November 2008 - Posts

Why DotNetNuke Corp getting funding is good for you!
Tuesday, November 25, 2008 10:30 AM

All of this information is simply my opinion, value it, or devalue it as you may ;)

So in case you live under a rock, DotNetNuke Corporation announced that they’ve raised Series A Capital through a couple of venture firms this week. This was actually announced this morning, so you wouldn’t have to be under a rock to miss it just yet ;)

As a DotNetNuke Core Team member, and owner of a business that lives primarily in the DotNetNuke Ecosystem, I think this is a great thing. Two years ago the DotNetNuke Corporation formed with the focus of continuing to drive the DNN open source project further into the future, making it strong and better for all users of the platform.

One of the things they quickly realized was they needed to build a sustainable business in order to be able to focus on that continued growth of DNN. I believe this round of funding will allow them to continue to do just that.

So here’s a list of why I think the DNN Corp getting funding will make DotNetNuke, and thus all businesses around or utilizing DNN better.

10. This new funding will provide DNN with the resources to provide better marketing and branding, this will go along way to help business sell and utilize DNN.

9. Better acceptance in the open source world, now that the Corp has funding perhaps some of the mainstream press who ignore open source projects on the Microsoft platform will take notice.

8. DNN Corp can hire more people, this will help offload some of the tasks that people normally doing development have been trying to handle such as conference organization and marketing.

7. More resources will allow for more growth of the framework

6. New features in the framework coming in the future will include multilingual module support and workflow/publishing capabilities

5. More books! The bigger DNN gets, the more books and better documentation that will come (I might be biased here as I am writing a DotNetNuke book now) There are quite a few books in the pipeline at Wrox currently!

4. Support! People are always wondering how to get DotNetNuke support, you can get it from the Corp, with the funding it will be easier and better supported!

3. With the newly announced Professional Edition of DNN there will be a DNN reseller program!

2. DotNetNuke is still free! Along with the professional edition there will be a community edition, with the same features, just without the support and services that the Professional Edition provides. You won’t have to buy the professional version, you can easily continue to use the free version as we all have been doing for many years. And best of all, it still open source!

1. Now Shaun Walker can finally afford to get a new headshot taken!

by Chris Hammond | 7 comment(s)

Filed under: .net, development, DotNetNuke, DotNetNuke Support, General Software Development, DNN

Are you PC? I'm a PC and proud!
Monday, November 24, 2008 10:12 PM

Are you PC? I walked into the Apple store today with Dang, it about made me sick (his macbook was broken, AGAIN). It was all I could do to respond pleasantly when one of the many (too damn many) clerks asked me if I needed help. I wanted to respond with “hell no, I’m smart enough to use a PC, I don’t need an apple product, I'm A PC” but I didn’t, I just laughed and said no thanks. I’ve been meaning to make this post for a while now, so here it goes.

Here’s why I'm a PC.

I am a software developer. I work on DotNetNuke, that’s what I do, what is DotNetNuke written in? VB.NET, who manages that? Microsoft. ASP.NET, Microsoft, C# Microsoft.

I have a media player, it’s a Microsoft Zune, I got it two years ago, the day the Zune came out and I love it! We have three Zunes in my house, my wife has two, somehow I only have one.

I have a server in my house, guess what it runs on Windows Home Server, I love it, it backs up all my computers effortlessly.

I run Windows Vista 64 Ultimate on my main desktop at home, I love it, for all the bad press Vista has, it really works, and it works far better than XP ever did for me!

I run Windows Vista Business on my laptop, see the note above, Vista Rocks!

My Wife’s laptop has XP on it, I upgraded it to Vista Ultimate and put in more ram, the thing flies, it used to freeze up in XP, no more in Vista.

I run a virus scan program, it is OneCare Live from Microsoft, it covers all our computers easily.

I create movies, videos, I do it in Windows Movie Maker (a great free video application from Microsoft)

I have a video game console, it’s a Microsoft XBox360, I love it, it plays everything I want it to play. I am ashamed though that HD-DVD lost the format wars, as I do have an HD-DVD player for my 360.

I have a smart phone, it runs Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 and it works great! No crappy iphone necessary.

Are you PC? I'm a PC, and you should be too!

by Chris Hammond | 12 comment(s)

St. Louis Day of .NET December 13th
Monday, November 24, 2008 11:00 AM

Are you in the St. Louis area, or near by? You might be interested in checking out the St. Louis Day of .NET that is scheduled for 12/13/2008.

