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]

The other day I had to sort a list by a datetime field. Given that this was an ASP.NET project, the easiest way that comes to mind to do that is to just sort the data on the server side, using LINQ, by writing a Comparer Class, or some other custom sort routine. Unfortunately for me those options were not available to me because: Collection I needed to sort was coming from an “black box” API, and one which I had no access to. Furthermore, even though they provided a Sort method on collections, it wasn’t working. LINQ was out of the question because the applic... [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]

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]

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]

I’ve been using Windows Live Writer (WLW) to write my blog articles since my blog platform has supported it, and I have installed as one of those “must have” tools on 2 of my PCs, my laptop and my main desktop. If you do not use Windows Live Writer, then stop reading this post and go download your copy, set it up, then by all means come back and finish reading. The problem I have had, has been the fact that the two instances of WLW on each of my PCs know nothing about the other. If I start writing a draft blog post on my laptop, I cannot go and finis... [More]

Horinaja is a slide-show ready-to-use for scriptaculous/prototype or jQuery. Horinaja is different than other content sliders because it supports mouse wheel navigation.
I found this resource the other day while I was working on the new theme form my blog. I will be using this script to created a slideshow of the “latest headline stories”. This will enable me to display more than just one story at a time, provide a navigable and sleek interface. [More]

I was recently working on implementing Twitter integration features to the DotNetNuke Blog Module (I’ll write up the details about these features in another blog entry) when I quickly ran into the requirement of having to shorten the blog entries’ URLs. As you may or may not know, Twitter requires that messages be less than 140 characters in length and when you include a link and a title, among other things, character real estate  quickly becomes precious. As it turns out, there are several services out there that provide just this service, for example TinyURL.c... [More]

PimpThisBlog.com is a place where you promote, publicize and socialize your content. Don’t be fooled, this is not yet another social bookmarking website, although it may look and feel that way to you. It's a simple to use and effective way to get your content noticed and FAST. All you have to do is let PimpThisBlog.com know that you have content that you wish to publicize and it’ll "pimp it" for you. PimpThisBlog.com will share your content, by syndicating it to various RSS readers, it will tweet your posts on Twitter (make sure you follow @PimpThisBlog to s... [More]

Earlier this month my company launched PimpThisBlog.com. PimpThisBlog.com runs on ASP.net MVC, a SQL Server database and combines a number of online third party services, such as Gravatar, Re-Captcha, ShareThis, and more, to provide a rich Web 2.0 user experience. While I will soon publish another blog post to outline the details of the application’s technology stack, I first want to use the spotlight of this first post on the topic to outline how PimpThisBlog.com works, how it can HELP YOU promote your business and content, and how you too can harness its wit and po... [More]

I was invited to attend an all-hands meeting this morning at company called SMBLive. I had the pleasure of working at SMBLive until last year as their CTO. CEO, Matt Howard, gave a great presentation on his 2009 vision and goals for his company's products and services. To put it in context, SMBLive has developed online social commerce solutions - 1StoreFront and 1WorkSpace - that demystify the web for SMBs and help them grow faster and work smarter. By licensing, branding and providing these social commerce solutions to their SMB customers, broadband carriers are... [More]

Sometimes, inspiration hits when you’re away from your desk. However, you don’t have to miss out on blogging about it! With the new DNN Blog Module (version 03.05.00) and it’s support for the metaweblog API, there are a variety of tools and technologies that make it easier to blog. One in particular is the ability to blog via email with a service like Blogmailr (www.blogmailr.com). Setting this service up is free and quick. Simply create an account at www.blogmailr.com. Once completed, log in and visit the “My blogmailr” section. Once there, click on “Add New Blog”... [More]

Recently I decided it was time to come up with a refreshed look from my blog. Since I use DotNetNuke to power my blog and my company's site, it meant that I had to build it in the form of a DotNetNuke Skin. Skins are not as simple to design as simple HTML pages, because, among many other things, one has to be knowledgeable enough with what DotNetNuke content tokens generate, and testing is not as simple as you would think. I had defined a few goals to abide by in the new design, and they were: It had to be simple It had to be clean It had to be CSS layou... [More]

I am currently working on a new skin for my Blog, as well as revisiting the overall user experience of this site. Since I Tweet quite a bit, I figured that displaying the list of my latest 5 Tweets would be a neat idea. A couple of thoughts came to mind, including writing a module that would consume the Twitter API to retrieve my tweets. After doing some researching around, I found that there is a much much, much simpler way to do this with a little (already provided) JavaScript. First, add the following html UL element somewhere on your page: <div id="twitter_div... [More]

