Building on GitHub Foundations, this one went deeper into enterprise administration, governance, and platform management.

I'm going for the other 3 GitHub certifications next, while they're on sale. They'll be a bit tougher as they are most specialized and focused.]]>https://radicaldave.com/blog/github-foundations-certified2024-05-05T18:00:42.000Z2024-05-05T18:00:42.000Z

I just hope it maintains its generic/open source culture over time. It has even inspired me set a goal to write my own Terraform Provider with GoLang one of these days!

The one thing that stands out about all certifcation tests, that I have done so far, is how every one of them have had some very tricky questions that almost feel like they are trying to trick you. Whether intentional, just oversight, or simply poorly worded by the test creators is questionsable.

So much so that it feels like in order to have realistic expectations as a test taker, you have to expect that you are going to at least miss a few due to how tricky they were word. Even if it is simply due to the fact that the question is so niche that even someone with years of experience with the particular technology hadn't used that particular feature yet.

Never stop learning. I got many more certifications planned for this year! Stay tuned!

Way to go AWS! Achievement unlocked!

Start and complete your own quest today at - https://aws.amazon.com/training/digital/aws-cloud-quest

Stay tuned here as I have several projects at various states of progress that I plan to announce soon that will also help you with your adventures/quests!

I was working on some automation tasks and found where these scripts would be useful:

Get-SitecoreSite — for auto-detecting where the Sitecore site is located (e.g. wwwroot/Sitecore). If you don’t provide the site name, it will check all folders under wwwroot (or a custom path you provide) for /bin/sitecore.kernel.dll. You can easily get the one Sitecore site you have deployed, or a full list of sites if you have more than one.

Get-SitecoreVersion — given a path (or otherwise calls Get-SitecoreSite), uses /sitecore/shell/sitecore.version.xml to show the actual Sitecore version installed.

Easy to install:

PS> Install-Script Get-SitecoreSite
PS> Install-Script Get-SitecoreVersion

Available on PowerShell Gallery:

• powershellgallery.com/packages/Get-SitecoreSite
• powershellgallery.com/packages/Get-SitecoreVersion

All MIT open source on GitHub:

• github.com/SharedSitecore/Get-SitecoreSite
• github.com/SharedSitecore/Get-SitecoreVersion

Thou shall not waste your time with any other VCS than Git. — Colin Pear, The Pharaoh

Your Version Control System (VCS) is the single most foundational tool for your entire software application and has a major impact on your DevOps tool selection. There are many choices:

• Git: GitHub, Azure DevOps Repos, Atlassian’s Bitbucket
• Subversion/SVN
• CVS – Concurrent Versions System
• Mercurial
• and many others with varying popularity.

It is worth noting that as of Q1 2017, Microsoft recommends Git source control technology. As of March 2017, the Windows source code itself is managed in 65 Git repositories, all hosted within Microsoft’s Azure DevOps (formerly TFS) suite of products. With the acquisition of GitHub in June 2018, Microsoft has signaled that it agrees with the rest of the industry that Git is the version control system for the modern era.

It becomes very obvious who the industry leader is based on the level of compatibility that has been achieved by Git throughout all the various tooling options. Can you use something other than Git? Certainly — just recognize that tool selection compatibility begins to become a question that you need to routinely ask yourself as you look at other tools for your application stack.

That is why Git is the top recommendation, whomever the provider that you wish to use. If you have yet to make a selection, the default recommendation is Azure DevOps Repos. Most enterprise software portfolios are already so large that the more you can consolidate the better, i.e. the full Azure DevOps suite.

References & Resources

1. GitHub
2. Azure DevOps Repos
3. Atlassian’s Bitbucket
4. Subversion/SVN
5. CVS – Concurrent Versions System
6. Mercurial

It is currently the industry standard, especially in the open source community, and the correct choice for the greatest percentage of software applications to be contained and separated within their own repo. This has recently been labeled as the Manyrepo version control architectural strategy and storage pattern. Listing all the advantages and disadvantages would be quite lengthy, so here are the main points:

Advantages

• Continuous Deployment tools are much easier to use.
• Dependency tracking, testing, code reuse and code review.
• Security is controlled at the repo level.

Disadvantages

• Dependency management across projects. (Should be reasonably easily managed via tools such as NuGet.)

Today, the Monorepo strategy, newly labeled in 2017, where all projects and solutions are in one repo, should be avoided. The argument for using the Monorepo has gained a slightly louder voice in recent years. Many using the fact that Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others use them. These companies are large enough and have an R&D budget that should allow them to use everything everywhere. Microsoft has in fact been moving to separate repos for certain projects as it has been open sourcing .NET Core, Entity Framework Core and many of its other tools, as evident by its current 4,157 nuget packages.

The future may lead towards the hybrid approach of a Metarepo. By utilizing extra tooling, you can either roll your Manyrepos up into a Monorepo or the reverse approach of breaking your Monorepo into separate repos. Here are just a few:

• meta
• meta-git
• Greenkeeper
• Bit

There are simply too many challenges today for most applications that make using anything other than the standard Manyrepo strategy worth the effort.

The architectural strategy you choose to use for your software applications and their source control strategies should always be analyzed for the most efficiency for your teams.

That is not to say that each repo will only produce one package. We actually utilized compartmentalized packages for various things throughout the continuous integration and deployment pipeline, for purposes such as: execute tests, seed data, build infrastructure, etc.

References & Resources

1. NuGet
2. Wikipedia: Monorepo
3. .NET Core, Entity Framework Core and Microsoft nuget packages
4. meta, meta-git, Greenkeeper, Bit
5. Ensure Your Assemblies are Versioned

We have had a long running policy, which seems to have become an industry standard as well, that any and all environment specific configuration and data should not be contained within your repo. It is not part of the software.

It only belongs to that specific environment. It should be maintained and automated with the deployment orchestration tools used to deploy your environments within their appropriate steps in your continuous deployment pipeline.

Practically all tools have their own unique and innovative ways of storing and applying the appropriate configuration. Most utilize a variable concept, such as: Azure DevOps Pipeline Variables, Octopus Deploy Variables and Travis CI Environment Variables.

At a minimum, keeping these details out of your repo helps reduce the risk of accidental and unnecessary exposure of potentially sensitive data, such as database connection strings, API tokens, etc.

Resources

1. Azure DevOps Pipeline Variables
2. Octopus Deploy Variables
3. Travis CI Environment Variables

This document is able to quickly paint a picture of the entire system and its processes. — Scott Wilson

A functional application is always the highest priority and that always leaves documentation artifacts at risk for potentially never getting completed. However, this behavior can be a serious impact to the efficiency and effectiveness of anyone that supports the application going forward. It is most obvious when someone new joins the team or someone rejoins the team after time has passed.

One of the most efficient ways to reduce this risk is by including and maintaining current architect diagrams within the repo. This allows anyone the ability to quickly see the various components, environments and processes. We have standardized on the usage of the The 4+1 architectural view model as the base for our architecture diagrams. It enables everyone to quickly and easily see the application from the following viewpoints:

• Logical view – uses class diagrams and state diagrams to describe and illustrate an end users view of the system.
• Process view – uses activity diagrams to describe and illustrate the flow of the application processes as it interacts with the various components of the system.
• Development view – uses component diagrams and package diagrams to provide the developer with an implementation view.
• Physical view – uses deployment diagrams to provide the engineer with a deployment view.
• Scenarios – uses use cases (and is even referred to as the use case view) to describe and illustrate the interactions between processes and objects.

We have found it so beneficial that it has become a requirement for all of our applications and have even created multiple 4+1 diagrams for specific phases and layers of more complex systems. We recommend that you standardize the location of these diagrams within your repo as well, so that everyone knows where to quickly find them. We use /docs.

Here is an excellent example of a full 4+1 Architectural Blueprint diagram for a Microsoft-Platform DevOps Environment created by Jeffrey Palermo.

References

1. Wikipedia: 4+1 architectural view model, Class diagram, State diagram, Activity diagram, Component diagram, Package diagram, Deployment diagram, Use case
2. Architectural Blueprints – The “4+1” View Model of Software Architecture by Philippe Kruchten, Rational Software Corp
3. Microsoft-Platform DevOps Environment 4+1 Architecture Blueprints created by Jeffrey Palermo

What is a private build? … a way to automate the local testing … — Jim Wallace

1. Clean the environment. All private builds must start from a clean environment and should not use any external assets from previous builds or any other source. This helps identify and prevent issues potentially caused by environmental discrepancies.

2. Compile your entire solution/project all at once. The entire solution must build correctly. One issue, even a simple missing file in one component, should fail the entire solution until it is resolved and before a commit.

3. Provide all dependencies necessary for running unit and integration tests. This is very important. It is what enables the actual continuous integration and deployment pipeline to run the tests during the appropriate environments.

4. Run all automated unit tests. They should be very fast and use no external resources. These tests should confirm that every function continues to perform as expected.

5. Run component-level integration tests. These tests should confirm that the interaction and interfaces between the components continue to operate as expected. The industry standard is 10 minutes or less.

Confidence in your ability to deploy your software is best achieved by executing a private build before a commit — David Walker

References & Resources

Learn how to create your own private build and more with these resources:

1. What is a private build?
2. Using psake for Private and Integrated Builds – PowerShell
3. Cake – C#
4. Fake – F#
5. Rake – Ruby

What is a private build? … a way to automate the local testing … — Jim Wallace

1. Confidence in your ability to deploy your software is best achieved by executing a private build before a commit to catch and prevent issues. It is the first and most important quality gate/check point. We should be continually trying to catch issues as early as possible and shift left.

2. Reduce risk. Completely unrelated issues often appear after making even a simple change. That risk is higher in large enterprise applications and especially for any new developers on the project. Requiring your developers to verify the stability of the software project prior to every commit reduces that risk.

3. Ability to deploy quickly. As a software development team, you should be able to get a fix or feature into the hands of your users as quickly and with as low risk of failure as possible. It is your team’s best way to deliver high quality and maintain velocity.

4. Save time and money. If an issue that could and should have been caught prior to a commit is missed, it could potentially impact the entire team. At a minimum, it impacts the time and cost of resources that were unavailable and busy deploying and testing the application.

5. Commit small, early and often. The smaller the change definitely means the smaller the risk. The larger the team and the larger the change both exponentially increases the risks. Stub your code and/or wrap it with a feature flag/toggle to help get it into your team’s hands as quickly as possible. Make sure you maintain and run your tests.