My good buddy Scott Spradlin has been getting this organized and lined up a great list of speakers covering a wide range of topics! I’m happy to be included in the list of speakers and will be presenting on “Live Services: Building Applications with the Live Framework”

If you’re interested in attending get signed up soon, registrations will most likely not be accepted at the door! The fee is $40 up until 12/1, after which is goes to $50 and must be made by December 7th.

If you have any questions be sure to check out the site, you might also attend the St. Louis .NET User Group meeting tonight.

by Chris Hammond | with no comments

Filed under: .net, General Software Development, Microsoft, st. louis, User Groups, Users Group

Changing My Windows Live ID
Monday, November 17, 2008 9:37 PM

I think I am finally going to change my Windows Live ID. I've always used autocrss@hotmail.com but honestly I have never used that email address, and I don't like it. So I am going to switch over to christoc@live.com. If you have me on your Live Messenger list go ahead and add that new address. I'll try to manually move over most of my active buddy lists as well.

I'm hoping to get the move completed tonight following these instructions... we'll see how that goes.

http://support.xbox.com/support/en/us/xbox360/xboxlive/myaccount/managemyaccount/SwitchWindowsLiveId.aspx

UPDATE:

So, after a few frustrating phonecalls with Zune and XBox Live support I got this to work. So the basic process is, sign into your Xbox 360, go to Account management and changed IDs. Well of course it wasn't that easy for me as I had already setup christoc@live.com with a Zune account, why I don't know, but this caused a kink in the switching process due to the account already having a "service" attached to it. I called Zune, the girl there basically said she couldn't do anything. I was worried she might delete my account by accident, so I called Xbox instead. They weren't all that helpful either, but once I was able to tell her what I was trying to do she was able to suggest something useful.

I logged into xbox with christoc@live.com, I transferred the account there to another windows live ID I have linked on my account that I don't use. I then logged into my original xbox account and transferred it from that account to the now vacant christoc@live.com account.

Sweet, it's all working! I think :D

Now to get working on installing TFS on my Windows Homeserver so I can write and source control some Zune applications.

by Chris Hammond | with no comments

Filed under: Live, Microsoft, Team System, Windows Live, XBOX Live, Zune

DotNetNuke Social Sponsored by Active Modules
Thursday, November 13, 2008 1:54 AM

Much kudos to Active Modules and those wacky guys from the DotNetNuke Corporation for the DNN Social event tonight for OpenForce attendees. If you didn’t get in because you weren’t registered for OF you missed out!

There were a ton of prizes given out, I even won two myself. Lots of socializing and interaction among community members. I’ve posted photos on Flickr tonight. Apologies for not blogging much today, I blame a couple of guys from North Carolina for an interesting night last night, which caused me some trouble today :)

http://www.flickr.com/groups/openforce08/pool/

I’ll blog more on Thursday, the final day of the conference, though day 4 of the week, we have our Post Conference training on Friday. I believe you can still get registered for the training up until Friday morning.

by Chris Hammond | with no comments

Filed under: ASP.NET, DevConnections, DotNetNuke, DotNetnuke Conference, Las Vegas, OpenForce, OpenForce 08, OpenForce08

OpenForce Session, Navin’s discussion on open source and commercialization
Tuesday, November 11, 2008 4:18 PM

Open source is better because

1. open
2. work closer together
3. more economic value for $$$ invested than any other model

The Rise and Rise of DotNetNuke

• Graph of downloads and life cycle stage for open source projects
  • Jboss has the greatest first 4 years, DNN 2nd
• Estimated 400k servers running DNN
• 140k downloads per month
• 200k forum posts
• 300+ vendors
• 250 SI’s 20+ hosting companies

Navin’s been discussing the synergy between community and commerce in the DNN world, that commerce and community are the two forces operating inside the ecosystem.

Lots of analogies here about community and commerce…

Must make DNN central and strategic to the enterprise like Sharepoint currently is. Here comes to the pitch ;)

To become strategic we need

1. Product strength
2. Strong company
3. Support system
4. Strong alliance channel
5. Choice for extensibility

Sorry I had to cut this short, I had a coughing fit I had to leave the room for.

by Chris Hammond | 1 comment(s)

Filed under: ASP.NET, DotNetNuke, DotNetnuke Conference, General Software Development, Las Vegas, Open Force 08, OpenForce, OpenForce 08, DNN

Done with my first OpenForce Presentation
Tuesday, November 11, 2008 3:02 PM

So I just finished up my DNN presentation, “How to sell DNN, why your customers should be using it” we had a lot of great questions going on after the presentation. I’m looking forward to my session on Thursday.

