.NET at 9.400 ft above sea level

DotNetCpu

DotNetNuke 3 Beta 3 is available for download

DotNetNuke is an open-source community portal written in ASP.NET, DotNetNuke is popular enough to warrant the existance of a number of third party services, we have used it for communities like http://panama.latindevelopers.net. A couple of days ago Beta 3 of version 3 was released, offering a number of enhancements like multiple portals with one codebase/database and separate upload directories. So go download it and give it a try.

Alternative .NET implementations

I think there's been a lot of buzz (and it's already old news) around the Mono project and how the Ximian guys got rich when bought by Novell. But there are other .NET implementations: DotGNU Portable.NET v. 0.6.10 has been available for several weeks now. The twist of this implementation? It's got a GNU license that will satisfy any OSS defender.

Contract-first web services

I just received an e-mail from my fellow RD Christian Weyer, an excerpt:

There has been a lot of buzz around schema-based contract-first Web services design & development lately (as opposed to code-based contract-first with juggling all the XML-related .NET attributes). Nearly everybody thinks that it is a good thing, and that we finally should reach a state where we all can live and breath it. But most people have been complaining about the lack of tool support for the so called 'first step'. We have two big steps

involved:

* Design your contract's messages and interface

* Generate code from the contract

Our WSCF (aka WsContractFirst) tool has been quite good at the last one of the two points: code generation. But there always was a missing link to how to design and model the contract effectively.

Now we from thinktecture are proud to present the next version of our very successful and freely available WSCF. This new version 0.4 now offers a simple yet powerful WSDL Wizard that abstracts away all the nitty-gritty details of WSDL and therefore does not give room for making errors and wrong assumptions just by trying to use and applying everything that can be done stated by the original WSDL specification. Just model your data and messages in XSD files and off you go.

Interested? Go here and dowload the tool.

¿Microsoft Windows on Sun workstations?

"Essentially, we want to ensure that our hardware platforms are supporting the major operating systems [Solaris and Windows]"

Greg Papadopoulos
CTO, Sun

Well, from an e-magazine article declaration to a fact there's a lot to be said and done, but the mere fact that having Windows run on Solaris workstations is being seriously considered shows, once again, that peace is better than war.

SQL Server 2005 Webcasts

The first program and the first programmer

I was browsing the Encyclopædia Britannica and I landed on Ada Lovelace, from my college years I knew that the Ada programming language was named in her honor and I knew that she is consider the mother of programming, but the details have slipped me: Ada wrote an article on Babbage analytical engine, in there she suggested a "plan" for using the engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers (all this happened circa 1843), because of this  Ada Lovelace is considered the first programmer and the first program is Ada's plan. A version of such program in C++ can be downloaded here and this is one of those moments when I wish I had the time for writing a C# version or may be even a Haskell version of it.

Trivia: according to the Wikipedia, you can see Ada's image on Microsoft authenticity hologram.

ASP.NET unit testing

Some time ago mi pal Keiji Miyabe asked me how to unit test ASP.NET pages. As you know, the idea of unit testing was born in the business layer (where the problem is solved, among others, by NUnit) but it has started to grow into other layers as well, for example NUnitAsp tests web pages (exactly what Keiji was looking for). I discovered this while checking fellow RD Scott Hanselman blog , where he mentions and interesting alternative way to test pages that leverages Cassini, the open source web server written in C#.