All private builds must start from a clean environment — David Walker

References & Resources

Learn how to create your own private build and more with these resources:

1. What is a private build?
2. Using psake for Private and Integrated Builds – PowerShell
3. Cake – C#
4. Fake – F#
5. Rake – Ruby

DevOps is based on the same principles of Agile software development. Both rely on developing a culture of continuous process improvement, powered by fast and direct feedback. DevOps is not just software, it is the practice of integrating feedback and real-time analysis into the development process. This portion of both Agile and DevOps practices can be applied to practically any process. Over time, there will always be an opportunity for improvement.

In today’s modern, digital age, everything relies on speed. Automating software in the fastest and most adaptive way possible is the primary goal. If you don’t manage to do it quickly and efficiently your competitor will. You can cause irreparable damage to your reputation or worse. The most prominent example is the fall of Knight Capital Group, LLC. Knight Capital had, due to lack of oversight in the deployment process, the slow response to issues and the lack of proper code analysis, bankrupted itself within 45 minutes. In 2012, Apple either ignored or had no feedback and testing procedures in place. Therefore, they suffered a major blow to their reputation due to an issue with Apple Maps. There are numerous examples of digital media and delivery industry shifts, BlockBuster anyone? If you have other examples of similar failures (aka #EPIC #FAILs), please share them in the comments below.

How quickly can you respond to a customer reported issue? Feature request? Industry shift? Can you deploy to production during business hours with no business impact? Is your team manually deploying after hours? Where is your pain?

If you’d like to chat about Azure DevOps, Consulting Services or anything else, don’t hesitate to contact me.

Most people have a general idea of what integration means in the context of web experiences. Even more than personalization, integrations lie at the core of every website. Modern users want their sites connected; they want to immediately be able to share something to their friends, buy something using their preferred payment method, or many other scenarios. Creating meaningful integration is where the distinction between creating business value and busywork lies. Poor integration adds to maintenance, may cause your site to load slowly, and is more to keep track of in the long term. So, the question becomes: how do you determine what provides the most meaningful business value that becomes most useful to integrate with?

Integrating any feature into a web experience platform development project is something that needs to be planned and thought through. Not every integration is useful, though many are in unexpected ways. When done properly, the main benefit of any integration should allow it to be easily accessible and consumable from your entire platform — including the ability to use it in your personalization features. Integrating with a weather service is one I’ve touched on before briefly — imagine contacting a weather service about the weather where your user is from and targeting content on your site based on the weather. There are many other use cases; don’t forget about analytics solutions and marketing tags that your digital media team might want in place for building custom audiences.

Here is my process that generally works for all integration projects:

1. Determine what the integration adds. The first step is to determine what the integration adds to your user’s experience and what business value it adds. Integrating with analytics solutions brings an obvious benefit to your business, but remember: there should be a justification for everything from both the business end and the user end. Many sites have burned through a lot of “user goodwill” by seemingly ignoring what the community deems major problems while integrating features that few users actually use. Don’t forget that you will have to maintain your integrations post-launch.

2. Determine your target audience. Many different sites integrate with each other — a typical example being social media: OAuth integration can help you get users who don’t want to keep track of another account. This can almost never cause issues for your site, and social media networks make it faster and easier for users to share your content. For B2B marketers, integrating things like a PIM (product information management) solution or CRM forms into the site are often core functionality that creates a seamless web experience for users and satisfies business requirements. Determine your target audience and see what features they would be likely to use and how.

3. Determine what specifically to integrate. Now that you know what your target audience needs and what your options provide, determine your priorities and what solution works best for your site. One analytics solution will not work for another, and every company’s ERP and CRM workflow is different. This is where integrating your company’s chosen systems into the site begins. The major thing to keep in mind is how easy it is to integrate with many services that most people wouldn’t even consider, and that they can provide unique value to your business. After a certain point it becomes more and more obvious that many services are really similar — that you can integrate them in similar ways quickly, using flexible and reusable systems.

4. Determine how you’re going to measure. Setting up clear expectations around tracking and measurement scenarios, and ensuring the site is capable of providing your team the data they need, is essential.

The true power of integration comes from the ability to make your site work with any other site or tool to improve its own content and capabilities.

Tags: Web Experience Platforms · Product Information Management · Digital Strategy

It was very exciting to see how far Stephen Pope has come to now release v2.0 of the Sitecore Publish Service built on .NET Core. It is now to the point that the recommendation from Sitecore is to add it to any Sitecore instance! I’ve downloaded it already and can’t wait to dive in!

Stefano Tempesta then delivered an excellent presentation on Optimising Sitecore Sites with Azure Redis Cache and Machine Learning.

Side-Note: While I am sure many of the speakers and their presentations are likely shared or published on the internet somewhere, the greatest value came from the excitement of seeing it live, in person. Everything exponentially increases the ability to connect, discuss, brainstorm — and if time would have allowed, even a “hackathon,” which I would still love to do!

Then I was excited to see the innovation happening in the Sitecore Commerce Overview by Thomas Moller Jensen. The platform, the capabilities, the roadmap, and Sitecore’s ability to innovate on the product are all very exciting — plus it’s built with .NET Core. 😀 The eCommerce flow kept rolling with Willem Haring & Erwin Werkman’s excellent How to Start Selling Products with Sitecore.

Alex Shyba and Adam Weber stole the show with their demo of JSS and SiteFlix! The ability to build complete sites with nothing but JavaScript — utilizing pure JavaScript frameworks like React (with Angular on the roadmap) — is extraordinary. The fact that it would be released that summer into private beta was extremely exciting. Imagine the Sitecore Experience Platform built “completely” with these capabilities. The pace of innovation across the entire platform would only grow exponentially.

Then Jeppe Grue and Pieter Brinkman brought the amazing event to a close. Jeppe delivered The Sitecore Philosophy and how everything they do is always tied back to what the community needs.

In closing and in my humble opinion, it really brings to light the innovation that is now possible at an astronomical rate — not only from the Sitecore platform itself, but when you combine it with the explosive innovation coming from all the major vendors: Microsoft, Amazon, Google, IBM, and virtually everyone else building some form of machine learning or artificial intelligence framework to deliver even greater business value to their customers.

This post is actually self serving, in that I will never have to hunt for it again. First, you of course have to install the MailingList Module and then Add a Reference to the Sitecore.MailingList.dll in the bin folder. Then add:

using Sitecore.Modules.MailingList.Core;

It needs some parameter validation before being 100%, but here goes:

private void SaveSubscriber(string firstName, string lastName, string email, string gender, string age)
{
    MailingList list = new MailingList();
    string listID = Sitecore.Context.Database.Items.GetItem("/sitecore/content/modules/mailing list/mailing lists/Newsletter").ID.ToString();
    string name = firstName + " " + lastName;
    string company = "";
    string country = Sitecore.Context.Language.ToString();
    list.PutSubscriber(name, email, company, country);
    // listID parameter says it’s listID’s although it’s not a string array, beats me
    list.Subscribe(name, email, listID);
    // you can send any parameters here that you want
    list.PutSubscriberField(email, "Gender", gender);
    list.PutSubscriberField(email, "Age", age);
}

private void RemoveSubscriber(string email)
{
    MailingList list = new MailingList();
    string listID = Sitecore.Context.Database.Items.GetItem("/sitecore/content/modules/mailing list/mailing lists/Newsletter").ID.ToString();
    // Second parameter expects string array of Newsletter Sitecode Id’s to subscribe to.
    list.Unsubscribe(email, listID.Split(‘,’));
}

Let me know if you find it useful or know of something I was overlooking. Most of this was taking from Alex’s post and just updated to Sitecore CMS version 5.3.

Anyway, I just learned the hard way today, that Network Solutions is now registering domains that have been searched for via their whois tool.

I was doing some preliminary research on the replacement for this year’s TulsaCodeCamp event, since I wanted to come up with something new, unique and maybe repeatable (hint). After seeing the available domain names and weighing the options, I went to register the domain I had picked using my usual registrar GoDaddy only to be informed it was no longer available.

I went back to "netsol" and this time when I searched it said "available here". Looking at their whois record and out of curiosity the whois record via GoDaddy, both said it was registered just today 1/29/08 by Network Solutions and even says "Available there".

Where is INTERNIC? This situation is only getting worse by the minute. Not only are there the lowest of the low, slimiest of the slime, cyber squatters who predatorily jump on a domain and put up nothing but a stupid search script. There’s the registrars that charge exorbitant late fees (like 12x annual fees) to renew at about 15 days late, then when you don’t bow to their demands, hold on to the domain for several years hosting nothing but the same stupid search scripts.

This is the one time I welcome some form of oversight, whether it be INTERNIC, the US Government, United Nations, somebody please end this. It is so very bad for the public, customers and the general internet populace.

My first trip to SUGCON EU was full of honors and humbling moments. First, simply to be selected and make the list of only around 60 or so speakers out of a large pool of talented candidates. Second, to see all the other sessions and the pace of innovation taking place across the Sitecore ecosystem.

I was there to see Lars Floe Nielsen ask Pieter Brinkman and a small team of “Retired MVPs” (former MVPs now Sitecore employees) to do some “real work.” In just two weeks they built a SitecoreUG.com clone that included HoloLens integration! It was awesome — and even Lars jokingly “agreed it was slightly innovative.”

I then saw the excellent presentation by Mark Cassidy: Decoupling Your Sitecore Architecture Using Azure Service Bus and Azure Storage. It is amazing how the simple utilization of a message queue can enable such great scalability and reliability into systems, even when some segments of the architecture become unavailable. In the simplest of terms: your order would still go through, even if the order processing system was down.

Then came the awesome demonstration by Bas Lijten and Rob Habraken of Sitecore Robbie! They built a robot using Raspberry Pi running Windows and communicating back to a Sitecore instance for all of its interactivity and personalization capabilities, with Microsoft Cognitive Services powering photo/video processing, facial recognition, and LUIS language services. I want to build one myself!

After that — I am extremely grateful that I had recently co-presented at the Boston SUG with Mark Stiles and the Milwaukee SUG with Jason Wilkerson, because their sessions were at the exact same time as mine and I was glad I didn’t have to miss them! Mark Stiles did an amazing job with his open source project: Sitecore Integration with Microsoft Cognitive Services — a whole new Media Library capable of auto-tagging images, facial recognition, emotional recognition, and much more. Jason Wilkerson’s Leveraging SXA to Empower Large Organizations is always excellent and brings the excitement around SXA to whole new heights.

