Community Blogs

I've been doing quite a bit of work with VS2010 recently as we've prepared for our launch of our free ASP.NET 4 hosting , and I had a fresh install of Windows 7 without the typical cruft that comes with our environment. So I wanted to show how quick booting off of a SSD is. There are two pieces of hardware EVERY developer must have - multiple monitors and a SSD. I've said it over and over again, I have never seen a single upgrade improve the performance of a PC more than my X-25M drive since I first saw what the Voodoo2 could do. I took this video to show how quick the sucker is because until you have used it, you probably think I'm full of crap. But this sucker FLIES. My previous OS partition was running on a couple of 10,000...

Visual Studio 2010 introduces new and cool feature – architecture diagrams that visualize dependencies between assemblies, namespaces and classes. In this posting I will show you how these diagrams look like and provide some explanations about how to read them. I tested architecture diagrams (or should I say dependency diagrams?) with one of my small projects. Okay, I tried to visualize dependencies found in source code of KiGG too but it was too big for current implementation of dependency visualizer. But for smaller projects it works pretty well. You can find these diagrams from Architecture menu of Visual Studio 2010. Assembly dependencies As a first thing I generated dependency diagram for assemblies. There is one main dll and it is related...

When I started building in-house demo application I thought about how to solve temporary data layer so I don’t have to use real database and object mappings for it. Playing with new object model and new components I move way faster if I don’t have any additional ballast that I can avoid. So I wrote simple cache based repository mechanism I can use to imitate real repositories that I will write in the future. NB! Don’t develop this idea too much further because you can use my method  only to some certain point. Don’t forget that you have also maintain relations between objects and keep them consistent. Use my method until your object model is small and simple. If you look for something perfect you don’t find it here. It is just my pretty...

A few days ago I was surfing through the forums on DotNetNuke.com and came across a post asking if you could run DotNetNuke on an Oracle database. In short, yes you can. But why would you? This blog post will talk about that, and some of the reasons why I would never recommend that you use DotNetNuke on Oracle. (No offense intended to anyone who provides Oracle support for DNN, this is simply my personal opinion) DotNetNuke is built with a provider model, what does that mean? It basically means that...( read more ) Read More...

There are many ways to create RSS and Atom feeds, in this post I’m going to show one way of creating a re-usable solution that utilises the Syndication classes from the System.ServiceModel.Web assembly. To make good use of the ASP.Net MVC framework I am going to show a nice way of creating custom action result methods to return the feeds without the need for creating any views. As this is quite a detailed overview with a fair amount of code – you can download a working solution here . The first thing to do is create the custom ActionResult methods to return our feeds. You will need to add a project reference to the System.ServiceModel.Web assembly. RssActionResult using System.ServiceModel.Syndication; using System.Web.Mvc; using System.Xml;...

My wife and I have formed a new company, Tobwiz Technologies , providing products and services for software development, media development, idea development, and International communications. In particular, we would love to help you add a touch of magic to your software projects by offering the following services: Contract software architecture and engineering Hands on code wizardry Independent design and code reviews New development Maintenance Legacy transformations Small projects Telecommuting relationships preferred. Please contact john.tobler@tobwiz.com ! Read More...

One of the biggest complaints about DotNetNuke , is, and always has been, the lack of documentation. I’ve been trying to help correct that problem for a while now. A year ago I started writing a book that was Published in June, DotNetNuke 5: A User’s Guide , I think it turned out to be a good resource for people looking to learn how to setup and use DNN to build a website. The book however can’t cover everything about DNN, and wasn’t intended too. There are a number of other books out there for DNN...( read more ) Read More...

Collecting, modeling, validating and analyzing data from different domains to create to-be architecture in a form of principles, standards and blueprints are not enough to create successful enterprise architecture. The real challenge of enterprise architecture is the ability to make it happened in projects. If you can't find signs of enterprise architecture outcomes in running projects, all the work that you've done worth nothing. In this post I'll try to describe what are the main task that I'm doing to create successful enterprise architecture governance processes. I'm usually splitting governance into three types: Formal: Creating hooks in IT SDLC, IT processes and business management processes to keep track on changes...

The last refresh of Google Maps messed up my street. I live two houses down from an intersection, where on one side the street has one name, and a different name on the other (two subdivisions started years apart). In the last refresh, they had the name from the other street extending half way down my street. I noticed a "report problem" link on the map, so I did. Here's what I got... Hi Jeff, Your Google Maps problem report has been reviewed, and you were right! We'll update the map within a month and email you when you can see the change. Report history Problem ID: A4EE-24E3-19D7-40FE Your report: Beaumont Dr. actually extends to N. Carpenter. It's Red Clover to the east, Beaumont to the west. Thanks for your help, The...

I created a small video (flash movie) of a neat feature of the upcoming LLBLGen Pro v3.0 designer: creating a typed list definition from search results obtained in the designer by running a custom piece of code (C#, with Linq to objects. VB.NET is also supported)! So any query you want to run on the model meta-data is allowed. Please click on the screenshot below to open the page with the video. You need flash to play the video. No sound included. LLBLGen Pro v3.0 is scheduled to go beta at the end of 2009 and will support the LLBLGen Pro runtime framework, Entity Framework, Linq to Sql and NHibernate. Please click the screenshot to view the small video. (opens in new window) Update: uploaded a better html file, so the video isn't resized...