CS Nuggets

CS2008: This blog is now WIDER!

I haven't been happy with the crappy width that this blog had, but I didn't want to widen the width of the header image and ruin the aspect ratio.  Well, I decided to go ahead and do it anyway.  If I hadn't told you that I had widened the pictures, you'd never know the difference.  When I get a chance I'll take some real pix to use up there, but this is good for now.  Since I rarely get to the mountains down here in Southern California, I may have to rely on Dave Burke for some snowy pix. 

P.S. YES, it does snow in California.  Even the high deserts get snow in the Winter.

CS2008: SP2 issues

If you've upgraded to SP2, you may have noticed that some previous issues have resurfaced.  The patch that I wrote to allow the file storage location to relative to the application, and go outside of the application, no longer works as written due to changes to the CSContext object again.  Since my sites won't run without the patch, I did fix that issue.  Here is the patch to make entries like basePath="~/../_filestorage" in your CommunityServer.config or CommunityServer_override.config file work:

CommunityServer.Components/Components/Globals.cs:

Change the following around line 498:

calculatedFileSystemStorageLocation = Globals.ApplicationPath + fileSystemStorageLocation.Substring(1);

to

calculatedFileSystemStorageLocation = CSContext.Current.PhysicalPath(fileSystemStorageLocation.Substring(1).Replace('/', '\\'));

There appears to be a bug with BBCodes too, but it's not consistant and I don't have the time to waste on looking into it at this time.  If I do fix it, I'll create another post with the fix.

CS 2009 Pricing

Some one forwarded a link to the Community Server 2009: Final Thoughts on Role, Pricing and Adoption article to me today and I nearly fell out of my chair.  Here is a snip from that post:

Community Server Licensing (updated June, 2009):

Annual (CPU-based)	One Time (CPU-based)	Product Code	Features
5K	12K	Professional-10	10 Blogs, 10 Forums, 10 Media Galleries, 5 Groups and unlimited WIKIS
10K	20.4K	Professional-25	25 Blogs, 25 Forums, 25 Media Galleries, 10 Groups and unlimited WIKIS
15K	30K	Professional-50	50 Blogs, 50 Forums, 50 Media Galleries, 15 Groups and unlimited WIKIS
30K	72K	Enterprise	UNLIMITED Blogs, Forums, Media Galleries, Groups and WIKIS along with the ENT Mail Gateway, ENT RSS Feed Syndication & Job Server

All annual licenses include updates/upgrades and technical support, for the year. The perpetual (one-time) licensing includes first-year support and maintenance; on-going support and maintenance is priced at the standard 20% per annum. Their à-la-cart pricing offers much needed flexibility in fine-tuning the licensing to match your immediate needs, relieving customers of the burden of having to pay for features that will remain dormant for the foreseeable future. Promotional pricing is occasionally available as well;  for instance, a 4-CPU enterprise license was offered at a one-time price of 216K (a 25% discount) if purchased before the end of June (‘09).

CPU-based licensing (…Software Licensing Gets Complicated):

1 physical CPU 1 core = 1 CPU license 1 physical CPU 2 core = 1 CPU license 1 physical CPU 4 core = 2 CPU license

CPU-based licensing can impose a significant penalty on high-volume sites. For instance, deploying the Enterprise edition on a 6-server farm that I’ve previously worked on (5 dual-core duo servers and 1 quad-core duo) would cost 72x2x5+72x4 = $1,008,000 + ~200K/year. In this vein, it’s worth highlighting that hardware can be configured to keep a CPU dormant for licensing purposes, until such time that volume necessitates it.

Many of you might be interested to know that Microsoft's Multicore Processor Licensing practices treats multicore processors as a single CPU and does not charge-by-the-core.  A 3 server MOSS 2007 farm will only cost you $250K + a development investment for your functionality, which I would seriously consider as a better investment.  For the 99% of you who can't afford $250K+ there are several open source products available and 2009 is proving to be a great year for them.  YAF is by far the forum leader now, and their forums are far superior to those of CS.  The BLOG arena is still quite diverse, but some winners are arising.  Check out the following sites for open source projects:

• CodePlex - Microsoft's open source web site that gives free access to a TFS store.
• SourceForge - An open source web site for multiple platforms.
• The Code Project - An open source web site for multiple platforms, primarily Microsoft based.
• CSharp-Source.Net - This is mainly an index of open source projects.

The bottom line is, do what works best for you and your company.  If spending a million dollars is best for your company, then more power to you.  If it isn't, there are several alternatives that will yield better results in the long term.