My room was packed. I always love presenting to new audiences — asking questions, then personalizing the delivery of content based on their backgrounds and interests. If my informal surveying has any accuracy, the Sitecore practitioners in my session were about 80–90% already using Sitecore Personalization! That was amazing, as every prior event had been approximately the opposite — 80–90% not yet doing personalization. This is the future. The tools are here. Our customers are demanding it and we all need to deliver it.

Then came Dmytro Shevchenko’s Sitecore xDb In-Depth: Harnessing Contacts, Sessions and Clusters. It helps me readily admit that even within just the Sitecore ecosystem there are so many innovations going on in so many directions that no one person could stay abreast of it all.

During the dinner and entertainment, I was excited to speak with several attendees from my session and find that the content was very relevant to their recent customer needs and deliverables.

At the end of the dinner: “Let the games begin.” Using Kahoot, we played Sitecore Trivia! The room was packed — I’d estimate 300–500 people, and over 110 played! I was “in the middle” of the rankings for most of the game until I went on a roll and finished in 5th place. It was very exciting and fun. As Adam Najmanowicz pointed out, in reality it meant I was the first-place loser, as everyone else took home prizes. 😁

Sitecore Personalization

Why is personalization so important? Simple, you want to provide the best possible experience to your prospect or customer. This is absolutely critical. You want every interaction with your customer to be as effective and efficient as possible; this requires at least a certain amount of knowledge of your customer — but obviously, you can never have too much data from which to make decisions. Today, we are always connected. We expect that the companies that we choose to do business with to at least know every interaction that we have had with them. It is simply not acceptable for an eCommerce site to not easily know what I recently viewed and make recommendations to me. Also, they must know my purchase history with them, in order to make more intelligent recommendations on other products that I may actually need. It all comes back to the core principal: the more you know your customer, the more effectively and efficiently you can communicate. The end goal of all this, of course, is to create lasting relationships.

I just completed a tour of seven Sitecore User Groups — Houston, Detroit, Richmond, NYC, Boston, Milwaukee and Minneapolis — where I delivered my “Personalization and Integration Unleashed” presentation. The overarching goal of that session is to get everyone using their imagination at the limitless possibilities that exist with the Sitecore Experience Platform and in particular personalization. It is very easy to create custom personalization rules, and this includes the ability to integrate with any custom and third-party data stores. I showcase business use cases for over fifty different external services. Would you like to personalize your website’s content based on weather, average commute time, average household size, an area’s physical attributes, or nearby locations of businesses? The possibilities are limited only by the data that you can harness. It all boils down to what would be the most efficient, effective and meaningful way for your marketing team to personalize the interactions with their customers. With such an advanced topic, however, I was fairly surprised by some of the questions.

The one basic question that consistently came up: How do I do Personalization within Sitecore? I am going to answer that over the course of a few blog posts and with a short video accompaniment.

First, in order to personalize any content within Sitecore, ideally you need different versions of that content for each variation that you would like to display.

Out of the box Sitecore has approximately one hundred different rules that you can utilize to personalize content. In this blog post and video, I will be utilizing — in my opinion — one of the most simple and yet potentially powerful rules for marketing teams to consider: the day of week. Maybe you want to offer special discounts over the weekend or any other specific day of the week. You could also, just as easily, use first week or last week of the month, etc.

In this example, I have installed a clean Sitecore 8.2 Update 3 site and then created alternate content items for the home page. Then, I created rules that show how to personalize the content for each day of the week — Monday through Friday.

Step by step instructions for personalizing content via the Content Editor:

1. Select the item you wish to Personalize.
2. Click the Presentation tab in the ribbon and then the Details button in the Layout section.
3. Click on the Edit button under the Default – Controls section.
4. Click the Controls section on the left.
5. Click on the Rendering that you would like to personalize in the middle list.
6. Click on the Personalize button on the right.
7. In the “Personalize the component” dialog that opens, click Add personalization rule.
8. Finally, select the appropriate rule you would like to use, enter the appropriate criteria for the macro, and select the Content and/or Presentation Rendering that you would like to use.

Now that you know how to do it — have you identified your marketing strategy? Are your personas current? Have you identified the business use cases for personalization that would be most beneficial for you and your customers? Is it data that you currently have integrated into your Sitecore Experience Platform? If you need any assistance, whether defining your strategy, the best approach to integrating the data you need, or anything else, feel free to get in touch.

Tags: Sitecore · User Experience · Digital Strategy

Per the Configuring Multiple Sites article on the Sitecore Developer Network, a single Sitecore instance out of the box is multi-tenant capable and able to render multiple sites with multiple host names. However, it requires adding new sites into the sitecore/sites section of the web.config file. This causes an IIS app pool recycle, which can require extra planning in a production environment where high availability is a necessity.

The documentation recommends the free Multiple Sites Manager module found in the Marketplace (formerly the Shared Source Library). I’ve personally used this module numerous times and my friends, former colleague and Sitecore MVP Niket Ashesh and Jimmie Overby have done a terrific job with the module and keeping it updated across Sitecore versions.

Another option is the excellent and also free Dynamic Sites Manager module, also in the Marketplace, written by Pete Navarra.

However, just prior to the release of the Sitecore Experience Accelerator, I found myself wanting to host multiple sites in my dev/demo/test environments and wanted to reduce the configuration steps required. So I created the Advanced Site Provider and finally cleaned it up enough to release it on GitHub.

Version 1 allows me to host as many sub-domains as I like, easily. As I work on Sitecore modules, I want to test them across numerous versions of Sitecore. With the help of the free Sitecore Instance Manager, this is extremely easy. Here’s my latest pattern:

http://sc71rev140905.localhost – primary host name. Based on template type, the following sub-domains are automatically used:

• http://sharedsource.sc71rev140905.localhost
• http://SharedSourceWebForms.sc71rev140905.localhost

As part of other modules I have in the works, I am also deploying numerous demo sites such as http://demosite1.sc71rev140905.localhost.

Currently, two additional steps are necessary to make this work:

1. In IIS, add an additional wildcard binding: *.sc71rev140905.localhost
2. For local dev, until Windows supports wildcards in the HOSTS file, you have to add entries for each domain and subdomain. I submitted this as a feature request for Windows 10 but it didn’t make the cut — I’ll post a new request whenever Microsoft opens up the next round of feature requests.

In Version 2, I plan to create a custom Sitecore Template allowing entry of the entire host name, enabling you to use whatever you like: http://demo1.localhost or http://myfavoritesite.localhost.

If you decide to use the Sitecore Experience Accelerator, multi-site support is actually built right in. You can find the documentation for creating a new site using SXA here: Create a tenant and a site.

If you want the nuts and bolts of the implementation: it’s a testament to the extensibility of the Sitecore Experience Platform. Simply implement the SiteProvider interface and programmatically create the Site instead of using the web.config file. Feel free to dive into the code on GitHub.

Have feature requests, questions or thoughts? Feel free to contact me any time.

We had what I thought was an interesting issue recently on a client project. I thought it was a great story and a solution worth sharing. A mobile-friendly responsive design was the main goal of this particular project. In this case, the customer was using a collection of General Link fields to control the various navigational features on their Sitecore site. However, during testing on iOS, it was discovered the telephone links that had been created were causing the markup to break.

Upon investigation, the issue was quick and easy to identify. Sitecore was treating the General Link fields that were being used for the Telephone Link Protocol as it does any other link — adding the http:// protocol to the front automatically. One developer even got creative and removed the http:// manually from the field and hit Save. Yes, that did temporarily allow just tel:########### to be stored as desired in the Content Editor. However, Sitecore’s renderField pipeline method GetLinkFieldValue would simply inject it again.

Next, this creative & solution-oriented developer started to utilize JavaScript to clean it up. Thankfully, I was able to get involved first and prevented this from causing extra technical debt. Among my many mantras, such as “Get It Right The First Time”, I also firmly believe in “Fix the issue at the Source” or at least as close to the source as feasible. This developer had already searched Google and found numerous excellent articles, notably the one Akshay wrote. If you want to dive deeper into creating custom Field Types, Renderers, etc., check that out. However, this developer was relatively new to Sitecore and was justifiably overwhelmed at how complex it appeared.

While creating a custom field type is the ideal long-term approach, I also believe in making the least amount of changes to achieve a “Minimum Viable Product.” So I proceeded to show how to resolve this with just one real line of code injected into the appropriate Sitecore pipeline — the “quick fix” approach, which is the simplest and most efficient.

In order to ensure that the tel: protocol remains intact when using a Sitecore General Link or Link field, we create our own custom class following the Sitecore Pipeline pattern of implementing a public virtual void Process(RenderFieldArgs args). Here is the full code:

namespace Sitecore.SharedSource.TelLinkPipeline
{
    public class GetTelephoneLinkFieldValue
    {
        public virtual void Process(RenderFieldArgs args)
        {
            Assert.ArgumentNotNull(args, "args");
            if (Context.Site.DisplayMode == Sites.DisplayMode.Edit) return;
            if (args == null || args.FieldTypeKey != "general link") return;
            if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(args.Result.FirstPart) &&
                string.IsNullOrEmpty(args.Result.LastPart)) return;
            args.Result.FirstPart = args.Result.FirstPart.Replace("http://tel:", "tel:");
        }
    }
}

The one line that actually does the work is:

args.Result.FirstPart = args.Result.FirstPart.Replace("http://tel:", "tel:");

This class gets inserted into the pipelines using a config patch file:

<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/">
  <sitecore>
    <pipelines>
      <renderField>
        <processor
          type="Sitecore.SharedSource.TelLinkPipeline.GetTelephoneLinkFieldValue, Sitecore.SharedSource.TelLinkPipeline"
          patch:after="processor[@type='Sitecore.Pipelines.RenderField.GetLinkFieldValue, Sitecore.Kernel']" />
      </renderField>
    </pipelines>
  </sitecore>
</configuration>

The key thing to notice is that our new pipeline processor gets patched after the out-of-the-box GetLinkFieldValue that injects the http:// prefix.

Finally, I would like to draw attention to the microformat open standards for hCard and h-Card (v2). The business benefit of using these microformats is that they provide a much wider array of compatibility across browsers and devices. The newer h-Card standard dives into deeper requirements for various cultures, time zones, phone number formats, etc. Additionally, microformats are universally understood by search engines.

