable work that other individuals and companies have done before us. Here are just a few shout-outs to those that made our jobs enjoyable while we grew Vaasnet from just an idea to an actual working product.

ASP.NET MVC

This site is built using ASP.NET MVC. It made web application development a lot of fun. ASP.NET web forms were awesome, but ASP.NET MVC is awesomer!

ORCS Web

Vaasnet servers are hosted with ORCS Web, the greatest hosting company in the world!

Microsoft Hyper-V and Windows Server 2008 R2

Windows Server 2008 R2 and Microsoft Hyper-V made our vision a reality. Without Hyper-V and the huge performance improvements from Windows Server 2008 R2, Vaasnet would not be possible.

Miscellaneous

Stack Overflow - the most useful developer resource available anywhere.

The article How Hard Could It Be?: Start-up Static by Joel Spolsky is one of those very inspiring pieces that has pushed us for several months now. It is like a good song when you are running... you are inspired to keep going a little further each day. Highly recommended article. Go read it now.

Button css design from this Particletree blog post: Rediscovering the button element.

Some icons on this site are from FamFamFam.

We are using Elmah for application error logging.