Recently I was invited by Scott Mendenhall, the organizer of the Web Content Mavens User Group, to be a panelist on DotNetNuke. The meeting's topic is Open Source Web CMS. It is on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 7:00 PM at R.F.D. Washington, 810 7th St. NW, Washington , DC 20001. If you wish to attende you can sign up at the meetup site. The discussion will be moderated by Scott Mendenhall and will feature the following panelists: Keith Casey from Casey Software on Drupal Antonio Chagoury from Inspector IT on DotNetNuke (Yes, that is me) Scott Davis from Alfre... [More]

Last week Microsoft released the Virtual Earth Map Control v6 API.  Here are some of the details: DOC: Virtual Earth Map Control SDK, Version 6.0 DOC: Virtual Earth Map Control SDK (CHM file) SDK: Virtual Earth Interactive SDK Some of the major focuses of this release are enhanced accuracy, performance, Safari Browser support as well as a new interface. There seems to have been no report of breaking changes from version 5, so a simple change in the javascript URL should be enough for anyone to upgrade. Here are a few features and enhancements that you wil... [More]

"Microsoft is unveiling a series of upgrades and additions to SharePoint that it believes will appeal to business users as well as to individual consumers." This is a direct result of the recent Microsoft announcement of the strategic alliance with Atlassian and NewsGator. Atlassian's Confluence product is making its way into the SharePoint's stack by way of a plug-in. This plug-in allows information to be shared between the Confluence Wiki application and SharePoint. A beta version of the plug-in is available here. NewsGator's Social Sites product ... [More]

Microsoft Live Labs, is always experimenting with new and (sometimes) useful ideas.  Recently they released their latest technology preview: Listas (http://listas.labs.live.com) Listas is a tool for the creation, management and sharing of lists, notes, favorites, and more. It allows you to quickly and easily edit lists, share them with others for reading or wiki-style editing, and discover the public lists of other users.  We encourage you to try using it for meeting notes, bookmarks, shopping lists, to plan a night out, or whatever other creative ways you ... [More]

As it turns out, technology adoption is directly related to the user's experience. Ben Gardner agrees. Ben works for a large blue chip pharmaceutical company in the UK.  Ben has a very difficult job as he is responsbile for getting corporate users to adopt Windows Sharepoint Services. He made an interesting post where he says: If I'm going to have to promote SharePoint in my organisation then this sort of skin job would be a god send. I realise that out of the box SharePoint can already do most of this but this re-skinning brings a intuitive UI to the ShareP... [More]

The issue of Net Neutrality is still very much debated. I recently stumbled through this interesting clip and thought I would share it with all of you. It is an interesting video clip which I am sure will stimulate your thoughts in this matter. Having said that, I am still skeptical about the outcome. One can never under estimate the power of many.         For your reference I also found the following information on Google: What is Net Neutrality? Network neutrality is the principle that Internet users should be in control of w... [More]

Barb Darrow from CRN wrote an interesting article this week (http://www.crn.com/software/197800215?pgno=1) outlining how hosting providers and channels are keeping "A Weary Eye at Microsoft Live". It is a really interesting article especially since it outlines the fact that hosting partners were previously spoon-fed Microsoft Services offering only to have Microsoft turn the table on them: "Many of these hosting partners had been recruited by Microsoft to offer SharePoint- and Exchange Server-based offerings. But now that Microsoft is hosting its own low-cost colla... [More]

BT Tradespace Beta Now Available British Telecom and SMBLive yesterday released the public beta of BT Tradespace (www.bttradespace.com). With BT Tradespace, small businesses can use the power of social media to promote themselves online, and can communicate with prospects and customers through blogging, podcasting, click-to-call, and text messaging. The Latest Example of SaaS Innovation for Broadband Service Providers... BT Tradespace is the latest example of how SMBLive continues to develop channel-ready Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools designed to help millions ... [More]

Recently some Google users lost all the emails and contacts! Yep, one fine day, they logged in their GMail account only to find out that all their stuff was, puff, gone! While the loss was contained to only a few people it does make me wander whether I (or anyone else for that matter) should rely on Web services to store data. A slew of Web 2.0 storage services such as Box.net and StreamLoad are making their debut and are quickly gaining large user bases. You may argue that these service providers are backing up your data, but Google did too; yet the loss was irreco... [More]

The speed at which technology progresses never seizes to amaze me. Not more that 3 or 4 months ago I was looking at PageFlakes.I remember thinking to myself "here another one of these Web 2.0 wanna-be's". Everyone seemed to be getting into the "AJAX" band-wagon and all kind of websites were popping up and down their interpretation Web 2.0. Today, I once again decided to take a look at PageFlakes only to be very pleasantly surprised at the progress they have made in such a short period of time. To be quite honest, I still do not see the "... [More]