To implement them, use the Style Class field and populate it with tel for hCard and p-tel for h-Card, and wrap the entire contact block with the appropriate container class:

hCard:

<div class="vcard">
    <p class="tel">+1.818.555.1212</p>
</div>

h-Card:

<div class="h-card">
  <p class="p-name">Joe Bloggs</p>
  <p class="p-tel">+1.818.555.1212</p>
</div>

Whenever you are ready, you can implement the more advanced features of the microformat — cultures, time zones, phone number formats — using the newer h-Card microformat and the value class pattern.

On October 7th we had the 10th anniversary edition of the Tulsa TechFest. Thanks to all our sponsors, speakers, attendees, volunteers, and my amazing wife!! We had 600+ people at the OSU-Tulsa campus!

Come see me at the following upcoming events:

• SUGCON (Sitecore User Group Conference North America) in New Orleans, Oct 1–2, 2015 — I will be presenting.
• Atlanta Cloud Saturday, Sept. 26th, 2015 — I will be presenting.
• COLLAB365, online, Oct 7th, 2015 — I will be presenting.

In the coming weeks there will be more announcements as Little Rock TechFest and NWA Tech Summit are coming up. I am pushing to achieve 100+ presentations and I am so very close.

Tags: Sitecore · TTF2015 · TechFest · Presentations · SUGCON · Atlanta · Cloud · COLLAB365

Scott Guthrie announced that the full server-side .NET stack would be open sourced on GitHub under the MIT license, and that .NET Core would run on Linux and Mac in addition to Windows. This was a seismic shift — the same company that once called open source a “cancer” was now one of its most significant contributors.

For those of us who had been building on .NET for years, this opened up a whole new world of possibilities: cross-platform development, containerization, deployment on Linux servers, and a massive community of contributors improving the framework we rely on every day.

It was a great reason to be thankful that year. And as it turns out, it was just the beginning — .NET Core eventually became simply .NET 5+ and is now the unified, modern, cross-platform successor to .NET Framework.

The .NET Core GitHub repo is worth a look if you haven’t already.

The Sitecore Hackathon is a community-driven, 24-hour coding event where teams from around the world build open source modules for the Sitecore platform. It’s a great way to push the boundaries of what’s possible on the platform, collaborate with teammates under pressure, and give something back to the community.

Our team was ready to deliver. The event is a fantastic proving ground — nothing sharpens your Sitecore instincts quite like a hard deadline and a blank canvas. Stay tuned for results!

Disable Memory Monitoring and Performance Counters (unless you need them)

Out of the box, Sitecore ships with Memory Monitoring hooks and Performance Counters enabled. Sitecore’s own recommendation has long been to disable these in production unless you have a specific need for them, as they add overhead that can affect throughput under load.

To disable Memory Monitoring, locate and patch the Sitecore.config (or the relevant include config) and set:

<setting name="MemoryMonitor.CheckMemory" value="false" />

Performance Counters can be disabled by removing or commenting out the Sitecore.PerformanceCounters.config include file, or patching it out via a config patch.

When you do need Sitecore Performance Counters

If you want to use Sitecore’s built-in Windows Performance Counters for monitoring (e.g. via PerfMon), you need to register them first. From an elevated command prompt on the server, run:

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\installutil.exe "[path]\Sitecore.Client.dll"

This registers the Sitecore performance counter categories with Windows. Without this step the counters simply won’t appear in PerfMon, and Sitecore may log errors on startup.

The key takeaway: keep these features disabled by default and only enable them intentionally, in environments where you have the monitoring infrastructure to actually consume the data they produce.

I do have at least a few beefs with LinkedIn. I wish they’d either raise or drop the 50 group limit. I like the idea they just launched of having a separate section of your profile for Volunteering and Non-Profit organizations. So much that I moved some of my previous roles to them, only to find out that the recommendations that people have taken their precious time to leave for me can not be moved. After contacting support, I was told that they currently do not have this feature. Now I get to move some of those items back at some point, so I can preserve those invaluable recommendations. argh. Oh well, it is still a terrific site and obviously no one is perfect.

Either way, kudos for taking advantage of these tools to keep people connected and sharing!

http://blogs.msdn.com/trika/archive/2008/02/13/certified-on-linkedin.aspx

I can only hope and strive to live up to the expectations that come with using such a namespace. Stay tuned!

I have several other new and exciting surprises planned for 2013, so stay tuned!

]]>https://radicaldave.com/blog/nwatechfest-2010-agenda-is-complete-and-registration-is-now-open2010-05-20T00:00:00.000Z2010-05-20T00:00:00.000Z

Application Infrastructure: Cloud Benefits Delivered

http://www.appinfrastructure.com

Want to bring the benefits of the cloud to your current IT environment? Cloud computing offers a range of benefits, including elastic scale and never-before-seen applications. While you ponder your long-term investment in the cloud, you can harness a number of cloud benefits in your current IT environment now.

Join us on May 20 at 8:30 A.M. Pacific Time to learn how your current IT assets can harness some of the benefits of the cloud on-premises—and can readily connect to new applications and data running in the cloud. As part of the Virtual Launch Event, Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst Yefim Natis will discuss the latest trends and biggest questions facing the Application Infrastructure space. He will also speak about the role Application Infrastructure will play in helping businesses benefit from the cloud.  Plus, you’ll hear some exciting product announcements and a keynote from Abhay Parasnis, GM of Application Server Group at Microsoft.  Parasnis will discuss the latest Microsoft investments in the Application Infrastructure space aimed at delivering on-demand scalability, highly available applications, a new level of connectivity, and more. Save the date!

Feb 7, 2009 – Presented at the first annual SharePoint Saturday KC – “Building Powerful WebParts with SharePoint 2007”. Becky Isserman and team did an awesome job! Attended some awesome presentations. Had some great BBQ with Daniel Larson!

March 1-5, 2009 – MVP Summit 09! Totally awesome. Got to see the Gu (Scott Guthrie) and hang out with a bunch of the SharePoint MVPs!

March 28, 2009 – Second annual School of Dev / first time to join with SharePoint Saturday! – about 87 people braved the weather reports to attend. It was just rain! Then 9am to 3pm had about 6+ inches of snow drop and stop. Within 24 hours 99.9% was all melted. Presented “Building Powerful WebParts with SharePoint 2007” and “Knowledge (Social) Networking for the Enterprise”

April 16, 2009 – White paper I wrote for Quest.com was republished on to the home page as a Popular Article on SSWUG.org – SQL Server and SharePoint – The More You Know, The Better Off You Are (if you are a paid member you can read it here.)

April 18, 2009 – St Louis MOSS Camp! Had a great time presenting – “Building Powerful WebParts with SharePoint 2007“ and attending the other sessions. Becky Isserman and Scott Spradlin talked me into playing Rock band with spoons for drum sticks, didn’t do too bad. LOL

April 25, 2009 – NWACodeCamp – awesome job! Especially for their first event! “Presented Building Powerful WebParts with SharePoint 2007”.

May 28, 2009 – Baby # 5 – Kadison Zoey-Mae Walker born, thanks to my beautiful wife!

June 1, 2009 – Two year term as Vice President of the INETA NORAM Speakers Bureau ended.

June 22, 2009 – 1st day at Microsoft as a ADC (Application Developer Consultant) – in Dallas at Las Colinas office for New Employee Orientation, after hours – attended DFW SharePoint group that night and saw Ted Pattison!

June 23, 2009 – Day 2 at Microsoft, after hours – attended Dallas ASP .NET User Group where Dr. Tobias Komischke, Director of User Experience @ Infragistics presented.

June 29, 2009 – Turned over Tulsa Developers .NET user group to the very capable Vice-President Sean Whitesell and the other groups to their respective leaders as well.

July 2, 2009 – My beautiful bride and I celebrated our 15th wedding anniversary

July 27-31, 2009 – TechReady 9 in Seattle. I thought the MVP Summit was huge. Wow. Amazing time, learned a lot, and met a lot of new people. Plus, folks I haven’t seen in awhile – Zewei Song, Michael Wiley, Steve Walker.. and lots of new friends!

Okay.. whew. There’s a whole lot more in there as well, between the monthly TulsaDevelopers.NET, Tulsa SQL Server Group, Tulsa SharePoint Interest Group and Tulsa Java Developers Group that I was involved with every month until recently due to my commute and some new NWASQL Server User Group meetings at lunch. But, my “quick” update has turned into a lot more.

Now… finally on to the code!

For those of you that haven’t seen my “Building Powerful WebParts for SharePoint 2007” session, I totally love writing code and utilizing SharePoint as an application development platform. But, it took several years and practically hundreds of contacts to find a hosting company able and generous enough to donate/sponsor a virtual server for the TulsaTechFest.com web site and for the Tulsa User Groups I am involved with.

Due to timing, I had to build out the site last year so quickly that I took the opportunity to explore the functionality of SharePoint Designer 2007 for the first time.

I utilized it to enable friendly url’s in SharePoint (can anyone say /Pages)? yuck!

I copied the 2008 content as a Site Template to kick start the 2009 site. But that left a lot of extra data, so I just recently added an “Active” Yes/No checkbox to the Speakers List. That’s one thing I’ve learned over the last 4 years of running large events, the agenda is bound to change up to the last minute.

Starting with Visual Studio 2008, it offered the excellent ability to debug XSLT! I took advantage of that, to deliver a no-code solution for the Event Management, by parsing the SharePoint List RSS feed utilizing XSLT. The default RSS feed is kind of gnarly to work with, but I’ve managed to work around it. (See my WSS_LIST_RSS_FIELDS.xsl distributed as part of my PowerQueryWebPart CodePlex project for a great reusable parser.)

Ironically, when I first added the Active filter to the xsl:for-each statement the xsl:sort quit sorting by the SortOrder number column. Very strange. Open in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1, same results. Sleep on it. Deploy today, so I could share with the world and get some others input and boom – it works!

For some reason Visual Studio 2008 isn’t showing the Debug XSLT option every so often. Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is showing it with no issues. Reopened it and reran the Debug XSLT option and boom – working every time now. Very strange. I’ll chalk both issues up to Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 testing. All working great now.

So, simply create a Speakers list with the following columns: Title (FirstName LastName), Bio, Link, Company, Tagline, SortOrder (Number), Active (Yes/No) and you’re ready to role!

I have a SiteImages Picture Library with a sub folder called Speakers where the images are stored: Title(spaces replaced with __).jpg.