I'll blog more after I get some food.

by Chris Hammond | 6 comment(s)

Filed under: DotNetNuke, DotNetnuke Conference, Las Vegas, Open Force 08, OpenForce, OpenForce 08

DotNetNuke OpenForce Keynote
Tuesday, November 11, 2008 12:17 PM

(Live blogging come back soon for more)

So Shaun’s Keynote is about to start, Joe is doing some quick announcements.

The room is packed! People standing in the back.

Looks like about half the room had been to OpenForce last year, maybe more, maybe less.

Agenda

• DNN Project Review
• Corporation Overview
• What’s on the Horizon?

1.6 Million downloads over the past year, will exceed 2007 by 300k by end of year

5.4 million downloads to date

625k users (out of date now)

100k registrations since 2007

Conferences

• Orlando
• Amsterdam
• Las Vegas

Product Releases Past Year

DNN 4.X 4.7 .8 .9

269 bugs and 50+ enhancements

DNN5 RC1

• Behind schedule due to
  • complexity and foundational development necessary
  • RC1 Private
• Roadmap
  • circle of info from 2007 presentations
    • Social networking
    • workflow
    • Core module suites
    • Dynamic content localization
    • Admin UI+ Skinning Engine
• Progress
  • Control Panel Enhancements
    • jQuery for module injection
  • Page management enhancements
  • Contemporary standards and compliant skin
  • Security & Administration
    • Increased overall security
    • Deny permissions
      • trumps granted permissions
    • Full control of admin pages/modules
  • Extensions enhancements
    • Consolidated management
    • Packaging improvements
    • Skin and module widgets
  • Skins
    • Designer friendly syntax
    • Super style sheets
• Overall
  • Many roadmap features in progress
  • Roll-out over multiple releases
  • Release frequency will increase (more than 0 is easy to increase)
  • 451 bugs have been logged and resolved in DNN5
  • 54 enhancements
• RC2 will be made publicly available today, after noon today (pacific time)
  • Not recommended for production yet, good to start testing your use cases against
• Poll of the crowd
  • a lot of commercial developers in the crown
  • few skinners
  • more integrators
• 10 Vendors here this year
• Community Night
  • 80 prizes, like $80k worth of goods and services

ExactTarget is an email provider for DNN newsletters

• Micah Squires, Development Manager, talking about how ET is using DNN
  • Marketing shtick
    • leading provider of one-to-one digital messaging
    • 30tb of databases, 135billion rows
    • October
      • 70 million api calls
      • 1.54billion emails
      • 147 tracks per second

Updated info from a secret source, 184 people in the room! great turnout.

• 3sixty application from ET (sounds like yahoo’s social networking app) (only ET customers)
  • Challenges project presented
    • key players
      • internal business owners
      • ET development team
      • user interface design agency
    • Aggressive timeframe
    • innovative UI
    • grandiose ideas
    • SSO
    • load considerations
  • DNN Framework design (I missed that he was saying this was built on DNN) http://3sixty.exacttarget.com/ (thanks tom, www.seablick.com)
  • Provider module for DNN allowed for easy membership overhaul
  • Skinning allowed for UI overhaul
  • Web farm support
    • Used the DNN provided document for configuration
  • DNN Community
  • Third Party modules leveraged
• DNN provider the ability to build website quickly
• Quick stats
  • Site live for 6 weeks
  • 3400 registered users
  • 200 concurrent connections
  • 58 user groups
  • 1400 users
  • 3000 training videos
  • 5000 resource downloads
  • 150 idea posts (idea module) 1200 votes on ideas
• Final Though
  • DNN is a highly capable enterprise application

Back to shaun

DNN Corp Overview

vision “dotnetnuke will be the most deployed, most valuable and most cost-effective web application platform in the world”

• Focus
  • Stewardship
    • nurture project growth
    • encourage and facilitate participation
    • stay faithful to OS ideals
  • Strength
    • financial and business strength
    • develop partnerships
    • grow team with smart talented people
  • Opportunity
    • create more opps for vendors
    • increase commercial eco system reach
    • support customer success by innovation
  • Confidence
    • Improve support for business customers
    • Focus on superior product quality
    • Increase trust in company and platform
• Step 1
  • Free DNN software –> DNN Community Edition
  • + Additional business benefits –> DotNetNuke Professional (The Source You Can Trust)
  • Support
  • Stability
  • Security
  • Scalability
  • Personal opinion here, I don't think this is intended to mean "you have to pay for DNN" it is another option available, there was also some reseller discussion after i left the session.

and I have to go to my session now, I waited for the important announcement!

by Chris Hammond | 9 comment(s)

Scott Guthrie’s Keynote at DevConnections/OpenForce
Tuesday, November 11, 2008 10:21 AM

(Live updates occurring, check this post for more info later.)

