Usually, after March Madness is done, Tourney Logic sits relatively dormant for a few months as we recover from the rush, which usually starts in November or December (getting upgrades ready to go) and culminates in March with the tournament. For us, it means many, many late nights pounding out features and bug fixes?until we meet our vision.

And once it's over, we usually end up a little burned out. But not this year. We've been working hard to get a new release of Tourneytopia out the door, and there's some really cool features in it.

First, some back story on where Tourneytopia came from. This year, we decided to move the Tourney Pool Manager to .NET 2.0 and make use of some of the cool and exciting new features available. And that's what we did, only it took longer than expected. We knew it was technically ready to go, but there were still some bugs and decisions to be made about how to best release it. Ultimately, we made the decision to use last year's version of the Tourney Pool Manager (running on .NET 1.1) as is and take the upgraded version and make it a hosted-only version. By doing this, we could fix bugs right through the tournament (which we did, although, luckily, no major bugs showed up), and we didn't have to worry about deployment as much - we can deal with manual deployment steps, where as a software package needs to be automated.

In the long run, it was the right decision. In the short run, we continued a few poor design decisions from years past so we could get it done. All in all, it didn't really hurt us - this year. We knew where the inefficiencies were, and, despite having a ton more traffic than I expected, the server held up fine - after a few late tweaks we made before certain features were used.

But we knew those decisions would ultimately hinder us going forward, so we looked at a re-architecture of the whole site. Ultimately, we came up with a Codesmith template that generated all of our business objects (more on that later), and rewrote the site's foundation. For the most part, the UI is the same, but the framework it's running on is much more scalable and efficient.

But this isn't the post to get into that. From an end user's perspective, this new back end gives us the ability to support more than just a 64-team tournament - you can now create tourmanents for any number of teams, such as the 16 team tournament for the World Cup.

Which is exactly what we are offering now - the World Cup. The window is small - the bracket play starts less than 24 hours from when the group play ends, so there's not a lot of time to enter, but it should be fun!

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