The following XSLT shows a 3 column right rail for speakers filtered by Active flag, sorted by SortOrder, Title

<xsl:transform  version="2.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
                exclude-result-prefixes="xsl xs" xmlns:ddwrt2="urn:frontpage:internal">
    <xsl:output method="html"/>

    <xsl:template match="rss/channel" xmlns:ddwrt="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WebParts/v2/DataView/runtime">
        <table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
            <tr>
                <td>
                    <xsl:for-each select="item[substring-before(substring-after(description, ‘Active:&lt;/b&gt;’), ‘&lt;/div&gt;’)=’ Yes’]">
                        <xsl:sort select="substring-before(substring-after(description, ‘SortOrder:&lt;/b&gt;’), ‘&lt;/div&gt;’)" data-type="number" order="ascending"/>
                        <xsl:sort select="title" />

                        <!–                        <xsl:if test="substring-before(substring-after(description, ‘Active:&lt;/b&gt;’), ‘&lt;/div&gt;’)=’ Yes’">–>
                            <a>
                                <xsl:attribute name="href">
                                    <!–
                  <xsl:call-template name="getWSSDescriptionField">
                    <xsl:with-param name="description" select="description"/>
                    <xsl:with-param name="fieldName" select="’Link’"/>
                  </xsl:call-template>
                  –>
                                    <xsl:value-of select="concat(concat(‘/Tulsa/2009/Speakers/’, translate(title, ‘ ,.’,”)), ‘/’)"/>
                                </xsl:attribute>
                                <img border="1" style="border-color: black;" hspace="3" vspace="3" width="46" height="60">
                                    <xsl:attribute name="src">
                                        <xsl:text>/Tulsa/2009/SiteImages/Speakers/</xsl:text>
                                        <xsl:value-of select ="translate(title,’ ,.’,’_’)"/>
                                        <xsl:text>.jpg</xsl:text>
                                    </xsl:attribute >
                                    <xsl:attribute name="alt">
                                        <xsl:value-of select="title"/>
                                        <xsl:variable name="tagline">
                                            <xsl:call-template name="getWSSDescriptionField">
                                                <xsl:with-param name="description" select="description"/>
                                                <xsl:with-param name="fieldName" select="’Tagline’"/>
                                            </xsl:call-template>
                                        </xsl:variable>
                                        <xsl:if test="$tagline!=”">
                                            <xsl:text>, </xsl:text>
                                            <xsl:value-of select="$tagline"/>
                                        </xsl:if>
                                        <xsl:variable name="company">
                                            <xsl:call-template name="getWSSDescriptionField">
                                                <xsl:with-param name="description" select="description"/>
                                                <xsl:with-param name="fieldName" select="’Company’"/>
                                            </xsl:call-template>
                                        </xsl:variable>
                                        <xsl:if test="$company!=”">
                                            <xsl:text>, </xsl:text>
                                            <xsl:value-of select="$company"/>
                                        </xsl:if>
                                    </xsl:attribute>
                                </img>
                            </a>
                            <xsl:if test="position() mod 3 = 0">
                                <br/>
                            </xsl:if>
<!–                        </xsl:if>–>
                    </xsl:for-each>
                </td>
            </tr>
        </table>
    </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template name="string-replace-all">
        <xsl:param name="text"/>
        <xsl:param name="replace"/>
        <xsl:param name="with"/>
        <xsl:choose>
            <xsl:when test="contains($text, $replace)">
                <xsl:value-of select="substring-before($text, $replace)"/>
                <xsl:value-of select="$with"/>
                <xsl:call-template name="string-replace-all">
                    <xsl:with-param name="text" select="substring-after($text, $replace)"/>
                    <xsl:with-param name="replace" select="$replace"/>
                    <xsl:with-param name="with" select="$with"/>
                </xsl:call-template>
            </xsl:when>
            <xsl:otherwise>
                <xsl:value-of select="$text"/>
            </xsl:otherwise>
        </xsl:choose>
    </xsl:template>
    <xsl:template name="getWSSDescriptionField">
        <xsl:param name="description"/>
        <xsl:param name="fieldName"/>

        <xsl:variable name="before" select="concat($fieldName,’:&lt;/b&gt; ‘)" />
        <xsl:variable name="after" select ="’&lt;/div&gt;’" />
        <xsl:variable name="htmlFieldStart" select="’&lt;div class=ExternalClass’" />

        <xsl:variable name = "leftRemoved" >
            <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="substring-after($description,$before)"/>
        </xsl:variable>
        <xsl:variable name = "results">
            <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="substring-before($leftRemoved,$after)" />
        </xsl:variable>

        <!– HTML fields have extra <div>–>
        <xsl:choose>
            <xsl:when test="starts-with($results, $htmlFieldStart)">
                <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="substring-after($results,’&gt;’)" />
            </xsl:when >
            <xsl:otherwise>
                <xsl:choose>
                    <xsl:when test="contains($results, ‘&amp;amp’)">
                        <xsl:call-template name="string-replace-all">
                            <xsl:with-param name="text" select="$results"/>
                            <xsl:with-param name="replace" select="’&amp;amp;’"/>
                            <xsl:with-param name="with" select="’&amp;’"/>
                        </xsl:call-template>
                    </xsl:when>
                    <xsl:otherwise>
                        <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select="$results"/>
                    </xsl:otherwise>
                </xsl:choose>
            </xsl:otherwise>
        </xsl:choose>
    </xsl:template>
</xsl:transform>

I’ll continue explaining more of the other sections of the site, plans for the future and more in upcoming posts!

I definitely don’t claim to be an XSLT expert. I’ve just managed to keep making it do what I need as I need to over the years. It is an excellent way to build functionality into SharePoint with no-code out of the box web parts.

Let me know if you have any questions and/or suggestions for improvements!

There are a couple questions that come to mind, but the first one is this the only product that will have problems?

If you are using a product that is built on top of ASP.NET you may need to be very careful. The bug described and the issues with it have not been reported specifically yet. It has simply been described as a "bug in the LosFormatter class (System.Web.UI.LosFormatter in System.Web.dll, used to serialize and deserialize an ASP.NET ViewState)."

It would be interesting to know if any other products have problems, if you know of any others let us know, via comments.

My most important question though is, could this have been caught in the Beta cycle? Or is this a bug/change put in place since the last Beta release?

Why change how ViewState is serialized and deserialized anyway? 🙂

ASP.NET MVC is looking more interesting all the time. Just have to wait for the rest of the marketplace to get it integrated into their products. 🙂

Here’s the email:

Dear Sitecore Enthusiast,

You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to the Sitecore Product Issues and Patches mailing list.
On Monday, August 4th, Microsoft released the following service packs: Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and .NET 3.5 SP1.
Sitecore has discovered that these service packs introduce a bug in the LosFormatter class (System.Web.UI.LosFormatter in System.Web.dll, used to serialize and deserialize an ASP.NET ViewState). This bug causes stability issues in Sitecore products. Sitecore has raised this as an urgent priority issue with Microsoft (case number : SRQ080813600454) and is working to help resolve this issue.
In the meantime, PLEASE DO NOT INSTALL .NET 3.5 SP1 and Visual Studio 2008 SP1 on any server running a Sitecore product (including Sitecore WCMS, Intranet Portal, and Foundry) until further notice!
Symptoms associated with installing either of these service packs:

• Memory consumption increases dramatically and single core CPU usage goes up to 100% when opening the Access Viewer or Media Library applications.
• OutOfMemoryExceptions thrown in the Desktop and Content Editor.
• The browser becomes unresponsive when accessing Sitecore.

Please be aware that Microsoft may include this Service Pack as part of the monthly ‘Patch Tuesday’. Please take steps to avoid the automatic installation of these service packs.
Please be aware that the final version of SQL Server 2008 will require .NET 3.5 SP1.
If you have any questions about this issue, please contact Sitecore support.
Best Regards, Sitecore Support Team.

A few weeks ago one of the hosts, Rob Foster instant messaged me that he was starting up a SHAREPOINT NATION! FaceBook group and wanted me to start up a SHAREPOINT NATION! LinkedIn group, so I did. It’s a term, a chant, a life style, that Rob coined around the time frame of the MVP Summit. You can find some of the history about it on his blog, We are SharePoint Nation!!! In my opinion it is the difference between a "social networking" thing and a real life group of motivated and enthusiastic individuals working together as a community, a REAL community, a NATION.

Since then, SharePoint MVP, Amanda Murphy found the time to create the awesome logo that’s now on all the groups and sites and simply says it all: Virtually Everything you need for SharePoint.

On July 16th, 2008, just a few short weeks ago, Bob Fox and crew launched the International SharePoint Professionals Association (ISPA). You can find out the details and plans on his blog post Announcing it.

SharePoint Magazine launched it’s first "issue" within the last couple weeks as well. Although, if you follow me on Twitter @DavidWalker you already heard me razz them for running it using WordPress. That is definitely no reason to not read it! They already have some great information. There’s many sites that fall victim to this type of technical treachery – SharePointBestPractices.com is built with PHP.

Finally, the open source project that SharePoint MVP – Stacy Draper and I have been hard at work on became publicly available around July 14th, 2008. We still have just a little more work to wrap it up for Release 1.0, typical scope creep issues with guys who are very excited about the project and the functionality that it can provide. The day before we had to make it public, CodePlex forces projects to be public within 30 days after creation or they will be deleted, we added a bunch of stuff that broke the deployment script at the moment. I hope to get his resolved as quickly as possible, so we can release version 1.0. In the mean time, check out the project and what it can do at CodePlex.com/PowerQueryWebPart. Once, Release 1.0 goes live I’ll post more details about the making of the project and how this swiss army knife can be a must have in your WebPart Gallery in any SharePoint site.

So of course I was curious, how well would Oklahoma rank? Well it appears we've moved up 4 spots from #32 to #28.

What's really odd is the really bad drop from #9 to #30 on the Workforce category and the huge jump in Economy from #26 to #3.

What's disappointing is Education practically stayed flat from #47 to #45 and Technology & Innovation did stay flat at #35.

Remember folks, this is out of 50!

All this and we border Texas (ranked #1!). I think Education, Technology and now Workforce are the biggest issues with our state at the moment. Economy, Cost of Doing Business and Cost of Living are practically as good as you can get.

To me, what it sounds like this all means, in Oklahoma you can live cheap and run a business cheap in a strong economy, but don't expect many educated, technically advanced workers. Sad.

]]>https://radicaldave.com/blog/zain-naboulsi-rocked-the-house-with-linq-features-in-visual-studio-20082008-07-11T00:00:00.000Z2008-07-11T00:00:00.000Z

Zain did an awesome job of explaining LINQ in the easiest to understand way that I think I’ve ever heard it so far. Plus, squashed all reasons for not using it.

