Continue reading »]]> With this alpha version of the ASP.NET Universal Providers the ASP.NET Membership, Roles and Profile functionality can now be used with SQL Server Compact Edition databases and SQL Azure.These providers are currently being released via a NuGet package but are probably included in the next version of ASP.NET. You can find all the information you need in this post of Scott Hanselman.

Continue reading »]]> After a busy half year I finally found some time to write a blog post. And todo it more often in the future I installed Windows Live Writer 2011 to make writing blog posts for my ExcellentSoftware.nl Joomla Site much easier.

Although the installation of the Movable Type  XML-RPC plugin, the publishing protocol between Live Writer and my Joomla site, went ok, and Live Writer could retrieve the categories and styling from my Joomla site, I wasn’t able to publish a post because of the error “section not found”. After trying a number of solutions from different forums I still got the same error.I didn’t want to spent to much time on trying to find a solution for this problem because I knew that my version of Joomla was already obsolute. I used version 1.5.15 and Joomla 1.6 was already there. So I thought upgrading to Joomla 1.6 would probably solve the problem. However, to upgrade from Joomla 1.5.15 to Joomla 1.6, I first needed to upgrade to the latest 1.5 version of Joomla, which is 1.5.22.  I didn’t want to do this manually so I installed an upgrade plugin that was able the upgrade my Joomla site from version 1.5.15 to 1.5.22, at least it would have done  that when it installed properly, however, it gave errors during the installation and therefore didn’t work. Again, I searched the internet, found some solutions, but they all didn’t work out for me.

I used Joomla for this blog site because I have build a number of Joomla sites in the past and I was familiar with it. Let there be no doubt, Joomla is a great free open-source content management system with a large community but the out-of- the-box blog functionality is quite pore compared to other blog engines. So, before continuing with my struggle to upgrade to Joomla 1.6, I decided to check out some other open-source blog engines to find out if they would satisfy my needs, how easy they were to install and how much effort it would take to migrate my blog Joomla site to it.

Todo this I installed Microsoft WebMatrix on my computer. Microsoft WebMatrix is a free development tool that makes creating, customizing and publishing of well known free web applications, like DotNetNuke, WordPress, Joomla, BlogEngine.NET and a lot of others, very easy. The nice thing is that it installs all the necessary software to run the web application of your choice on a Windows platform. So, for example, when you install a php based web application like WordPress or Joomla, WebMatrix will also install php and mysql on your Windows computer so you can run it locally. With WebMatrix I was able to easily check out a number of free blog web applications.

After testing I choose WordPress for a number of reasons. It has all the blog functionality I need, the administration functionality and UI is very clear and intuitive and even has drag and drop on some places, it has a large community, a lot of free plugins and themes and,  it keeps track of updates of WordPress itself and all the plugins and themes installed. And, very important, it all worked!

So I copied all posts from Joomla to WordPress manually.  Maybe this could have been done automatically by some sort of import plugin but I figured out that it would probably take more time to find and install such a plugin then it took me to copy those few posts manually .

Although I like the JSN Epic theme that I used as a base for my old Joomla site I didn’t want to spent any time on converting it to a WordPress theme. There are plenty of WordPress themes so I picked one that I liked, which is the Graphene WordPress theme and I customized it a little bit.  

So there it is, my new blog site, powered by WordPress. I hope you like it.

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Today I saw the keynote of Visual Studio LightSwitch. Visual Studio LightSwitch is a new member of the Visual Studio family and allows developers to quickly create professional-quality business applications in a Visual Studio environment.

With Visual Studio LightSwitch, you don’t need to write all the plumbing code to access the data, bind it to controls on the screen, handle validation, keep track of changes and so on and so forth.

From within Visual Studio Light Switch you start building your application by choosing the langauge type you want to use, VB or C#. Then pick the data you need in your application from one or more data sources, like SQL Server, SQL Azure, WCF RIA services and even SharePoint lists. Select one of the available screen templates to display the data on. Select which platform to run the application on, desktop (default) or web browser, and you are ready to run your application.

Visual Studio LightSwitch is build on top of the .NET framework and is highly customizable. It is easy to add custom code and change the layout of the application. One of the nice features is that you can easily aggregate data from different data sources and show it on one screen without any coding. Visual Studio LightSwitch uses ms deploy to help you deploy your application.

I can’t wait to get my hands on the beta which comes available on August 23.

For more information visit the Visual Studio LightSwitch site and this introduction video of Jay Schmezler at channel9.

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Last week I saw a video of Scott Hanselman at the DevDays 2010 where he explained ASP.NET MVC 2.  During his presentation he mentioned a utility called AutoMapper where he is very enthusiastic about.

AutoMapper is an object to object mapper and after reading the documentation about it I also got enthusiastic about it.

AutoMappertakes the boring work out of your hands of copying the property values from one object to another which is often the case between the boundaries of layers. Think of domain entities to data contracts in case of services and domain entities to view model objects in presentation layers.

AutoMapper is open source and can be found on CodePlex. There is also a video available here.

Enjoy!