Néstor Sánchez
aspnet food for thought, from the Dúnadan Raptor

Wireless Electricity Is Here (Seriously)

The title of this blog entry repeats without adornments the title of an article in FastCompany magazine that reports about the imminence of a technology that will absolutely revolutionize the mobile industry and will transcend into other areas. We will soon presence the era of truly wireless devices.

Vista, Visual Studio and Dotnetnuke development

I had been using Vista on a Virtual PC to slowly become acquainted and I had refused to own a notebook, until I was sucked into reality when my wife asked me to take a week off or else... Long story short, I looked for and bought a laptop in less than an hour. I configured it with 4GB RAM an Vista Business 32-bit, since I wasn't prepared to spend more on a 64 bit machine for my first purchase.

After installing Office, it was time to set up my development environment for my DotNetNuke projects. VS 2008, SQL 2005 and Virtual PC 2007. After set up, I started to configure my DotNetNuke environment and experienced issues when trying to install DotNetNuke.

I had two specific issues:

1. The install would hang. After several attempts and getting help from Charles Nurse I realized it was that VS2008 only installed the latest MS AJAX version, and DotNetNuke uses AJAX v 1. After installing it everything was OK
2. After successfully installing DNN4 it was time to play with DNN5 Betas. With Vista's IIS version you can create sites, not just virtual directories and I was happily trying to create one called http://donetnuke_2 to follow the practice for core modules. For some reason after installing the beta successfully I could not login into DNN. With help from Sebastian Leupold, Erik Van Ballegoij, Charles, Chris Hammond and Shawn Mehaffie, I finally pinpointed the error to the fact that you cannot use dashes in the domain part of the URL. After switching to http://dotnetnuke2 I was back in the game.

This are just two issues I came across and so far I have been coding away without any issues in Vista and VS2008. I plan to start testing Windows 7 and VS2010 CTP in my first attempt to be an early adopter. Of course, I will post my findings here, stay tuned.

Have you found other issues with Vista and VS2008? Let me know.

Day 1: Windows 7 & Internet Explorer 8 - a better experience, really

I've managed to stay away from Betas for a long time, I could not afford to have downtime but with the entire buzz about Internet Explorer 8 and the recent availability of Windows 7, I decided to give it a go.

I created a new VM with 1GB RAM and a 20 GB Hard drive. The installation process was quite smooth, and I practically did not notice it while attending our DotNetNuke weekly team meeting. I did not even create a DVD; I just captured the downloaded ISO and began installation.

Although in the VM I have to do away with the Aero GUI, I must say that turning Full Screen Mode on and working as if I were directly in the Laptop base OS was just fine.

Some of the features are even more intuitively placed, including the direct access to change the screen resolution. The additional feature that allows automatic rotation of background is nice as well. During the day Windows Explorer did not cause any of the problems I currently have in Vista, like the restarts I have to endure. Finally I found the copying feature more stable and reliable. I copied several hundreds of MB from another machine, going through the Host OS with an apparent increase in speed. The laptop has 4GB of RAM and the VM did better with only 1GB.

On the network side, with the exception of finding out that clicking the "Connect to a Network" links in the Start Menu or the Network And Sharing Center, both open the popup that takes you the Network And Sharing Center (!?)-, I had no problems joining my domain.

After installing the Firewall client, I went to see some of my favorite sites to experience firsthand how the new standards compliance could affect their appearance. None of the sites I visited had any issues. I took more time to visit some DotNetNuke based sites, of course including some I've done for my customers. I am amazed that none of them presented any problems.

One of my best experiences so far was with the Silverlight extension install. I was completely surprised that after downloading and installing it, I did not have to restart IE. Even though the installer finished mentioning that I might need a refresh, Silverlight content was immediately available in some of the browser windows I already had open.

I liked the docking of windows and the automatic behavior that hides or shows other windows when you shake the active one.

Although I was limited because I was running Windows 7 inside of the VM, for a day's worth of playing with Windows 7, I had a pleasant experience. I can see now why there are rumors that a second Beta may not happen and that a RC could be the next version that Microsoft releases.

An opportunity for better DotNetNuke testing with Typemock Isolator

A product that will complement the current effort to support unit testing in DotNetNuke, is Typemock Isolator. They have an ongoing campaing to start some kind of viral marketing and they are giving their product for free to those who post about it in specialized blogs. So, full disclosure, I want to get the free license and start using the product to test my DotNetNuke modules.