February 26, 2006
Well, I've been investigating CMS's again and have found quite a few .Net ones lying around on the web.FREE OPEN SOURCEDotNetNukeFREE SHARED SOURCE
AxCMS.NetCOMMERCIALKentico (USD$500 per site)Dozing Dogs (USD$249 per site)ADXStudioDigiMaker (couldn't find licensing on their site!)SiteCore (USD$8,910 per site)ContentXXL (EU4500) QuantumArt Basically found these by digging around blogs, Google and
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February 23, 2006
Okay, think of a 'buzz-word' and Google have a workforce of minions going at it to come up with the next thing to take over the Internet...GMail, GTalk, Google Reader, GMail and Gtalk...and now Google Pages! A AJAX Content Management Editor.I had a home page going in about 5 seconds clicking on the editable areas required...you can have links to other pages, urls, emails, contacts. They're even u
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February 22, 2006
As you may or may not have noticed, this site is now running off of Community Server v2.0 Express. I did try and do an upgrade but had some teething problems so I installed a new instance and then migrated over the Blog entries.I did try and also migrate over the gallery but with no luck :-( I will try again when I get time. The script was nearly there but I couldn't get any images to actually sh
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February 22, 2006
Well no luck with installing a single server instance of Team Foundation...got as far through the help file instructions as installing Team Foundation from a clean Windows Server 2003 VM and it came up with an error at the end! Hopefully I'll get an answer out of the MSDN forums!Also found this interesting post by TFS God Rob Caron about how TFS will integrate with Project Server. Microsoft have
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February 22, 2006
Nauman Leghari's has listed 3 great apps that come in very useful on his blog...I've already used the HTTPDebugger to troubleshoot this web sites CommunityServer.org install and also used the encryption and password generator in the OMziff app! Always great where people share their finds!
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February 21, 2006
Going to install Team Foundation Server RC and have a look at it now. Will post my findings.
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February 20, 2006
Found this great article on using Nant's <solution> tag to compile a VS.Net solution. Has some great advice on creating a deploy folder and copying necessary files into it to then manually deploy them - currently I use UnLeashIT to get the files I need for a live or test environment. This way you get an automated hit at it.I'm going to start investigating Team Foundation Server and MSBuild
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February 20, 2006
Microsoft have released their first batch of exams for .Net 2.0 Framework. 70-528 Preparation page points you to their line of books that will aid you in passing that exam for .Net Framework 2.0 Web Applications. Not too sure if the core Visual C# book is necessary if you already know 1.1.I do find the Microsoft web site so hard to navigate! It's still easier to use Google to find anything on it!
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February 19, 2006
This is a very good article on where Sony went wrong and missed the boat with UMD and PSP marketing etc. I believe they could have forged ahead and beaten Apple iTunes online store with regards to selling video and music (and both) with Sony's large user base.It'll be interesting to see whether they make the same mistakes with the PS3 too. I mean the Xbox 360 is out now and I'm sure they'll be bi
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February 18, 2006
This article discusses Blockbusters issues with Netflix and how Apple could breathe life back into it by it's all powerful iPod Video. Walking into a Blockbuster stay and transferring the latest film, TV epsiode and some trailers over a USB connection may be the way forward. Saving on download times of broadband etc.
Sounds like a good idea, be nice once Apple release the video iPort like the
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February 18, 2006
iSkoot could be the buzz word of the year if everything goes to plan. Their service currently connects Cingular customers in the US to Skypes network through their standard service connection. This basically would cut the cost of international calls to Skype rates. The service is going to be extended to other networks and other VOIP services such as Google Talk etc.
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February 16, 2006
I've been following with interest the path Microsoft are making with Windows Mobile 5.0 and after owning a 02 XDA IIs and now waiting for my 02 XDA Atom to arrive...I wanted to see what they see in the future for these devices.This article on Pocket PC Thoughts is a good overview of Steve 'crazy' Ballmers keynote.They used the Atom to demo Microsoft Powerpoint Mobile connected to a projector via
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February 16, 2006
Selenium is a Firefox extension that basically allows you to record some actions in Firefox and then Assert some things. You can add breakpoints and save the tests and edit them using any HTML editor because it is all XML.I can see it being really handy for testing long forms even across multiple pages etc.There's a great video demo which quickly shows you what it does and it's only a light downl
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February 15, 2006
Just been playing some with the Enterprise Library Security Application Block. I was very interested in the Roles based Rule checking which allowed you to select a RuleProvider and authorize a principle against a paticular rule. These rules are based on expressions which can contain Role-based and Username-based rules.These things come in very handy when you want to check to see whether the user
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February 15, 2006
I've been using my hockey community site to test new things in .Net that I can't play with at work because we don't get time or we're extending old code that would take too long to update.The hockey site is structured to allow people to register and submit content of various types (News, Events, FAQs, Articles, Links). A forum is also used.The structure for the different types of content inherits
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February 15, 2006
Found this article whilst surfing around this morning...I'm also doing a quickwatch and digging through the Items element etc. to find out what it's brought back...now you can use this extra to view the dataset like you're in a datagrid.
