Jim Bonnie's Blog

Test Driven Development and DotNetNuke - OpenForce 2008

Wed, 12 Nov 2008 18:36:29 GMT

Thanks to everyone that attended this morning's session at OpenForce 2008. We had a decent showing for the 08:00 am session.

I have posted the slides and sample project with the simple GolfScore MVP project with tests, as well as the project from the testdriven DNN projects built with the project templates on CodePlex

It is very exciting to have DotNetNuke V5 RC2 released for public download. We can all dig into the DNN container and Interfaces and see how we can all do more unit testing of our DNN modules.

Happy Coding!

Setting Up Windows Live Writer for DNN's Blog

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:46:02 GMT

The DotNetNuke Blog Module V 3.05.00 was recently released, see Antonio's Blog Post.

The new DNN version has a lot of features that Antonio's talks about, download it here.

This is a quick post with some screen prints that show how easy it is to set up the blog for posting from a Web Authoring tool that supports the MetaWebLog API, such as Windows Live Writer.

Here are some screen prints from my install on a new Laptop that I am setting up for my travels to OpenForce, you are going also, right?

Step 1) Download and Install Windows Live Writer - The installer was a bit obnoxious and kept coming to the foreground to report installer progress...

Step 2) Start the install and select the option stating that you already have a DNN Blog

step 3) Specify another blog Service

Step 4) Put in your blogs home page and user account details

Step 5) WLW wants your posting URL, so head over to your DNN site to get it...

Go to Your DNN site and page with the Blog Module, Login and go to to the Blog Settings

Step 6) on the Blog Settings, go to the section with the MetaWebLog information and Copy the posting URL

Step 7 ) Post this information into the Windows Liver Writer Screen

That's it, you should be ready to create nice posts in WLW and publish them to your DNN site.

Good Luck and Happy Posting!!

Jim

Westchester/Fairfield County Code Camp at UCONN Fall 2008

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 17:01:01 GMT

Yesterday was the 2nd Annual Code for the DotNet Users group of Westchester/Fairfield County.

It was a rainy day in Connecticut and the last of the leaves were letting go.

The event was at a great venue again, the Stamford campus for UCONN.

I was only able to attend 3 sessions, as I am busy getting ready for a 2 week trip starting with OpenForce at Devconnections this coming week.

How could I miss a session by Don Demsak. Don did a new talk on Business Intelligence for the .Net Guy. I was scared by the raw ado.net code and inline SQL required to get data from the MDX queries. I am not sure that I ready to jump into this area, but Don makes a good point that BI is an area in demand.

The second session I made was by a local develoepr Jason Sliss. Jason did a talk called, TDD LIVE. It was great!!! He did a quick intro to TDD and then walked the session through solving a real world business problem. It was stock price validation, a topic near and dear to me after working for Reuters for 18 Years! Jason showed TDD, refactoring towards patterns and had a very pragmatic approach to TDD - he certainly opened the door for more developers to do TDD

I ended the day with a pizza session and follow up session with Richard Hale Shaw. He is a great passionate speaker and did a Q&A for people on C# language features and then did the session on LINQ and LINQ to SQL. He really showed the value of LINQ and his extension methods were pretty cool also.

Thanks to Leo, Mark, and Louis from UCONN for a great event, I can't wait for next years, Watch out Philly - Here we Come!!!

DNN Blog V 3.05.00 Available for Download

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 23:24:15 GMT

A new release of the DotNetNuke Blog is now available for download.

This release provides a number of enhancements, one of the most exciting is support the metaBlog API.

That's right, now you can write your posts from windows Live Writer, Word 97, and other popular tools that support the metaBlog API.

Check out Antonio's Blog posts on the wealth of new features.

SAP Project Summary

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 21:28:25 GMT

I just completed one of the best projects to work on to date.

I thoroughly enjoyed working with the SAP team and Daniel was an excellent developer to pair with and challenge me.

Daniel was open to using different tools such as Subversion and Tortiose SVN. After the first few weeks and sneaker net and USB thumb drives, the project productivity took a leap with the use of SVN. You should have seen his face when our conflicts were merged for us!!!

There was a single case when we needed to manually manage a conflict. This saved days if not weeks of time on the project.

I had the data access layer in place in a single day with SubSonic, but use of this tool was outside the corporate policy so it needed to be replaced with some home grown ADO.NET methods. The amount of hand written code must have also taken weeks to do over the life of the project. Perhaps they will move to LINQ to SQL when they upgrade to VS2008...

But we did keep Subsonic in for versioning the DB and this was another big time saving. I was also very excited to introduce the concept of a mapping layer to handle the simple ORM needs of the project. But it was nice to have a single place for these methods.

We were able to deploy some ajax control toolkit components and the auto suggest text boxes worked very nicely and the server side generation of JSON objects for use on the client was another huge win.

The project architecture was very simple, but a nice seperation of logical layers for the DAL, Service Layer, Web Service Layer, and Web Application. And yes we had test projects using MbUnit!!!! It was an amazing work environment with a friendly and motivated group of people.

I will miss working with Daniel, Bruno, James, Jeff, Aldonna and even Zack! And two of the sweetest girls that I have met, Rebecca and Raquel are awesome.