He didn’t just stop at explaining it though. He really showed how we can take advantage of the tools provided by Visual Studio 2008 to more efficiently and effectively utilize LINQ in our projects.

He showed us how easy it is to take advantage of the source project Scott Guthrie’s posted on his blog: LINQ to SQL Debug Visualizer and drove home the point that you can easily create your own visualizers as well.

It was pretty obvious by the end of the meeting that everyone in attendance was sold on using it and is *maybe* as much as Zain is.

Don’t just take my word for. Zain has published 22 webcasts "that can change your life" covering the nuts and bolts of how to effectively use Visual Studio 2008 and his LINQ Features in Visual Studio 2008 is there as well.

I’ll be watching them all shortly. Just to see how well the webcasts catch the "Zain Experience".

Of course, he mentioned his now (in)famous Second Life .NET Developers User Group. He assured me that we can jump straight to the island and not have to worry about the non-family friendly avatars that could be found in Second Life. Maybe I can talk my wife into letting me attend one now, we shall see.

2. New Employer – Back in March, I switched employers! I am now a Technical Specialist for The Revere Group, an NTT Data Company. Where I have been focusing primarily on public facing web sites utilizing the .NET Enterprise Content Management System – Sitecore CMS. The last project with my previous employer was deployed the week before I left, utilizing MOSS 2007 for the public facing web site, for the National Professional Paintball League. I definitely feel invested in all the projects that I worked on and hope them, the company and my past co-workers continued success.

3. MVP Summit 2008 – An opportunity that could not be passed up. Seeing the keynotes by Ray Ozzie and Steve Ballmer, plus all the break-out sessions with the product teams, etc, it was definitely priceless. I even tacked on an extra day for the World Wide User Group Management Summit, just wish I could’ve made the ALT.NET conference that was going on that weekend as well. One thing that amazes me is how many people have said they want to be an MVP. How do you become one, etc. Even after giving them some brief advise with some of the simplest things to do, nothing – just lip service.  The MVP Summit itself is worth it. Get involved in your communities.

4. Tulsa’s first annual School of Dev! – After having our first successful TulsaCodeCamp on March 10, 2007, I decided to come up with something new and exciting. Who knows maybe someone will start repeating it, like what’s happened with the TechFest events. <hint.. hint> I can provide hosting for anyone who wants to, since I built the SchoolofDev.com site with that in mind from the beginning using WSS (Windows SharePoint Services – will skin it later). If you missed it, take a look at the Agenda, Speakers and over $130,000+ worth of prizes that were given away. Thanks to all our Sponsors. Every attendee could even get Continuing Education credit from Tulsa Community College!

5. Microsoft TechEd – I have had the honor of having my session selected for the Developers Office track – How to Use Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 as an Application Development Architecture: Not your typical Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) development and deployment. Having worked on small projects all the way to large public facing social networking sites, you too can learn how MOSS is much more than just an Intranet-in-the-box solution. It can be utilized as the application development architecture of the future. It offers tremendous time savings for development and deployment. Learn the best practices for setting up your server architecture for redundancy and high performance. Learn the pain points to watch out for as well as all the short cuts to make your next Web application ready for prime time.

I also find it very amusing that the post is date May 21, 2008. I KNOW I have seen this exact same article posted roughly six months ago. I’m still looking for it. Could CNET actually went so far as to just change the date to recycle this crap? I know this for a fact, because I had never heard of Alfresco until the article that was either the exact same article or "disclaimer" by another Alfresco employee.

It’s so funny considering Alfresco has some pretty steep licensing fees. I came across this site which had a really good comparison between SharePoint and Alfresco – Microsoft SharePoint VS Alfresco – Part 1 and Part 2.

The main thing to keep in mind when evaluating a CMS solution for your enterprise is to get your information from a reputable source. Better yet, get the products, in trial edition form at least, and do your own comparison.

Obviously, we have to watch for disinformation as it appears from this article that CNET is helping to spread. Alfresco must be getting desperate?

Don’t get me wrong. Microsoft Office is a minimum requirement for 99.99% of every person and is used hours upon hours every day. Yes, the Microsoft Office team has done an excellent job of pushing new versions out every two years.

Okay, enough praise, I suppose. Here’s my problem and the problem that I am sure everyone else will agree with once the look at it from this perspective: Microsoft Office has been and continues to be notoriously known for years as the worst example of bloatware! I think too many of us have forgotten that over the years, as CPU’s, RAM, and disk space has continued at such a rapid pace. I think we need to be reminded. Microsoft Office Suite has things that still need to be addressed take the simple issue I came across at on this Jeff Bell’s blog regarding a Microsoft Publisher Viewer. You start to see that not everyone remains happy with Office. Microsoft Publisher has always been treated as an "outsider" to the Office suite. I know a whole lot of people are still upset about the Ribbon interface, even though Microsoft promotes it as the best thing to EVER happen to Office. I personally have grown use to it over time, just as we have grown use to and ignore the bloatware factor.

In Microsoft’s defense, what one person perceives as bloatware is a must have feature to someone else. That is why I do hope Windows 7 ends up taking the same path as Windows Server 2008 and more easily allow me to choose the features I want. Other than that, my only request to Microsoft is PLEASE allow the Ribbon to be toned down at least a little. I love tabs (which in my opinion is really all that the ribbon is), but I do learn what the pictures on a button mean, so please let me insert my Tables, Pictures, Shapes, Charts, Hyperlinks, etc without having to actually start at the Text as well. It used to be common practice to allow someone to configure how they want to use their computer – "Small Toolbar Icons", etc. I prefer the desktop real-estate on my two 21" wide Dell LCD’s. Oh well, it’s only an inch. Give me back the power to make these simple decisions. Why are we moving in the opposite direction? This is my frustration and whole reason of concern. One step forward (every two years) and two steps back (bloatware, no personalization, preferences, or choices, continued incompatibilities and lack of integration with the rest of the enterprise and technology.

To wrap it up, the article does have some other critical things to say about the new process, now under Sinosfy, and that is the tight lipped non-disclosure policies that have been portrayed – translucency versus transparency. For crying out loud, the folks living and working with IT need to be aware of the roadmap if they ever intend to try and continue driving through the fog.

I personally hope Microsoft gets it right with Windows 7. We shall see. I actually prefer Vista over XP. I do occasionally feel the pain of incompatibilities, but I haven’t looked back yet.

Of course, the very first thing I wanted to do was display the tweets on the various DotNetNuke sites I own and operate.

The XSLT transform that comes with DotNetNuke was pretty ugly when displaying the Twitter RSS feed, so I hacked up some modifications using Visual Studio 2008. It provides a great IDE to debug XSLTs. The only spot of this XSLT that will need tweaking for you is the TimeZone Offset (tzOffset) variable. I wanted it to display my tweets time based on my time zone CST.

Feel free to modify this to your hearts content. Let me know if you come up with any cool changes! Have fun! (You can also download it via: http://www.davidlwalker.com/Portals/1/twitter.xsl)

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform>
  <xsl:output method="html" indent="yes"/>
  <xsl:template match="rss/channel">
    <xsl:for-each select="item[position() &lt; 11]">
      <div class="twitterEntry">
        <p>
          <a href="{link}">
            <xsl:call-template name="getDate">
              <xsl:with-param name="dateTime" select="pubDate" />
              <xsl:with-param name="tzOffset" select="-6" />
            </xsl:call-template>
          </a>
          –   <xsl:value-of select="substring-after(title,': ')" />
        </p>
      </div>
    </xsl:for-each>
  </xsl:template>

  <xsl:template name="getDate">
    <xsl:param name="dateTime" />
    <xsl:param name="tzOffset" />
    <xsl:value-of select="substring($dateTime,9,4)" />
    <xsl:value-of select="substring($dateTime,6,2)" />
    <xsl:text>,</xsl:text>
    <xsl:value-of select="substring($dateTime,12,6)" />
    <xsl:variable name="orighour">
      <xsl:choose>
        <xsl:when test="(number(substring($dateTime,18,2))+number($tzOffset)) &lt; 0">
          <xsl:value-of select="(12+(number(substring($dateTime,18,2))+number($tzOffset)))+12" />
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:otherwise>
          <xsl:value-of select="number(substring($dateTime,18,2))+number($tzOffset)" />
        </xsl:otherwise>
      </xsl:choose>
    </xsl:variable>

    <xsl:variable name="hour">
      <xsl:choose>
        <xsl:when test="$orighour &gt; 12">
          <xsl:value-of select="number($orighour)-12" />
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:when test="$orighour = 0">
          <xsl:value-of select="'12'" />
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:when test="$orighour = 12">
          <xsl:value-of select="'12'" />
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:otherwise>
          <xsl:value-of select="number($orighour)-12" />
        </xsl:otherwise>
      </xsl:choose>
    </xsl:variable>

    <xsl:variable name="ampm" >
      <xsl:choose>
        <xsl:when test="$orighour &gt; 11">
          <xsl:value-of select="' PM'" />
        </xsl:when>
        <xsl:otherwise>
          <xsl:value-of select="' AM'" />
        </xsl:otherwise>
      </xsl:choose>
    </xsl:variable>

    <xsl:value-of select="$hour" />
    <xsl:value-of select="substring($dateTime,20,3)" />
    <xsl:value-of select="$ampm" />
  </xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

Yet another city is destined for the inevitable world domination of TechFest.

All signs point to some big numbers in 2008. Since all the events have been very successful so far (TulsaTechFest, VancouverTechFest, HoustonTechFest, IndyTechFest and AlbertaTechFest), it would seem logical they will repeat next year as well. Thereby, doubling the number of TechFest events. I am proud to say TulsaTechFest is a trend setter.

I think we should all let John Kellar (Founder and Chairman of Nashville's devLink and before that Co-Founder of Little Rock's TechExpo) that the answer to his twitter "should there be a devLink 2008" is a resounding yes and no. NashvilleTechFest has a nice ring to it, eh?

I had the opportunity to speak at the first annual HoustonTechFest.com on August 25th, 2007. It was a very awesome event. Michael Steinberg and the team from the HoustonDNUG did a terrific job. I got to talk to Ben Scheirman, who I got to meet recently at the OKCodeCamp where we were both presenting again as well, fellow Commodore-64 starter Scott Bateman. It’s always great to see Microsoft supporting these community driven events with the likes of Chris Koenig, Zain Naboulsi, Phil Wheat and of course Brad Abrams speaking.

