Welcome to West Wind Technologies

West Wind Technologies is a small shop primarily run by myself, Rick Strahl. For bigger projects and operations I also frequently partner with my long time business partner, Markus Egger of EPS Software and their Code Consulting services. Most direct contact you'll make will be directly with the me, Rick Strahl. If you've arrived here you are probably curious about the services that I offer.

What we do

In the past I've helped countless customers solve thorny technology problems, integrating a host of different technologies, providing guidance on choosing the right technology as well as providing support to teams in getting up and running with new technologies for the first time. I also frequently provide troubleshooting services when teams get stuck on particular technology issues and get them 'unstuck'. I can provide one-on-one mentoring, pair with you to work through specific problems or build understanding of specific technologies. I can also provide more formal training for larger groups. And finally I can also provide many development services including project or technology bootstrapping, building base frameworks ready for you and your team to build on top of. If you need more full featured, end to end development services, then it's time to bring in Code Consulting to provide full project management, long term development and staffing services with specialty services that I can be involved with.

I can help with software development services and mentoring for individuals or teams, as well as support for our products and any of the related technologies that I work with. If you've run into issues related to a blog post or article I've written and you need more depth or personal guidance I can help with that. My primary focus is on the Microsoft tools and .NET based Web stack with additional focus on building rich client side and mobile Web applications using HTML5 and JavaScript and Angular and VueJs in particular. I also continue to support customers using Visual FoxPro, specifically those working with our popular West Wind Web Connection product and FoxPro to .NET and Web Service integrations.

I'm here to help! There are a number of free support options available, as well as paid options for direct one on one access. For more information on hiring me, please see the paid Support section below. Since I live far out of the way in the middle of an ocean, I prefer to work remotely using screen sharing tools, collaboration tools and distributed source control for sharing development work. However if desired, on site arrangements can also be made although there will be significant premium cost to that. Please feel free to contact me using the contact info on this page.

Free Support

West Wind Technologies offers free support for general purpose questions, bug reports, suggestions and so on on both our Online Message Board and on my GitHub Projects. If you have any questions regarding any of the open source libraries or tools, GitHub is the best place to have a discussion about issues, features, bugs, enhancement requests.

For all other products and libraries or for more general conversations and use cases as well as customer specific conversations our public Message Board site is the better place. We offer free support for all issues directly related to our tools and libraries and also general development issues and concerns. Myself and other community members usually answer questions within 24 hours - much more quickly in most cases. However, we reserve the right to defer you to paid support when support issues either get too specialized to your implementation or delve too deeply into special use cases.

Take advantage - it's free

You don't have to be a registered customer to use this free resource and it's not meant to be a sales tool! We provide open support and technical discussions, because that's what we do and we love to help people solve their problems. So take advantage of the free support service that benefits both you as well as the rest of the community that might be lurking.

How to submit a support request

If you submit support questions or bug reports, please take the time to formulate your questions clearly by specifying any errors you see, the code or operations you perform to cause the error, what you're trying to accomplish. Providing a self contained, runnable test case that's cut and paste is ideal. Providing a clear problem report makes resolving issues much easier both for you and us.

Paid Support, Mentoring or Consulting Services

If you need more personalized or in-depth support for your questions, or need direct consulting or mentoring services for your project you can directly set up a consulting session with me using paid support. All direct contact or support, mentoring, training or short term consulting with Rick Strahl via phone, Skype, screen sharing or email is billed at a consulting rate of US $175/hour in half hour increments.

Collaboration Tools

If you want to facilitate remote support sessions, here are the tools I prefer to use for connecting:

• Skype for Voice/Video Calls and basic one way screen sharing
• Zoom for collaborative screen sharing
• or use GotoMeeting, TeamViewer, WebEx etc. if you provide it.
• GitHub or BitBucket for shared code

I'm here to help whether you need a half an hour or a block of 100 hours.

About Rick Strahl

Rick Strahl is the Big Kahuna at West Wind Technologies on the beautiful island of Maui, Hawaii. Rick has been a software developer for over 30 years, developing business and Web applications since the very early days of the Web when you needed a hand crank and a pair of wire splicers) to get online. Rick's early work in building Web frameworks at the dawn of Web Development gave him a unique perspective for the low level aspects of building Web applications and frameworks. Today Rick primarily builds client centric Web applications and services for customers using HTML5, JavaScript and mobile Web technologies, using Angular and VueJs on the front end, and the ASP.NET stack on the back end. Lately he's also deeply involved in documentation solutions, Markdown integration and Desktop and Hybrid application development as part of work in Markdown Monster. Rick’s company West Wind Technologies produces a number of developer related tools including Markdown Monster, West Wind WebSurge and Html Help Builder. He also maintains many open source libraries at https://github.com/RickStrahl and you can find Rick’s popular software development blog at https://weblog.west-wind.com.