Last night I had a great time giving a talk at the CapArea .NET user group. It was great to see and catch up with old friends, as well as meeting new people. My talk was centered around the new major release of DotNetNuke, version 6. There are a lot of new and exciting changes, and the best way to showcase them was to pull up version 6 right next to version 5 and contrast them with one another; that worked really well. I also uploaded the slides of the presentation on SlideShare for those who could not make it to the user group meeting last night but would still like... [More]

It is through much deliberation, thought, and consideration that I announce that I am stepping down as the organizer of the Capital DotNetNuke User Group. This decision was not made in haste; it has been on my mind for a while now. It also hasn’t been easy to finally let go of something that I created and nurtured for almost 7 years! This decision was a tough one to make. Truth be told we have been having a tough time increasing awareness and growing the user group’s membership and meeting attendance. It has also been difficult to raise sponsorship funds, and we rec... [More]

It’s 8:15am on Sunday, October 3rd, I am at O’hare International Airport waiting to board my flight and begin the journey back home. As I sit here, I think, in admiration, of the people that made yesterday’s event a success. Their hard work and dedication is inspiring. Trust me folks, organizing such an event is NOT a piece of cake, its tough work. So with that said, I would like to personally thank all the organizers, volunteers, sponsors, and other supporters that contributed to making this event happen. I had a great time at the event seeing and meeting new faces ... [More]

I just wanted to drop a quick note to let you know that I will be speaking at the Chicago Day of DotNetNuke this coming October 2nd, 2010.

My presentation is filed under the “Mobile Development” track, so if you are interested in this topic then be sure to attend and hit me up with any questions you might have. [More]

It was just another routine day at the job, but this time we could not figure out why HttpModules that previously worked like charm all of a sudden ceased to work. This issue took us for quite a ride until we finally figured out that the IT group had upgraded all production environments to IIS 7 and changed the Application Pool from “classic application pool” to the new “integrated mode”. As it turns out, if you are going to use “integrated mode” then you must ensure that you modify your web.config files appropriately. So, for thos... [More]

Ladies and gentlemen, start your laptops… It's Hackathon-time, hosted by the Capital DotNetNuke User Group. What is a Hackaton? Hackathons are developer events with a goal of increasing developer knowledge on a specific technology aspect in a casual, collaborative environment. They are also designed to encourage participation by people who are not familiar with the technology, basically providing them with an immersive quick start. Hackathon Events are: built around a single programming concept (for example: DotNetNuke MVP Pattern) encourage participat... [More]

Today, Scott Willhite announced the release of a C# version of DotNetNuke in a blog post entitled DotNetNuke source in C#. Yeah, Really. If you haven’t read it yet, then I suggest you do so now and then come back and continue reading this post to find out what my opinion is on the subject. Now that the announcement is official, I wanted to also make my opinion public, here on my blog. Prior to this announcement, the core team had been discussing this move in a private forum. Opinions on the subject were many and on both sides of the fence. Let’s be clear though, t... [More]

NoVa CodeCamp is back hosting its first event of the year on Saturday, June 12th. The venue for this event is the Microsoft Office Facilities located at 12012 Sunset Hills Rd, Reston, VA. I’ve decided to submit a session for this year, but this time under different topic than the usual .NET or DotNetNuke development. Inspired by Steve Fabian’s last visit to the Capital DotNetNuke User Group, I have decided to present on something more flashy, more cool, more jQuery! Unlike Steve’s session though, I will not use DotNetNuke as the syndicator of the data; time permitt... [More]

On March 2nd, 2010 I will be speaking at the Central Maryland Association of .NET Professionals about the new Visual Studio 2010 IDE and the *goodness* it brings to .NET developers across the globe. I am really excited to be doing this talk at CMAP because I have never spoken at this User Group, and secondly because I get to share some exciting new features of VS2010 with the audience. I hope you can make it there; here is the abstract: A Sneak Peek of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Rumor has it that Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 is riding the nex... [More]

That’s right folks, it is time for another MSDN roadshow, this time focus on Windows Azure. The first events will take place next week, kicking off with Richmond on March 3rd. Read on for dates, locations, and registration links. [More]

Last week, the Microsoft Visual Studio team released a new Visual Studio 2010 & .NET Framework 4 Training Kit that works with the Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate. The training kit This includes 17 presentations, 22 Demos and 32 Hands-on Labs. I am also particularly excited to see content added for Visual Basic,  as well as Office, SharePoint and Application Lifecycle Management! This kit is designed to help you learn how to utilize the Visual Studio 2010 features and a variety of framework technologies including: C# 4.0 Visual Basic 10 F#... [More]

Please note: This is a cross-post from my blog on DotNetNuke.com Last week I announced the release of the BETA of DNN Blog. Since then there has been a “silent” release of BETA 3, which included some fixes to bugs, and issues found by beta testers as well as some that we found ourselves internally. In this blog post I want to share a SQL script that we included in the Beta releases, one that received very little press, and as a result probably one that you never (rightfully so) paid attention to. The SQL script in question is located in the following folder: “Desktop... [More]

  Please note: This is a cross-post from my blog on DotNetNuke.com Hello folks and happy new year! A ton of progress has been made on this module since my last blog post back in September ‘09. That being said, I know how you feel, and that unless you have a functional version running on your own DotNetNuke instance you are bound to be a skeptic. Hey, I sit on the other side of the fence too, when it comes to modules that I am not involved in -  so believe me, I understand. If it serves for nothing else though, at least this announcement should p... [More]

