Jesse Ezell Blog

John Udell Wants To Hear From You

“In the spirit of Michael's plea, I'm working on an upcoming article in which I'll compare what was promised for the .NET platform (er, framework), two and three years ago, with the current reality as it exists today...Over the next week or so, I'd like to have conversations with people on all sides of these (and perhaps other, related) issues. I'll be speaking with various folks privately, but here's a comment link (rss) for those who want to register opinions and/or provide feedback.“ [1]

[1] .NET Reality Check.John Udell. http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/01/27.html#a900

Free Version of ColdFusion Available

Simon McLean pointed out in a comment that there is now a free version of ColdFusion being developed by New Atlanta. The project sounds pretty cool:

“Most organizations today are faced with choosing between J2EE and .NET as their strategic technology platform," said Vince Bonfanti, President of New Atlanta Communications. "This decision can be particularly troublesome for organizations with significant resources invested in CFML. BlueDragon gives these organizations the freedom to choose either J2EE or .NET with confidence that their CFML applications can be integrated and deployed on either platform." [1]

[1] New Altanta Press Release. http://www.newatlanta.com/corporate/news/bluedragon_6_1_announce.jsp

Add XSLT Intellisense to VS.NET

These guys have a schema you can use to add XSLT intellisense to your copy of VS.NET:

http://www.fesersoft.com/dotNet/

Java Language Converter 3.0 Does EJB

TheServerSide.NET reports:

“Microsoft yesterday annnounced the beta availability of the Java Language Conversion Assistant (JLCA), a tool designed to ease migration of Java applications to the .NET environment. Notable in this release is the ability migrate J2EE 1.3-compliant applications, including JSP, JMS, JNDI and EJB.“ [1]

[1] http://www.theserverside.net/news/thread.aspx?thread_id=23484

Back from ATL

Novell's Alternative to System.DirectoryServices

Novel has released a .NET based library for LDAP operations [1]. Unlike Microsoft's implementation, this is pure managed code, so you won't have to deal with those amazingly informative “Error 0x85000000“  errors that Microsoft's Win32 API wrappers in the System.DirectoryServices namespace love to give you. Some cool features in there too, like async support. And I must also mention, that you can also download the complete C# source. [2]

[1] http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/cooldev/features/a_net_cplus_ldap_library_cdev.html

[2] http://forge.novell.com/modules/xfmod/cvs/cvsbrowse.php/ldapcsharp/CsharpLDAP

Shadowfax Alpha Code Drop

“We are currently looking for reviewers to provide feedback on the latest drop of code. If you are interested in participating in an alpha review (prior to the code becoming more widely available on the workspace) please contact Pete Coupland (see admins) along with the name of the organization you work for - and a couple of sentences about projects that you are working on that might have a need for Shadowfax.” [1]

[1] Alpha Code Drop is Available. http://www.gotdotnet.com/community/workspaces/newsitem.aspx?id=9c29a963-594e-4e7a-9c45-576198df8058&newsId=2146

Your Dream .NET CMS

So, over the past 2-3 years we have been slowly putting together our kick ass .NET based web content mangement system. It is designed not only to sit there and manage web pages like most content management systems, but also to be easily extended for other content based applications (like blogging or knowledge bases for instance). Looks like we will be going into public beta some time soon, but we still have a little time left for your input before then (and, of course, we will have plenty of time for input during the beta as well). What features does your dream CMS have? Do you currently use content management? Did you build, buy, or extend? Is anyone actually using MS CMS? What price range are you considering or would you consider for your next CMS purchase?

A little preview of some of the things you can look forward to:

Built from the ground up in 100% Managed Code (no legacy COM objects to dirty up the class library)
Native XML content support
XSD schema validation
Custom content indexing via schema annotations
VS.NET template authoring support (we use ASPX, so you can take full advantage of the .NET framework)
Built in content placeholders (including the standard HTML/XHTML type placeholders, but also very cool ones like our dynamic form builder, which lets business users very easily create surveys, contact forms, etc.).
Built in RSS Support
Built in XML-RPC/PingBack Support (in case you want to blog)
Document repository with versioning, indexing, and metadata support
User and profile management (SQL and AD support built-in, interfaces provided for swappable providers)
Built in tracking and reporting
Role based content security and permissions
Support for programming of custom approval pipelines
Cross posting
Content staging and versioning
Date sensitive content publishing
Rich base class library (high level APIs geared for the Morts and low level APIs down to the including transaction management and object caching level for the Einstiens and Elvises)
Very clean administration UI (geared for business users, not developers)

Initial feedback has been extremely positive, so I am really looking forward to a more open beta so that we can get a broader range of opinions. If you are interested in finding out more, post here or send an email to me at: jesse@activehead.com and I'll be happy to answer any questions you have.

Mono 1.0 Quickly Approaching

“We keep focused on our Mono 1.0 release, so those of us working on this release get to enjoy fixing bugs, while the others developers get bored to death implementing new code and boring new features.

To keep the excitement some folks have been doing performance tuning, the Mono C# compiler has been a good test bed to improve our performance. Various elements come into play: precompilation (which for compilation gives a 30% performance boost), VM improvements (method to assembly inlyining, optimizations, memory saving), class library improvements (reducing the memory size used by our classes) and in particular the compiler got tons of tune ups. Ben, Gonzalo Jackson, Paolo and Zoltan have all been working on this.

A lot of interesting data came from the mono --profile output on the compiler, and by reducing the memory usage of the compiler we were able to get 26% of performance improvements in a month. So now the compiler is down to 2.9 seconds in bootstrap time (without precompilation compilation, just pure JITing) on my machine...” [1]

[1] Small Mono Status Report. Miguel de Icaza. http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/archive/2004/Jan-14.html

Sam on .NET Rocks