Tales from the Evil Empire

The HTML canvas has a set of methods, createImageData and putImageData, that look like they will enable you to draw transparent shapes pixel by pixel. The data structures that you manipulate with these methods are pseudo-arrays of pixels, with four bytes per pixel. One byte for red, one for green, one for blue and one for alpha. This alpha byte makes one believe that you are going to be able to manage transparency, but that’s a lie.

The Rules module in Orchard enable you to set-up “if this then that” types of rules. The system is fully extensible in terms of what “this” and “that” are of course, but Orchard comes with everything you need out of the box to set-up comment notifications. Let’s create this rule:

TL;DR: I’m leaving Microsoft to found my own company. My involvement in Orchard continues unchanged.

Drivers in Orchard are responsible for taking content parts and using them to generate shapes for the rendering engine to transform into HTML. A little known fact is that there can be more than one driver for any given part. You might be wondering what this can be used for: one shape per part seems like a reasonable assumption.

Back in September, we did something with Orchard that is kind of a big deal: we transferred control over the Orchard project to the community.

Damn, Rob saw right through the PR lies of Phil Haack about the new NuGet gallery and figured it all out. Kidding, kidding. For your enjoyment and context, here is Rob’s post:
http://wekeroad.com/2011/12/06/nuget-and-orchard/

I’m not very satisfied with traditional database backup solutions. It seems like almost no progress was made since SQL Server 6.5 (at least for the built-in tools). They are still outputting monolithic binary backup files that only do the job if the only thing you expect from backups is the ability to recover from catastrophic failures. I expect more, but before I explain, we need a disclaimer:

I'm in the process of moving the Orchard documentation site from ScrewTurn Wiki to a Mercurial + Markdown system, where revisions are managed through source control tools instead of a fully online wiki. We see quite a few advantages in doing that, but that's a story for another post.