This was also an interesting assignment as it brought me back to the same building and offices that I started in when I moved to Stamford in 1998. Here are some shots of Tresser blvd, the pit is still there!, the Marriott next store, my view of the LI Sound, and a view over to Sylvan Knoll.

I am extremely excited to see how much more fun the next assignment will be!

Been Quiet for to long

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 04:09:58 GMT

Next week is the Kaizen Conference in Austin Texas, and David Laribee has just posted some information on the Pre-Conference Agenda. I am really excited to be headed back to Austin. Last year ASP.NET MVC was unveiled. Who knows what this year will bring!!!

Hartford Code Camp - TDD with DotNetNuke Presentation

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 02:05:26 GMT

It was a great time at the Hartford Code Camp. Thanks to the people that attended the TDD with Dotnetnuke session. The questions and interaction were very helpful. The slides can be found here. I will post the code samples if anyone is interested. Remember that the TDD templates testdrivendnn for DNN on Codeplex, will only work with the upcoming Cambrian release, aka DNN 5.0 Have fun!

August 2008 CodeCamp in Hartford - Call for Speakers

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 11:15:05 GMT

Technorati Tags: DNN

CTDOTNET CodeCamp - Hartford CT (Saturday Aug 16th 9AM-5PM)

To be held at New Horizons Computer Learning Center (Bloomfield CT)
http://www.newhorizons.com/content/centerSearchResults.aspx?SiteId=25

A code camp is a FREE, community-driven, all-day event for developers. Speakers are local or regional developers. Topics are based on community interest. Sessions are original and feature a heavy technical focus (no marketing fluff). We will follow the Spirit of the Codecamp Manifesto as described here -
http://www.thedevcommunity.org/codecamps/manifesto.aspx

We are seeking talented .NET developers to make a presentation or two at the First Hartford CodeCamp on August 16th (Saturday). If you have ever wanted fame (& perhaps fortune) - this is your opportunity! We are giving away one MSDN Premium subscription and other prizes for presenters (judged by evals from attendees).

Each session should be about 90mins in duration and the content should be on developer topics that would be of interest to attending developers. Just about anything in .NET and other Microsoft technologies!

Choose a .NET topic of interest and send a brief abstract or outline, your developer experience, expected audience level, etc or any other questions to ctdotnet@gmail.com

Our thanks to New Horizons Computer Learning Center for sponsoring our event.

Our thanks to MyWinHosting & Franklins.NET & InterBridge.NET for their continued support

DNN, JQuery, and Cycle Plugin: Building a Photo Slide Show Module

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:09:58 GMT

Technorati Tags: DNN

During my recent vacation to Monaco, I made some blog posts with photos to share with friends and family. My brother had some trouble with the blog summary feature and it was not easy to see that clicking on the Blog Title would bring up the entire blog post and ... more pictures.

He suggested that I just post the pictures to flcker, but that is to easy! As I have been reading a JQuery book, it was a good time to see what could be done to create a slide show or just share some pictures with some custom development.

I saw a number of add ins built using JQeury, so I figured that was a good place to start, going slow and integrate someone else's work. There was a really nice photo display module called Galleria. It shows thumb nails that are click-able to show the full image in another section on the screen. The thumb nails are generated on the fly. I had a DNN version working but the thumb nail placement was not working in FF, it was okay in IE 7. I lost the battle with the CSS and generated html. So much for JQuery handling the differences in browsers for you...It can handle the DOM abstraction, but can not save you from the CSS/HTML differences.

I settled on another route and an excellent plugin called cycle, from http://www.malsup.com/jquery/, there are some other plugins worth checking out. You have to check out the capabilities of these plugins, very nice!

You can see the demo of the DNNCycleSlideShow module on www.walkspoiled.com, highlighting the Monaco trip and last years visit to Hawaii.

The module looks for folders of pictures in the active Dotnetnuke Portal folder called DNNSlideShow. Then looking for a sub folder with the appropriate moduleID and sub-folders called photos_XYZ.

A button is placed on the screen for each folder with the label XYZ. This way multiple modules can be deployed with their own sets of photos, and each module can have multiple sets of photos that can be selected to see them in a slide show. That is my brother on the left and Dad on the right.

The trick to getting JQuery to work with DNN for me was to:

Load the scripts in the the pre render event (thanks to the dotnetnuke forums for that one)
The scripts were the JQuery library, the Cycle Plugin, and the small amount of javascript that I needed to write to wire up my div id's with the cycle functionality.
I put the JQuery no conflict call in when I had more JQuery in an earlier example. I could have just used the JQuery function name instead using $j

Let me know if you are interested in the module. I still need to add an upload facility, as I went with FTP or the DNN file manager for now.

Dad's 79th Birthday was a blast

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:12:15 GMT

The Monaco trip is winding down. We had an amazing time on Sunday celebrating dad's birthday. We started with a trip aboard Paul's rib style boat. Perfect for a nice short trip. We sailed along the coast in the photo that my father is standing in front of here. It was better in real life!

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After a swim down the coast, we came back to a great spot on the beach. Here is a shot as we were leaving, and my dad coming back after a swim. Kevin and Paul needed to give him a helping hand.

And the birthday celebration culminated in a lovely dinner with Diane, Ivo, and Victoria. We had birthday cake and then watched the end of Spain vs Italy - with Spain winning via Penalty kicks.