I can hardly believe that a year has already passed by… Exactly a year ago I was blessed with what I thought was the best start to the year 2009. Last January 1st, 2009 I received an email from Microsoft awarding me the Microsoft MVP status; I was psyched to the say the least. While the rest of 2009 is history, I am pleased and blessed to say that 2009  continued to be a good year for me and my family; I can only pray (and work hard) that 2010 will bring us the same joy and happiness that 2009 did. This January 1st, 2010 I am blessed with another gre... [More]

First, a big thank you to all the 70+ people who came out to CapArea.NET to watch this presentation. I hope that you enjoyed the event as much as I did. I posted the presentation slides on SlideShare for your viewing pleasure. I also posted them on my SkyDrive account along with the code samples; you can download them by clicking the folder icon below:     Finally, I do appreciate feedback, good and/or bad. Please feel free to let me know how I can improve on both this presentation as well as on my presentation skills using the comments section below. ... [More]

In the past 4 weeks I have given the Mash-Up Your DotNetNuke Using RESTful APIs presentation at the following three user groups: 10/21 - Capital DotNetNuke User Group (CDUG) 10/28 - Frederick MD .NET User Group (FREDNUG) 11/10 - Orlando DotNetNuke User Group (ODUG) Needless to say it has been a very busy couple of weeks, but I truly enjoyed speaking at each of them and will certainly consider doing it again. The topic was also popular and well received by many, so much so that Will Strohl of ODUG wrote a very flattering blog post about the event in Or... [More]

Get ready folks, the Microsoft Software Developer Network (MSDN)  has announced a new set of upcoming roadshows for the last quarter of 2009. The following is a list of locations and dates scheduled for the Mid-Atlantic region: 11/12/2009 – Pittsburgh, Pa 12/1/2009 – Harrisburg, Pa 12/3/2009 – Reston, Va 12/8/2009 – Roanoke, Va 12/10/2009 – Malvern, Pa The MSDN “Mid-Atlantic” Roadshow is piloted by G. Andrew Duthie, Dani Diaz, and Dave Isbitski and they are great events for learning about what Microsoft &... [More]

Earlier this year I decided to switch Blog platform partly in an attempt to force myself to learn something new. I chose BlogEngine.NET. I chose it over anything else in the blog-app-sphere because it is open source, and appeared to be amongst the most popular and mature. It also met my #1 requirement that it had to be based on the Microsoft .NET Framework. Soon after installing BlogEngine though, I realized that none of the included themes inspired me all that much. They all looked *ok*, but none looked quite complete to me.  A search for BlogEngine themes lead... [More]

On December 15th, 2009 I will be speaking at the CapArea.net User Group about the new Visual Studio 2010 IDE and the *goodness* it brings to .NET developers across the globe. I am really excited to be doing this talk, first, because I have never spoken at this User Group (which happens to be my home group), and secondly because it forces me to dig deep into Visual Studio 2010 to find some hidden gems that I hope to share with the audience. I hope you can make it there; here is the abstract: A Sneak Peek of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0 Rumor has it tha... [More]

If you are a regular reader of this blog then you probably noticed that the design and layout has changed considerably. The fact is that the changes actually go much deeper than that, as I’ve gone as far as switching the platform entirely. I recently decided to explore other Open Source platforms, and the final choice of blogging platform chosen is BlogEngine.net. I will be sharing my reasons and thought process about this change (and others in the works for other application types) in another blog post. When moving a blog there are several things that need to ... [More]

As I sifted through my inbox for the VB-Insiders list emails the other day, I wandered how many of those VB MVP’s and insiders shared their thoughts, knowledge and random comments on Twitter. I decided to send out an email to the VB-Insiders distro asking everyone who had a twitter account, and who wanted to be listed on this Tweeps List to send it to me. The response, and you can see from the list below was great. (For the record, there were a few who still felt that twitter was pointless and a waste of time; I still cannot disagree with them 100% – w... [More]

Yesterday afternoon Hal Hayes and I were invited to speak at the SharePoint Technology Conference hosted and organized by the SharePoint User Group DC (SUGDC). The following is some information about the event: For two exciting days, you'll be eating, drinking,  talking and living Microsoft Office SharePoint  with Microsoft's Most Valued Professionals (MVP's) from across the country. There are tracks for developers, users, managers, and administrators. There will be time to network with some of the areas top employers where you will discover just how much ... [More]

While the first half of 2009 is almost behind us, there is a lot more community work left to get done. As I try to arrange my life-work-community schedule I see that I have quite a busy couple of months coming up yet. I am still waiting for responses from other community leaders and events such as the SDN/Open Force Europe, so I won’t list those here just yet. Meanwhile, here is what I’ve got lined up. 6/26/2009 Sharepoint User Group DC Session: Sharepoint VS DotNetNuke (3:00pm – 4:00pm) Prepare for the battle of the titans! Which platform is ri... [More]

Earlier this year the Microsoft Visual Basic team conducted several interviews with VB MVP’s. I just received an email from Lisa Feigenbaum that my interview was posted on the Visual Basic Team’s website. Check out the interview here and learn just a tad more about what I do, and why I LOVE VB. [UPDATE 6/27/2009] Other Resources: I’m a VB Blog Website (www.imavb.com) Visual Basic Team’s website Lisa Feigenbaum’s Blog My Interview

On June 26th, I will take the stage once again at the Regional SharePoint User Group. I will be joining Hal Hayes in a battle that from the looks of it may rival “David and Goliath”. The event topic is labeled as follows: Prepare for the battle of the titans! Which platform is right for you? Each one has its uses depending on the audience. If you are interested in watching this battle in real-time the register for this event and join us on June 26th between 3:00PM and 4:00PM. Here is some more information: For two exciting days, you'll be eating, drin... [More]