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February 14, 2006
Found this interesting article on MSDN about migrating Petshop web application from 1.1 to 2.0. I'm impressed with the generics and System.Transaction extensions in .net 2.0 from reading this.I'm still very dubious about the Master Page template paradigm from Microsofts useability concerns with it's own browser support and also with how Visual Studio 2003 worked with code before.It appears to hea
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February 14, 2006
As I mentioned before, I'm looking to replace my phone again after being mugged and I have my heart set on the 02 XDA Atom, which currently isn't on the list of available products through my insurance company as yet...patience, be patient!Was reading this article with great interest on where Apple may be going. There is some serious discussion about this going on.I for one would buy an Apple PDA
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February 14, 2006
Just installed and got running a web application in .net 2.0 using Ent Lib 2.0 Logging. Was trying to move on to get logging configuration for different environments. This used to be done in Ent Lib 1.0 using Olaf Conijn's Application Block. I guess we'll have to wait until he's written that unless there's an easier way of doing it. Tom Hollander mentions the same path...The documentation for eac
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February 13, 2006
Found some interesting articles on DevX which has some right and wrong virtual machine uses and also pros and cons of them aswell. For me, the ability to be able to recreate the same environment on my local machine is second to none but also being able to drop these and start from certain base points very easily.
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February 13, 2006
On MSDN they start to sell the idea of using MSBuild and Team Foundation Server. It would basically replace any need for Draco.NET or CruiseControl.NET and also NANT.I totally agree with using Continuous Integration purely because it encourages developers to write their code so that:it can be automatically deployed and works on a build serverit therefore can be pulled up on a developer machine ve
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February 13, 2006
I'm jumping at the bit to start incorporating TFS features into my development practices to try and encourage others to use it too. One big draw back to the whole TFS .Net 2.0 platform is backwards compatibility with .Net 1.1 framework which you can't compile to in Visual Studio 2005 - a mistake i think Microsoft will regret as this will be the major hold-back for upgrading to the VS2005 platform
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February 13, 2006
I've just been modifying an existing Coding Standards document at work and found some good links to other example documents:MSDNPhilips Medical SystemsIridiumLance HuntI really don't like the idea of having a huge document to maintain. I like the idea of using FXCop to create rules and from the rules created in XML somehow generate a report that is readable upfront for the programmers. They can t
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February 13, 2006
Yahoo have gone and published their UI Design Pattern Library online to developers. It can all be downloaded as a series of .js files similar to how AJAX libraries are being distributed here. One of their Senior Web Developers discusses what how they grade the browsers that are supported and then the table to illustrate this grading. It's quite an interesting way to approach browser support and a
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February 12, 2006
My laptop at home is running particularly slow and I've ran some adaware programs to see if it can find anything with no luck. Got pointed in the direction of SysInternals web site which has a Process monitor program which is like Task Manager on Steriods...has helped to find out what my PC is actually doing and what files it has locked etc.
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February 8, 2006
Me and Cojo have been working on his site today and have installed the DNN Store Module. It's an awesome first cut and the feature requests for the next version look exciting.
Interestingly I found a very good comment from an obvious experienced developer who basically stated "Please do not implement every possible enhancement request for the module.". Have a read, it's very true.
We've
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February 8, 2006
Came across PageFlakes today which continues along the AJAX bandwagon but interestingly for me continues down the personalisation and customisation route like www.google.com/ig and www.live.com.I personally I think this is better than live.com for sure and has more features than google.com/ig. Will follow this one with interest as my final year thesis at university was on this using my inline hoc
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February 7, 2006
I'm just downloading Team Foundation Server RC from MSDN as I'm writing this and will hopefully have it up and running in our corporate environment and start getting some of our newer .Net 2.0 projects into it very shortly.
I can see the main advantages at first to continue my longing quest to get everyone using Continuous Integration, better source control and also all of the Testing that can be
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February 6, 2006
I downloaded DotNetNuke 4.0.2 because I want to use this product for replacing a friends commerce site JiggyJigs.com. He's currently using a static site which he now wants to make dynamic.There is the DNN store which has just been released in Beta. It's very impressive for a first cut and a lot better than the Kentico Commerce Module we've been using for a client at work.I'll probably have some b
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February 6, 2006
After mass broadcasting by my mother...who showed her how to e-mail! Everyone and their dog knows that I was mugged and assualted on Australia Day on a main road (Canninghighway) full of traffic waiting to go home. No-one jumped out to help (thanks guys) when 5 skin head australian's, more than likely on something, decided to start pushing and punching everyone in their path as they walked up the
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