December 2008 - Posts
I think people over 30 never cease to be amazed at what is possible to do using the Internet. Yesterday, I shared a conversation of a few hours with Don Worthley, creator of a DotNetNuke module that makes publishing to DNN modules a breeze. Don is a member of the DotNetNuke Blog project team, he has 5 children and he is only 3 years older than me.
It is cumbersome to use different interfaces for tasks that are similar and after the Blog module started to support the MetaWeblog API, I've found less excuses to share information and my thoughts on a myriad of things. Ever since I am able to publish posts to the DotNetNuke Blog module from Word/OneNote, I've been posting more often to my blogs. However, being very DNN-centric when it comes to websites, it's impossible to miss the fact that most DNN modules don't support the MetaWeblog API. While there are valid reasons for this, Don's module, called metaPost, comes to the rescue for all users who want to write rich content for their websites from a simple yet powerful desktop application like Windows Live Writer, or the aforementioned Word/OneNote combo.
I am in the process of deploying metaPost to my business site and will let you know how the experience goes. In the meantime, you can learn more about metaPost at the links provided above and make sure you watch the videos that explain the Expanders, which enable you to include rich content into your site.
My daughter's birth caused major changes in my life. Unlike with my first child, I dedicated part of my day to take care of her. Last Thursday we celebrated her first birthday and I took some time to evaluate the impact the decision had on my professional life. I reduced the number of hours dedicated to programming, I dedicated fewer hours to reading technical books and, in general, I spent fewer hours in front of the computer. All of this obviously influenced the amount of time I had available to dedicate to community endeavors. The result was diminished participation in both the DotNetNuke web development platform as the Gallery Project Lead, and being almost absent from asp.net forums where I was an All-star poster as well as forum moderator.
The hours I enjoyed being near my little Renata have been really fulfilling and with renewed strength I decided to go back into my dedication to my preferred community activities. Starting today I've scheduled in my daily agenda some time to dedicate to moderating and replying to forum questions in the asp.net forum.
With the submission of the DotNetNuke Gallery module, I am also starting the planning phase of the next version. And even though I envision full leverage of newer technologies like Silverlight and JQuery to give the module the necessary visual "umph", I will be sharing vision with the rest of the team, continuing to experiment with an agile-like approach to development in this open-source distributed-team effort. AJAX is a no-brainer of course and the development of a DAL will be one of the most active areas of work.
If you are interested in DotNetNuke in general and the Gallery module specifically, I suggest you follow the respective project area over the DotNetNuke website, as most of the action related to the development of the next version will be visible in the Blog and Forums that reside there.
And yes, Renata is pictured at the top of this blog.
I began my investigation of Oslo (Microsoft's next Modeling Platform) by taking a look at the Models Remixed website, and while watching the cartoonish video, I could not help but hope that the one who placed humans and T-Rex in the same period of time is not part of the Oslo team.
I have read before that marketing people usually trash perfectly good products. Although my comment may be exaggerated, this is a great example of hype over truth. With Oslo's main promise of bringing model-driven development into the mainstream, some messages may slow down adoption by unnecessarily adding humor to an otherwise incredibly useful tool.
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