I was just reflecting (no pun intended) on this thread on the ALT.NET mailing list. I that there are a few people out there who were at least initially upset at Lutz Roeder handing .NET Reflector over to Red-Gate. Personally I think that Lutz has done a great job for a very large community of developers [...]

  On August 6 Microsoft released their MSDN Forums Client to Codeplex in the form of a Community Technology Preview (CTP), which,  unless you have the Windows Live SDK installed it just does not work.  Dont fret, I have a solution for you.  Three solutions in fact!  (harder, hard, and easy)  1. (Harder) If you have vs.net 2008 installed:     a. Download the head of the trunk build from codeplex: http://www.codeplex.com/msdnforumsclient/SourceControl/L... [read more]

The march towards the 10.0 release of Visual Studio is well under way and details are starting to come out about what features are going to be showing up in the IDE. This link provides some details on some of the interesting improvements coming down the line for developers. I really like the thumbnail view of [...]

I was just checking out the improvements the team has made in beta 2 of Internet Explorer 8. While I haven't had time to mess with all of the improvements, I see lots of opportunities to create enhancements for my sites to allow visitors to get what they are looking for faster. Be sure to check out the full list of improvements at http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/08/28/part-i-better-everyday-browsing.aspx. You can download IE8 Beta 2 at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8.

Listen to the Show! Steve Smith, owner of ASP Alliance and Lake Quincy Media joins us today to teach us about some hidden gems in ASP.NET caching and performance. Steve’s expertise in this area comes from first-hand experience as Lake Quincy’s ad system serves over 60 requests per second and handles over 150 million requests per month. Steve is an ASP Insider, Regional Director, Microsoft MVP, INETA Speaker and fellow book author! What performance metrics are worth tracking? Requests... [read more]

Because my development machine crashed and burned last week, I had to build up a new box and decided to finally take the 64-bit plunge. Read more here: My first 64-bit computer   [A new DevLife post]

I'm very excited to be speaking at the DevReach conference in Bulgaria in October.  It will be my first international conference speaking experience (though I spoke to a user group in Moscow last year - my first international talk).  I'm told this show is great, with a lot of good content and a lot of fun.  I know most of the speakers, and I have to say that (with the possible exception of me) it's a very impressive lineup.  I'm really looking forward to it, and I hope to mee... [read more]

I just happened to discover this as I was setting up my new machine and grabbing Reflector off of the web. It only happened a week ago. There will still be a free community version but Red Gate will be able to put additional resources behind enhancing this tool that we can't live without. You can read an with Lutz Roeder and Red Gate's James Moore in this Simple-Talk article, The Future of Reflector. (Simple-Talk is a Red Gate site.) When asked if he will be involved, Lutz replies: "I w... [read more]

I set up Disqus on my blog about two weeks ago. So far I have been very happy with the service and pleasantly surprised with some features I did not know exists. Disqus, pronounced "discuss", is a service and tool for web comments and discussions. The Disqus comment system can be plugged into any website, blog, or application. Disqus makes commenting easier and more interactive, while connecting websites and commenters across a thriving discussion community. Disqus is a free s... [read more]

When working with AJAX and Web Services it's often nice to be able to render ASP.NET controls as strings, so the rendered HTML can be sent back to the client to replace the contents of a <div> or something like that.  The standard way of achieving this is to use the RenderControl() method, exposed by all ASP.NET controls.  Unfortunately, the RenderControl() method doesn't simply return a string - that would be too easy.  Instead, it takes in an HtmlTextWriter which it will r... [read more]

I finally did it. Late yesterday afternoon I had to get away from the computer so I hopped on my bike and headed south. I thought I would try, yet again, to see if I could get up the App Gap again. Having gotten past the first of two critical points last time, I knew exactly what to expect; so when it got extra hard, I knew that it would let up around the next bend. To make a long story short - I MADE IT! When I pushed past the place I gave up last time, I had my head down and was focused on st... [read more]

