Just got confirmation that I will be co-presenting with Joseph Hill at the MySQL Conference and Expo. The session is titled Cross Platform .NET Development with Mono and MySQL.
"This session provides an introduction to application development
with Mono and MySQL, and will discuss the current state of Mono,
including its support for databases through ADO.NET and LINQ. We will
also take a look at several tools that can be leveraged to ease
migration of applications to Mono and MySQL, and explore how one open
source ASP.NET application provides support for Mono and MySQL."
I'm very excited about this conference and the opprotunity to talk about mojoPortal, Mono, and MySQL.
I've known Joseph through correspondence and his involvement with the
Mono community since 2003 so I'm looking forward to finally meeting him
in person. He's recently joined Novell as the Product Manager for Mono
which I think bodes very well for the Mono Project.
In addition to co-presenting this session I'll be manning the
mojoPortal booth. I've still got a few available entrance passes for
anyone interested in attending and willing to help man the booth. We
have one session pass to share between the 4 entrance passes so we'll
have to take turns covering the booth and going to sessions. Let me
know if you're interested and are able to arrange your own travel to
the event.
Huge thanks to Joe Stagner and anyone else involved for opening up this service to the community! I think its a great idea. I subscribed to the main feed and am already enjoying reading some good posts from folks I might not otherwise have discovered. I'm very happy to have the opportunity to participate in this community.
My name is Joe Audette and I've been doing web development since around late 1996 or early 1997 having started out in Classic ASP and moved to .NET as soon as it was out. I'm the founder and primary developer of mojoPortal, an open source web site framework and content management system written in C#. I also have a blog on that site and I have one at JoeAudette.com, so I'll probably be cross posting things here to some extent from my other blogs. I'm also a musician so if you're interested you can hear me play at http://www.myspace.com/sloppyjoeblues. I play acoustic blues in the styles of the pre-war blues masters like Big Bill Broonzy, Robert Johnson, and Blind Boy Fuller.
If you haven't heard of mojoPortal yet, I hope you'll take a look. Its similar in concept to the more well known DotNetNuke, and was also born of the same IBuySpy Portal heritage. Back around 2002-2003 I was using Rainbow Portal (also of IBuySpy heritage) for my web site and contributed the Blog feature to that project. Then as I began learning about the Mono Project, the idea of being able to build cross platform applications using .NET was very exciting for me. I found that Joseph Hill had ported the IBuySpy Portal and some other ASP.NET projects to run on Mono. I say ported but really it was just fixing some things to keep it platform neutral. Using Path.DirectorySeparatorChar instead of hard coded strings and awareness of case sensitivity in urls and paths are really the main issues that had to be fixed. So I began looking into porting Rainbow Portal to run on Mono but I also wanted to support other databases. After studying it I felt that due to the way Rainbow was organized it was going to take major architectural changes to be able to use other databases. So I decided to go back to the IBuySpy drawing board and start from scratch following basic rules:
- the web code will never talk directly to the database
- business objects would not have strong references to any database but would instead consume only generic data objects like IDataReader
- the data layer would be abstracted away from the business code so it could be interchanged without touching the business logic if the API were implemented for another database.
So in the fall of 2004 I released the first version of mojoPortal, named after my dog mojo. It supported MS SQL or MySQL and it worked on Mono. Since then the project has grown steadily in features and popularity and it now supports 5 different databases, MS SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird Sql, and SQLite.
For the first several years I was working on mojoPortal in my spare time (some would say obsessively). Then in late 2006 I decided to follow my dream and try to make a living doing consulting around mojoPortal and formed my own company, Source Tree Solutions, LLC. My business model would be to keep improving mojoPortal to keep the popularity rising and hopefully generate consulting engagements from those who needed help with custom features that could integrate into their mojoPortal sites. It was a scary leap, but enjoying what I work on is very important to me so I went for it. I didn't make anywhere near as much in my first year as I made working for other companies but I did make enough to get by and that was my main goal for the first year. I invested more free time (as in not billable) than ever into mojoPortal over the year but was very happy doing it and feel like the product is really shaping up. My efforts have seemed rewarded by growth in interest in the project. Significant features like Polls and Surveys were contributed by the community this year and resource files have been translated into 12 languages now.
The project won "Best Other Open Source Content Management System" in the 2007 Packt Publishing CMS Awards.
We've also been invited to the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, CA in April.
I'm really excited to make my first trip to silicon valley and the opportunity to get more exposure to mojoPortal.
Anyway I promise not to make all my posts here infomercials about mojoPortal. It is something I'm very passionate about and most of my work is involved in it so I will certainly talk about it more, but I plan to make some posts about solving technical problems or cool solutions that are of interest to anyone working with ASP.NET.