March 17th and spring sure seems to be here already! View Full Album

If you upgrade an Azure web instance to use ASP.NET MVC 2, make sure you mark the System.Web.Mvc reference as Copy Local = true.  Otherwise, your deployment will fail.  And you won’t get any good feedback from Windows Azure as to the cause of the problem.  So you’ll start searching the web for help, and perhaps you’ll stumble on this post, and you’ll realize that you didn’t set Copy Local = true on your System.Web.Mvc assembly reference in your ASP.NET MVC 2 web instance.  A... [read more]

Piles of interesting stuff going on at Mix 10 this week. Here's a link rollup with all the details and downloads that you might care about. (As well as a few blatant plugs for my own sessions.) First: Watch Day 1 and Day 2 keynotes on demand. See recorded sessions here. Silverlight 4 Release Candidate - If you want to develop with the SL4 RC, you'll need the latest Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Web Developer Express 2010 installed and Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010. All the deep ... [read more]

My two-hundred-and-fifth podcast is up. Astoria, ADO.NET Data Services and OData - what's the difference and the real story? How does OData work and when should I use it? When do I use OData and when do I use WCF? Scott gets the scoop from the architect himself, Pablo Castro. This week at Mix, OData.org was launched. There are currently consumer libraries like : Javascript PHP Java Windows Phone 7 Series iPhone (Objective C) .NET Jon Galloway have even updated NerdDin... [read more]

It’s a good idea not to do too much work without checking something into source control.  By “too much work” I mean typically on the order of a couple of hours at most, and certainly it’s a good practice to check in anything you have before you leave the office for the day.  But what if your changes break the build (on the build server – you do have a build server don’t you?) or would cause problems for others on your team if they get the latest code?  The solution with Subversion... [read more]

By default, when WCF emits a WSDL definition for your services, it can often contain many links to others related schemas that need to be imported. For the most part, this is fine. WCF clients understand this type of schema without issue, and it conforms to the requisite standards as far as WSDL definitions go. However, some non Microsoft stacks will only work with a single WSDL file and require that all definitions for the service(s) (port types, messages, operation etc…) are contained within... [read more]

The 5.3.0 development cycle has been unlike any in our 7+ year history.  In some respects this is good and in others – not so much.  As I explained in my Just Like Clockwork post, we are working hard to make monthly releases a habit and to have release schedules that are predictable.  DotNetNuke 5.3.0 marks the first major release we have attempted since splitting our engineering group into feature development and maintenance groups.  As always, doing anything for the first ... [read more]

 If you are anywhere in the San Francisco Bay or Silicon Valley area this post is for you. Others are welcome, but you might find the drive a little long depending on where you are. On 3/23/2010 we are going to be holding our first DotNetNuke User’s Group here in the DotNetNuke Corporation’s Headquarters in San Mateo, CA. All are invited and encouraged to attend, it doesn’t matter if you know DotNetNuke or not yet, user groups are a great way to learn about the software, and get to meet oth... [read more]

We've been working on introducing content localization enhancements for a while now. Back in 5.2.0 we started to add some of the API pieces and other supporting framework that we would build on and the original aim was for 5.3.0 to contain support for localisation portal settings. However, this has proved more tricky than it would originally appear, so rather than rush out an imperfect solution with 5.3.0, we've pushed it back a month to the 5.3.1 release.More...

This article is cross-posted from my personal blog. A year or so ago I wrote a series of blog posts about building testable modules using the Model-View-Presenter (MVP) pattern.  The MVP pattern of development provides many of the benefits attributed to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern, which has become very popular recently as an alternative approach to ASP.NET development.  You can have your cake and eat it too. Its main strength though is that it retains most of the benefits of the... [read more]

As I indicated last week, I am pleased to announce the Call for Speakers for the 2010 DotNetNuke Connections conference.  Once again, this years conference will be held at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas from November 1st through the 4th with pre and post-conference training available as well.  We could not do this show without our speakers and we have been fortunate in the past to have had some great session proposals by many well respected speakers.  Some of those speakers have b... [read more]

This article is cross-posted from my personal blog. One of the tenets of Unit Testing is that in order to test a piece of code we often need to create some alternate implementation of one or more of the Interfaces involved in a test.  This concept is generally called a Test Double.  However there are many types of Test Double, and there is some degree of confusion about the types of doubles used. In this installment of “Adventures in Testing” I will attempt to clarify the types of Test Doubles... [read more]

At the last Microsoft MVP summit, I was eating lunch with Jeff Paries who I had collaborated with on previous Silverlight projects, but had not met in person until that week. I commented that I had not used the Silverlight gauge he created about a year ago because it was too big...More...