At Open Force Europe, this fall, I will be presenting a talk on Creating Testable Modules.  This is part 3 of a series of blogs  where I intent to describe the process as I work my way through developing this talk.  In previous posts, I have introduced some of the concepts including the Model View presenter design pattern.  In this blog I will dig deeper into this pattern by creating a simple Hello World application.  I will be using the Passive View variant of the ... [read more]

Feel free to ignore me I'm just thinking out loud. So I'm reading TechCrunch about a 500 million dollar company called Ning. So what do they do?: http://about.ning.com/product.php Umm this is looking a lot like a DotNetNuke site to me... I guess the difference is that they host the sites. Seems that there is nothing stopping any of us from using DNN to launch our own 500 million dollar company. Oh but they have a bunch of really high-tech widgets... anyway in un-related or perhaps related news I... [read more]

As version 4.1.0 of the Documents module is progressing through the release tracker I have been working to finalize the team members that will help to make the next versions of the Documents module.  As of this time we now have the team in place and roles have been identified.  Team resources have been divided into three functional groups; development, testing and documentation, and localization testing.  The following will tell a little bit about the team and each of the members responsible. De... [read more]

Yet again I am about to take flight, this time to New Jersey. All of my travels this year for our on site DotNetNuke Training have taken me east, and while I don't mind that, where are the folks in the western half of the US finding DNN Training? I'm actually going to the Red Sox Yankees game tonight in New York (go Sox!) and then will be doing training for a client in Parssippany NJ tomorrow before a late night flight home.

Weighing in at 8lbs and 13oz and measuring 21 inches long the Worthley family welcomes little baby Anna Grace Wortley. Mom and little one are doing great! Congratulation! (By the way, when can she start coding?)

 This blog introduces both [Token] based module layout templating and XSL Stylesheets.  

If you read my last blog [Token] based module templates and XSL compared, you might have asked yourself why I transformed the data into XML as the Announcement module doesn’t offer any XML feed beside the default RSS feed. I needed a simple example, and a lot of users are already familiar with the Token based approach of the Announcement module. In contrast, the User Defined Table (UDT) uses XSL-transformations for templating. I will repeat yesterday's example covering now the UDT... [read more]

I'm happy to announce that the 01.00.04 version of the Active Directory Provider has passed through the DotNetNuke Release Tracker. While there are only about a dozen bug fixes in the release and no new features a couple of the bug fixes are significant performance-wise.

At the Open Force Europe Conference this fall I wll be presenting a talk on developing Testable Modules.  In this blog series I will be discussing the insights I have gained while developing materials for this presentation.  In this blog post I will discus adding tests to the Hello World application I developed in a previous blog post

Oren wrote today about a fun problem he'd run into with trying to TDD some changes to some code about which many of his assumptions were proving incorrect.  The problem is that each test he wrote that verified one of his assumptions needed to later be fixed when he found the underlying assumption wasn't true.  The result was a lot of thrashing and not a lot of productivity.  The solution in this case for him was to worry first about just verifying that the code does what it does.... [read more]

I always seem to struggle with a NOT IN clause when there are more than one column to compare.  This, of course, comes up when I am trying to get records from one set that are NOT IN another set and the comparison has to be done across multiple columns. ...(read more)

I always seem to struggle with a NOT IN clause when there are more than one column to compare.  This, of course, comes up when I am trying to get records from one set that are NOT IN another set and the comparison has to be done across multiple columns. ...(read more)

I have been using my MBP for work and play for about 9 months. While it is still a technical work of art, the luster is starting to where off. While I still love my Mac for consumer (web, photos, videos) tasks and highly enjoy many available applications (EverNote, Skitch, 1Password, Textmate, Fusion) everyday the urge to go back to a PC increases (especially considering Dell’s recent releases [1]). This is not a definitive list, but here are some of my biggest gripes: Office – Mac Offi... [read more]

On day 2 at ReMix the community room is hosting a panel with Scott Guthrie and Travis Leithead, a Program Manager on the IE team. We’re going to be taking questions from the floor, as well as providing a way to submit questions during the conference, but if you’ve something pressing you want to ask and don’t fancy standing up in front of a crowd, then I’ve set up a thread on the backnetwork forum where you can post your questions. Tea and biscuits may also be involved.