It was very inspiring to see that the concept I began with TulsaTechFest in 2006 has started to spread into the larger cities. VancouverTechFest was the first thanks to Rob Chartier and Richard Campbell. They even started up a manifesto for it. Which we tried to follow, but we very successfully found that only having content on weekends doesn’t appear to be as successful as the weekdays (see previous post) and below numbers.

My Windows Communication Foundation Presentation:

The thing that I find most astonishing is that even after a whole year of it’s release, the .NET 3.0 Framework is still unheard of by many attendees to these types of events. Therefore, even though as a presenter I feel like Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is old news, since I have been studying and presenting on it for a year and half while it was still in Beta. I will just continue to bring the personal in-depth experience on the production usage of WCF in a high volume environments as well as consistently looking for the best way to present on the technology in easy to understand terms. With nothing more than the end goal of getting developers to start studying, learning and at least experimenting/playing with this and the rest of the .NET 3.0 Framework. Do I even have to say that these things have not changed much in the newly released Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 – .NET 3.5 Framework? The tools only continue to improve thanks to the Microsoft Patterns & Practices Team and the WCF Service Software Factory project, which Nov 9th released version 3.0 – Modeling Edition! Definitely download this and the 2.0 version and start seeing what interconnected application development can do for your enterprise solutions.

With good reason, I had to delay this post. I just happened to come across Bill Steele’s post regarding IndyTechFest.com! It is amazing to see an idea start to benefit all these other communities! It’s a good thing I started it with pure intentions – the contribution to the community, if I had been seeking ulterior motives I would have done things a lot differently.

Here’s the events in a chronological order for everyone:

1. October 14, 2006 – TulsaTechFest 2006 – 20 tracks, 119 sessions, 60+ speakers, 650+ registered, 360+ attendees
2. November 14, 2006 – Santa Fe TechFest – details unknown, info from J. Michael Palermo Blog
3. November 15, 2006 – Phoenix TechFest – details unknown, info from J. Michael Palermo Blog
4. February 24, 2007 – VancouverTechFest – 4 tracks, 28 sessions, 25 speakers, 575 registered, ??? attendees
5. August 25, 2007 – HoustonTechFest – 7 tracks, 36 sessions, 29 speakers, 865 registered, 476 attendees
6. October 13, 2007 – IndyTechFest – 5 tracks, 26 sessions, 16 speakers, 370+ attendees
7. October 19 & 20, 2007 – TulsaTechFest – 16 tracks, 100 sessions, 67+ speakers, 870+ registered, 650+ attendees on the 19th, 400+ on the 20th
8. November 10, 2007 – AlbertaTechFest – 3 tracks, 18 sessions, 15 speakers, almost 200 attendees

If there hasn’t been one already in your area, why not start one? There’s just a couple major differences between a TechFest and a CodeCamp – TechFest can be any thing technology oriented, Microsoft Exchange, Sql Server, Data Security, Project Management, etc, where as a CodeCamp is typically "developer centric". A TechFest can have sponsorship, vendors, etc. – why not have the funds to provide bigger prizes, T-shirts and just an all around bigger event?

www.TechFests.com will be up shortly ( it is currently redirecting to TulsaTechFest) to be the one stop location for locations, dates and details on any and all TechFests.

Building off last year’s success for the first annual event with attendance then of approximately 360 on the Saturday only event, this year blew the lid off. This was our first attempt at charging and making it a Friday and Saturday event. We received overwhelming sponsorship support that we decided to refund the 200+ paid attendees and make the event free to all again. This pushed our pre-registration numbers to over 800. Organizers expected the actual attendance to be either evenly split or higher on Saturday and were surprisingly shocked. While we are still awaiting exact final counts, what we have so far is 650+ checked in on Friday and 400+ checked in on Saturday.  While facilities cannot be booked until after the first of the year, we are already tentatively planning the dates for TulsaTechFest 2008 to be Thursday, October 16th and Friday, October 17th. We do still plan to include some content on Saturday, October 18th, but will probably consist of some deep dive training.

Lunch for 650+ people on Friday was an interesting feat and we narrowly squeaked by with the largest Domino’s pizza order ever delivered at one time of 125 pizzas. We over compensated by ordering 175 pizzas on Saturday, then as we did last year, delivered the left overs to a nearby homeless shelter.

It was not surprising the event attracted so many people from surrounding states, considering we had 5 Microsoft employees presenting, over 15 Microsoft MVP’s, with a total of 69 speakers, and 100 sessions. Details can still be found at www.tulsatechfest.com and details from the 2006 event can now be found here: 2006.tulsatechfest.com.

First and foremost, I want to thank those who have already registered and will be attending. I also want to thank our platinum level sponsors for helping to make this event possible with a great lineup of top-notch speakers!

Also coming in as sponsors so far are FarPoint, Wrox and Infragistics, all providing some money and some giveaways as well! Please consider these companies and what they do for our communities and offer for your professional needs.

I hope this email finds you all well and enjoying your summer!  Its finally quit raining here in Oklahoma City and the sun is shining and the weather is in the mid 90s, so its feeling like summer time finally!

We have some awesome giveaways.  Over 2 dozen books, Vista Ultimate, Office Ultimate, Red-Gate ANTS Profiler, CodeRush, Refactor Pro and much more, including suites from FarPoint and Infragistics.  Don’t hold me to this, but their *might* be a Zune in the mix as well!

We were not able to work out a suitable or acceptable deal with the 2 hotels we approached about discounts.  The most we were able to get were $10 discounts, and you would have had to have reserved by the end of this week.

The Crowne Plaza hotel is where we recommend staying.  http://www.cpokc.com/  It has rooms for as little as $99 per night.  There are many, many other hotels in the area though.  Any hotel that is located on NW Expressway in Oklahoma City is going to be easy access to the code camp.  There is also 2 Marriott hotels, one called the Waterford (http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/okcwa-waterford-marriott/) and the other (http://www.marriott.com/hotels/travel/okcok-oklahoma-city-marriott/).  All very nice hotels.  Again, anything on NW Expressway in Oklahoma City will be easy access.

We are still looking and working to drive up the attendance, so please pass along the information about the code camp to co-workers and friends!

http://www.okcodecamp.com

Thanks again,

Raymond Lewallen

director@okcodecamp.com

In my opinion, to answer Jon’s question would simply be that everyone should go to all of them that they possibly can. The very same applies to the normal .NET User Group meetings in your areas. It benefits everyone. The more that attend, the bigger speakers, more sponsors and prizes. Everyone benefits when everyone shares their individual experiences and perspectives.

OKCodeCamp is shaping up to be a great first time effort and not just because I’ll be speaking there. As one of our members pointed out (just more friendly competitive fuel) – it should have been OKCCodeCamp — which means it currently is okcOdeCamp. 🙂

Of course, I am partial, but Tulsa TechFest is going to rock this year. It only being our second one, those that attended last year will be amazed at the differences between the two events. Not wanting to give a whole lot of specific details away just yet, here’s just a few:

As Jon mentioned, Jason Zander – General Manager for the .NET Framework will be delivering the very opening keynote.

Sean Alexander – Director of Microsoft Silverlight

Michael Scherotter – Microsoft Developer Evangelist from San Francisco

Markus Egger – Publisher of CoDe Magazine and President and Chief Software Architect of EPS Software Corp.,!

Wally McClure – host of the ASP.NET Podcast

Jeffrey Palermo bringing a “Party with Palermo Tulsa TechFest Style“

Bill Vaughn – SQL Server Guru of no equal and author of numerous SQL books!

Ambrose Little – Infragistics Codemunicator

The list definitely goes on and on.

Stay tuned to the web site for more updates very shortly. You can look at the details of last year’s event and get an idea of what will be happening this year because a very high percentage of the speakers from last year have been contacting us ready to do it again. That speaks a volumes to the success of last year.

Oh, and Jon, we’d love for you to come and speak as well. 🙂

I just wish we could have one even half way close to us – Dallas even? Kirk Allan Evan's blog post makes it sound like they are marketing it to a small list of customers. I can think of a few who are deserving (like my employer!) 🙂

You must check out his Silverlight Ribbon UI for web sites demo – www.xmldocs.net be sure to hit the Test tab and see the RSS feeds group! Very awesome.

Synergist : Why XML in Silverlight is Significant

There are just a few features that are missing that makes it less easy to use. First, you can only run it as an IIS web site and not in a virtual directory. Since IIS on XP only allows one site running at once this can be a pain in the rear and installation on Vista is not well documented and caused me considerable amount of grief. More and more web sites today have heavy requirements for personalization and social networking features and this seems to be an area that it is lacking in. Finally, it needs to be easier to run unrelated web sites using one installation of Sitecore to make it applicable to a hosting provider scenario.

I continue to get more excited about Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) the more I learn and use it as an application framework. It has so many features out of the box that I can take advantage of allowing me to focus on the real needs of my clients.

Now my wife and I can finally stop fighting over my iPod. Plus, I'm always a big fan of dogfooding.]]>https://radicaldave.com/blog/implementing-reliable-service-oriented-architecture-soa-using-sql-server-2005-service-broker2007-02-15T00:00:00.000Z2007-02-15T00:00:00.000Z

One thing that still amazes me is how many people had never heard of WCF. Microsoft does a great job of educating and spreading the word very early of the new technologies they have coming down the pipe. Over they last several years they have done a terrific job of getting them out early thanks to their beta versions. More and more companies are developing against these Beta technologies earlier. It makes the most sense. Why spend your time developing something that will be out of date by the time it's completed? If you're not tapping into these trends you are missing out on many golden opportunities.]]>https://radicaldave.com/blog/are-you-ready-for-arcready-events2007-02-04T00:00:00.000Z2007-02-04T00:00:00.000Z

Since Keith is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and teaches .NET, SQL Server and more all around the world for a living, it is a little extra pressure. Every time I've seen him teach or present, he does an excellent job. So, I have always looked up to him. Oh, and did I mention he is also our regional Manager of INETA - International .NET Association User Groups and a Microsoft MVP? On top of that, I'm already wanting to increase the depth of my presentation from an "Introduction to Programming Windows Communication Foundation" by dropping off the Intro part and covering it with more depth.