The last three weeks I have found myself extremely busy with the Skinning Contest. First, I built a module for the voting portion of the contest (with the help of Joe, thanks Joe!). When originally deployed, we found some problems with allowing everyone to vote so I apologize to those who initially couldn't vote (we have corrected this as of last week), so I spent a bit more time investigating that. Next I started preparing a skin object for public release (also for the skinning contest). F... [read more]

Over the past several months we have been making some significant changes in our release process.  We have made a commitment to monthly releases, opened up our code repository and in general have made a move to be more transparent.  During this same period we have also made some changes to our development processes to separate our feature development from our bug fixes.  The DotNetNuke 5.3.0 is our first quarterly feature release that is benefiting from this new development proce... [read more]

We are once again in the heart of the planning season for the DotNetNuke DevConnections and SDC conferences. It is that time of year when we ask all of you to submit your session abstracts for this years DotNetNuke North American conference.  Later this week we’ll be opening up the official Call for Speakers on DotNetNuke.com, but I wanted to take the opportunity to give speakers a heads up so they could start preparing their abstracts so that they are ready once we open the submission for... [read more]

Silverlight provides a flexible animation engine that can be used to transform and manipulate objects in a timeline. While you can do nearly anything you’d like to objects using Storyboards things get a little tricky when you want to synchronize storyboards with audio or video files. There are several different approaches that can be taken to keep things in sync.  In my talk at MIX10 I discussed the following options: Empty Storyboards Using Markers Animating Custom Attached ... [read more]

Yesterday I accidentally discovered that you can edit a multiplicity end point in the EDM Designer: It’s a known bug and is fixed already (post-RC). The changes don’t get saved with the EDMX.

It’s amazing how much the scenery can change when travelling around some parts of the US. We headed out from the Grand Canyon National Park after having a lazy start to the day and headed for Monument Valley. This meant that we needed to backtrack about 110KM or so to the turn of to Tuba [...]

At a meeting yesterday Judy Spencer, co-chair of the Federal CIO Council ICAMSC, briefed that NIST had recently re-released Special Publication 800-73 [PDF] to account for PIV-I Card Issuance.  These would be Smart Cards that can be issued by Non-Federal Issuer’s and can potentially be trusted by US Government Relying Parties. The relevant bits are in Section 3.3 of NIST SP 800-73-3 (Quoting below so that I can easily reference them in the future): ... [read more]

When: March 24th, 6PM Where: Competitive Computing, Colchester Vermont (www.competitive.com) From Zero to BI in 10 Minutes or less By Rushabh Mehta Finally a technology that the Information Worker can use to take raw data and turn it into valuable information in a matter of minutes from the comfort of their own desktop! In this very exciting and interactive session full of exciting demos, we will walk you through taking raw information from a variety of sources and building a powerful analyt... [read more]

On Thursday we headed east through the Zion National Park around to Page (in Arizona) and then on to the Grand Canyon National Park (South Rim). The north rim is closed this time of year (due to snow presumably). Going through the Zion National Park was a real highlight and we got to climb up [...]

I’ve been having some technology issues that have stopped me putting up some posts but I thought I might catch everyone up with what we have been doing. On Wednesday earlier this week we moved on from Las Vegas and headed north east towards Springdale (in Utah) which is next to the Zion National Park. We [...]

To avoid over tweeting/blogging I have decided to try to maintain a list of DNN related links for weekly publication. Here is this week… Looking for free dotnetnuke skins for your dnn website? Lehigh County, Pennsylvania – New DotNetNuke Case Study DotNetNuke raises $8 Million in Series B funding Features of DotNetNuke Development DotNetNuke Makes It Easier For You To Build Feature-Rich, Interactive Web Sites And Applications Creating Testable Modules – Redux – Now Baked into the Core (Do... [read more]

Kevin has posted about marshalling numbers in the 3rd part of his ongoing blog series.   Jonathan Cogley is the CEO of Thycotic Software, an agile software services and product development company based in Washington DC.  Secret Server is our flagship enterprise password management product.