There must be a thousand people or more sitting here in the room with us watching Scott Guthrie’s keynote here on the first day of DevConnections/OpenForce 2008.

Scott is currently showing some of the cool features that shipped with .NET 3.5 SP1 and VS 2k8 SP1 regarding object relational mappers (demo done in vb.net).

ASP.NET charting controls shipped two weeks ago, system.web.ui namespace, asp:chart runat=”server”

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/mschart

His demo for the charting controls has the newly released Microsoft .NET logo that was released at PDC a few weeks ago. The chart demo got a brief round of applause.

Next topic MVC, I won’t get into MVC discussion as it has been covered a million times already. Not replacing ASP.NET webforms, there are advances to webforms in ASP.NET 4.

Ajax enhancements and jQuery. ASP.NET Ajax improvements

• Back/forward button history support
• script combining functionality
• ADO.NET data services support (“astoria”)
• Client Template and Live Databinding support

jQuery support

• Microsoft Product Support
• VS2k8 Intellisense Support w/ download of files for jQuery core library
• DEMO got some laughs based on the pictures it returned from a Flickr query

</end shipping/available today>

<start next year>

ASP.NET 4.0, ships next year with .NET 4.0 framework

• Webforms improvements
• Controllable clientids for controls
• Better viewstate control
• Support for URL writing using same framework as MVC for url writing
• Much richer customization of styles for controls
• Better control of HTML
• MVC Features
• Dynamic Data Features
• Dynamic data scaffolding against any class or object
• AJAX
• Distributed Caching
• Better support across multiple web servers
• Velocity, free caching server for .NET will be available pre .NET 4

VS2k10 Improvements

• Code focused improvements
• Source Editor Snippets Analysis
• TDD Workflow
• Web development improvements
• Javascript/AJAX Tooling
• Design view CSS2 Support
• Better Publishing and Deployment Support
• Applause for web.config differences for release, debug, staging
• Sharepoint App Support
• Not much applause, most sharepoint guys are at the sharepoint keynote.
• VS2k10 Demo from Jeff
• Automatic runat server inclusion
• Will save time in 4 main areas
• Select all, surround with option to wrap content in the design view with a snippet, like a multiview controller
• 59 second demo with keystrokes the old way, 232 keystokes, didn’t get it completed, cold play background music
• 59 second demo the new way, rocky music playing 24.2 seconds left, 132 keystrokes, app completed
• MVC Enhancements
• I zoned out here :)
• Silverlight
• Silverlight Interactive Designer
• Richer TFS integration
• Much richer code analysis
• Multimonitor support
• Components and extensibility improvements
• RIA rich internet application, silverlight (.net in the browser)
• Talk about all the apps/sites using Silverlight
• Cool Hardrock website to use silverlight and zoom in on memorabilia
• Healthcare App www.MSCUI.net 

</end session> headed off to the “break” probably spend some time in the speakers room after I talk to a few people.

by Chris Hammond | 3 comment(s)

Filed under: ASP.NET, DotNetNuke, DotNetnuke Conference, General Software Development, Open Force 08, OpenForce, OpenForce 08

We made it to OpenForce
Tuesday, November 11, 2008 1:48 AM

So we made the trek to Las Vegas today, the long grueling trek it is. We even adopted a kid today (more like a father ;), Scott Spradlin joined the Engage team on our flight and cab ride to the hotel!

It’s late, almost midnight here and I have a presentation to give tomorrow, less than 12 hours away, so I am going to call it a short night tonight. For now check out some of the photos and a time-lapse video I posted in the OpenForce08 Flickr Group.

I’ll blog more tomorrow for sure.

by Chris Hammond | with no comments

Filed under: ASP.NET, DotNetNuke, DotNetnuke Conference, Las Vegas, Open Force 08, OpenForce, OpenForce 08

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