April 2009 - Blog Watch

My podcast listening routine has been fixed for quite a while now, but there's not much of it anymore.  Since Murphy's gone I don't take many walks, and since I work at home that leaves trips to the grocery store and errands for podcasts.  Still, I continue to catch each week's roundtable segment of "This Week with George Stephanopoulos" (usually skipping the headliner), a couple of Marketplace broadcasts each week and Real Time with Bill Maher when I can fit it...

Many of you have expressed interested in this week’s Windows 7 Developer Incubation week which is being held at Microsoft in Irvine, CA.  The quickest and easiest way to follow what is going is to follow me on Twitter (llangit), as I’ll be here all week and will be tweeting as we go.  We’ll also be shooting video and posting either here or via various Twitter vehicles, 12seconds, etc…I have protected my updates on twitter, so if you want to follow, then just request and I’ll approve you...

Back from The Gilded Age. We just returned from Newport, Rhode Island for April Vacation Week 2009, which I hope explains my brief cyber-absence. Sorry for not giving you the usual heads-up. Newport is known for its mansions from the Gilded Age, most of which were built around 1900. Vanderbilts, Astors, Morgans - those cats. We spent two days touring several of these incredible mansions, kept in their original state by the Newport Preservation Society. The wealth of these families during this period...

When things are good, well, they are just good, aren’t they?  Where else could I talk about Developer best practices with an analyst from Wisconsin, a SQL developer from Sweden, a SharePoint admin from Kitwe (Zambia), the UG lead for Adobe in LA, the SQL UG lead from Belgium, an independent developer / trainer from Seattle, a developer from Orange County and more – all on a Sunday, no less. More and more, I am considering abandoning blogging, rather just to use Facebook.  What do you think...

To support site-wide features like Sueetie Favorites (which I completed today for BlogEngine.NET posts and comments--more later on that), a centralized data structure was required to tie together the data of the various applications that comprise Sueetie.  I'm very happy with the results described here, originally published in the Sueetie Wiki.   The new Sueetie Data Core structure proved to be so efficient, with so important a role moving forward, it has assumed a presence far beyond...

Come on over to our Irvine office on April 30 from 8:30 to 5:00 pm to learn about how your SDL can be improved using Visual Studio Team System and have a chance at winning a signed copy of my new book .  I’ll be signing at least 5 copies , so the odds are in your favor.  Looking forward to seeing you there.  Register here Here’s the agenda 1. Test Driven Development: Improving .NET Application Performance & Scalability - This session will demonstrate how to leverage Test Driven...

In this post we will walk through the process of creating a secure forum in YetAnotherForum.NET, the excellent Open Source Forums Application used in Sueetie Getting started: Creating the Sueetie Group The Membership functions of YetAnotherForum.NET are integrated into Sueetie's ASPNET Membership, so any changes made in Sueetie administration are instantly reflected in YetAnotherForum.NET's permissions. We are creating a secure forum for the "Sueetie Insider" group, so we will create...

In this post we will walk through the process of creating a secure media gallery album in Gallery Server Pro, the Open Source Media Gallery application used in Sueetie Getting started: Creating the Sueetie Group The Membership functions of Gallery Server Pro are integrated into Sueetie's ASPNET Membership, so any changes made in Sueetie administration are instantly reflected in Gallery Server Pro's permissions. We are creating a secure media gallery album for the "Sueetie Insider"...

I started a new column in the Sueetie Wiki titled "Feature Rich: The Applications that Comprise Sueetie."   I've been wanting to spend more time providing information about the great apps that comprise Sueetie from the beginning.  Today by happenstance I was able to do some things in Sueetie that inspired me to get Feature Rich off the ground. The situation was that several Sueetie developers I've had the good fortune to be in communication with have been working on various...

Sueetie Member Following is complete for BlogEngine.NET post authors and commenters. Implementation of member following for, say, YetAnotherForum.NET will be somewhat different than member following for BlogEngine.NET. Still, I like to write up the documentation while the code is still fresh, so here is the newest Sueetie Wiki document, “The Design of Sueetie Member Following.” I’ll update the wiki after I implement following on YAF.NET, ScrewTurn Wiki and Gallery Server Pro. I hope to have the source...

I announced Sueetie Friends and Favorites yesterday, demonstrating how members will be able to follow blog post authors and commenters as well as tag posts and comments as favorites. Thinking ahead to displaying and managing BlogEngine.NET blog favorite data in the Sueetie User Profile, it seemed a good time to extend BlogEngine.NET data availability to Sueetie.Core. As a quick review, Sueetie supports an unlimited number of BlogEngine.NET blogs both on the site and in Sueetie Groups. Thanks to the...

Inspiration does come from unexpected places, doesn’t it?  I’ve been thinking, for well over a year now, on how to take the Microsoft DigiGirlz program to the next level – that is beyond live events to scale it online.  Well, I think I’ve got a good idea, which I’ve been floating around to a couple of people and today I got that extra push at, of all places, the UPS Store .  Who knew that the women carefully packing my shipment has been a programmer for 25 years?  Well, I sure...