So the pressure is on! I hadn't planned on having to present in deeper depth until DallasCodeCamp on April 21st, 2007. So wish me luck, although I wont need it, I'm ready to go!]]>https://radicaldave.com/blog/sharepoint-2007-404-and-search-service2007-02-02T00:00:00.000Z2007-02-02T00:00:00.000Z

I whipped up a proof of concept .NET ASPX WebForm using DirectoryInfo - GetFileSystemInfos(). But alas, with this method it was generating the following exception: Exception Details: System.IO.PathTooLongException: The path is too long after being fully qualified. Make sure path is less than 260 characters. After further research, the only solution I discovered was to use the Windows API via PInvoke of CreatFileEx. This API utilizes unicode for the path and can handle up to 32,000 characters. Supposedly appending the string "\\\\?\\" in front of the path should force that path to be sent as unicode, but I was unable to get this to work successfully. Instead, this was causing an invalid character exception. I will continue looking at this alternative considering the preformance improvements that would come along with it. It's just a matter of getting the unicode part working, here's a resource I discovered that showed some VB.NET code - http://vbnet.mvps.org/index.html?code/fileapi/fsoapicompare.htm. After more trial and error on my own, I did finally discover the easiest work around and that is to simply use these two methods of the .NET framework instead: System.IO.Directory.GetFiles() System.IO.Directory.GetDirectories()

They both return back string arrays of the full path of the files and directories respectfully. As long as you don't need the additional properties, as in this case, this is the easiest solution to the problem.]]>https://radicaldave.com/blog/tagged-five-things-you-did-not-know-about-me2007-01-21T00:00:00.000Z2007-01-21T00:00:00.000Z

Here's the details per the Microsoft Visual Studio Developer Center: Visual Studio 2005 represents one of the most significant developer tools releases since the introduction of Visual Studio nearly a decade ago. It offers all types of developers a wider spectrum of development possibilities and a greatly advanced design experience. By expanding the Visual Studio product line to include the Visual Studio Team System and the Visual Studio Express Editions, Visual Studio 2005 delivers a compelling toolset for everyone, from hobbyists to enterprise developer teams.

Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 continues Microsoft’s investment in market leading development tools. Service Pack 1 addresses issues that were found through a combination of customers and partner feedback, as well as internal testing. The issues addressed range in severity from places where the syntax coloring was incorrect to customer reported crashes in various scenarios. In some areas, more than 50% of the bugs addressed were reported by customers through the MSDN Product Feedback Center and Microsoft Connect. Overall, Service Pack 1 offers customers improvements in responsiveness, stability and performance for Visual Studio 2005. Through further advancement and feedback, Service Pack 1 also provides over 70 improvements for common development scenarios including:

• New processor support (e.g., Core Duo) for code generation and profiling
• Performance and scale improvements in Team Foundation Server
• Team Foundation Server integration with Excel 2007 and Project 2007
• Tool support for occasionally connected devices and SQL Server Compact Edition
• Additional support for project file based Web applications
• Windows Embedded 6.0 platform and tools support

Cos Callis: Custom User Objects in ASP.NET A lot of developers create their own object and store it in Session. Such as Email address, etc. Since this is typically tied to the CurrentUser, you might as well have the additional properties you need there.

Page.User is based off IPrinicipal and all you need to do to add to it is create you own class that implements the IPrinicipal interface. IPrincipal is the important part. Attaching it to the LoggedOnUser make it so that only the current user can see their data. This data is stored in HttpContext instead of Session, making it even more secure.

(* Note: the following is Pseudo Code:)

Turn on forms authentication in web.config You build your User Object inside Global.asax sub Application_AuthenticationRequest  try   if not request.cookies(Formsauthenticaion.FormCookieName) is  nothing then    context.user = new ccuser()
  else
   context.user = new ccanonymoususer
  end if  catch ex as exception
  context.user = new ccanonymouser
 end try
end sub

Login btn click .  httpcontext.current.user = new ccuser(textbox1.text, textbox2.text)
 formsauthention.redirectfromloginpage(textbox1.text, true) end sub public class CCUser  inherits System.Data.DatasSet  implements System.Security.Prinicipal.IIdentity, System.Security.Prinicipal.IPrincipal public readonly property identity() as identity implements..
 get
  return me
 end get
end property _email _firstname _lastname _roles _menuOptions _CSS _webparts datatable (data repeater to display the webparts) Page.CSS = User.CSS Me.StyleSheetTheme  = User.CSS 3 constructors blank new () public sub new(byval email as string, byval password as string)
 validateuser(email, password)
 loadcooke(email, password)
end sub public sub new(byval Cookie as HttpCookie)
 dim exttickit formsauthen.decrypt(tkt)
 validateuser(ctkt.Name, ctkt.UserData)
 HttpContect.Current.User = new System.Security.Principal.GenericPrincipal(id, MyRoles)
end sub pub sub validateduser(byval email as string, password as string)
 'It doesn't matter type of authentication type you use,
 'you can use mixed, try ActiveDirectory first, and if it fails,
 'then do your custom db user login.
 'IsInternal T/F whether they're in AD.
end sub public sub LoadCookie(email as string, pwd as string
 Dim tkt as New FormsAuthenticationTicket(1, "CodeCampUser", Now, Now.AddHours(1)), True, "Hello Wichita",
 dim exttickit formsauthen.encrypt(tkt)
 httpcontext.current.response.appendcooke(n httpcookie(forma.formcookiename, ... )
end sub then login sql stored proc:
select * from menus where userid=##
select * from users where userid=##

public Class InvalidLogonException
 inherits System.Exception end class

public Class CCAnonymousUser
 inherits CCUser  public overrides ReadOnly Property IsAuthenticated() As Boolean
  get
   return false
  end get
 end property

 public overrides readonyl property name() as string
  get
   return ""
  end get
 end property
 
 function isinrole
end class

public overrides reado
end sub class ccbasepage
 inherits System.Web.UI.Page

 public shadows Property User as CCUser
  Get
   return directcast(mybase.user, ccuser)
   'ctype tries to valid first
   'what is full explanation why directcast is better
  End Get
 end property

Great Job! On why it's needed, how useful it is, and why it's best to inherit and implement from the Current.User 'only argument people have voiced: it creates too much bloat, but you're going to do it somewhere (session, application, etc) - why not here - the most logical choice.

Raymond Lewallen - Continuous Integration
www.codebetter.com/blogs/raymond.lewallen/downloads/ci.zip
Continuous information - if you only talked to your customer once a month your project would be in trouble. So why do you wait until deployment to really audit your code? FxCop - All methods should be Pascal case. )
Only thing that doesn't work with 2.0 is nCover report - it runs but produces empty xml report. Yours Truly - Introduction to Programming Windows Communication Foundation (WCF)
The presentation went well, it was obvious that everyone understood how easy it is to create services, as well as, how much easier WCF makes it.

I had one question by the most inquisitive of the group:
Can Services or Clients be used to attach as an "EventHandler" to a Service? After much thought, I realized, the solution to the architecture that he is really looking for would involve a multiple service situation. Trying to use a Client as an EventHandler would logically be the opposite message communication that is typical from Client to Service, so in my opinion, the real solution to what he was asking, would be for the Client to have a Service of it's own (and/or the "EventHandler" Service would be running somewhere), and the Service that is needing to communicate the event would then send it to this Service for any additional handling. I had one comment afterwards in summation was: "it's hard to get excited about WCF, because Services have been around for several years, and it's so easy to create a service, but I've never done it and I don't see the need in my environment".

After spending a little bit of time thinking about it, the first thing that comes to mind is how developers are always more confused by the things that are simple. As developers, we are so inbreed to think everything is complex. So, when we encounter something that is simple, it really baffles us and we keep thinking there must be something more that I'm missing. Well, as services go, it is really simple. WCF only makes it even more simplified, which is good. As far as not needing services in any environment, I can see that thinking today, but really the ability to make your business functionality and processes available easily to multiple applications in-house and to your external clients and business partners, it's only a matter of time. Why not be prepared, since it is so easy? Web Application Security
This was a introductory presentation on all the various aspects security.

All various methods in IIS that are security related: SSL, etc. Self Certificate Generator w/IIS 6 Resource Kit SQL 2005 - Native Encryption - 127bits
US.gov & credit card industries, etc. must be encrypted at least 128 bits.

iis vs dba's vs developers (security needs to be implemented by all) sql injection attacks

sql server security versus windows authentication versus local db security.

aspnet_regsql to install ASP.NET 2.0 user management

'' or '=' and '' or '=' in password select * from login where user='' or '=' and password='' or '=' select * from login where user='' or 1=1 and password='' or 1=1 select * from login where user='' or delete * from % and password='' or = '=' select * from login where user='' or delete * from % and password='' or = 1=1 use stored procs. **Summary** The thing that stood out the most is that even though a lot of the topics were things we already new, we all still walked away surprisingly learning more than we had ever expected. Great Job WichitaDevelopers.NET .NETGeneralPersonalMy first real presentation: Intro. to Programming Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) ... and challenges!http://aspadvice.com/blogs/davidwalker/archive/2006/06/01/18285.aspxFri, 02 Jun 2006 03:40:00 GMTe709ad4c-0c15-48eb-915e-c462c6e85445:18285dwalker2http://aspadvice.com/blogs/davidwalker/comments/18285.aspxhttp://aspadvice.com/blogs/davidwalker/commentrss.aspx?PostID=18285Just a few more days until my June 3rd presentation Introduction to Programming Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) at the WichitaDevelopers.NET Code Camp! I am ready to go, except WCF is being a pain in the butt trying to get a few things to work for my code demo pieces right now. So I am in the middle of rebuilding my Virtual PC from scratch again, hoping installing the components in the exact recommended order will help. If not, I'll be trying an older CTP release of the tools. Thanks to Ami Vora for her presentations and hard work on the WindowsCommunication.net site and the slides! As well as Paul Fallon for the excellent advise on what to focus on when presenting WCF and all the other great advise and tips!

Finally, Code-Magazine.com for publishing Juval Lowy's article "WCF Essentials - A Developer's Primer". I had been trying to decide for quite some time what I wanted to be able to present on and this article brought WCF back to my attention and a light bulb went off that I have yet to see or hear of any one giving a presentation on WCF in my neck of the woods. I've seen presentations on the other components of WinFX. Paul Ballard gave a great presention on Windows Workflow Foundation back in Oct 2005 for the Tulsa .NET Users Group and Markus Egger gave an excellent presentation on Windows Presentation Foundation in Feb 2006 at the Little Rock Tech Expo. Since it's something I have some familiarity with, having had past web services and windows services with remoting projects, I realized this would be the most logical topic! I could help spread the word and hopefully share my excitement for this awesome new Framework Feature. I'll post more specifics about WCF and my presentation later.]]>https://radicaldave.com/blog/tech-expo-2006-in-little-rock-rocked2006-03-09T00:00:00.000Z2006-03-09T00:00:00.000Z