I checked my email this morning, as usual, just as I am rolling out of bed (on my phone that is; no, I do not sleep with my laptop next to me.... I slide that underneath my bed ) and found that I won the April 2008 Community-Credit Award! (For more information what it is, go to www.community-credit.com).

Here is what they had to say:

Congratulations. You won 10th Prize in the April 2008 Contest. As you may know, a lot of people compete ... Read More »

Hello Everyone!

On May 17th, 2008, I will, once again, have the pleasure of speaking at the Northern VA Code Camp. 
I will be doing a repeat session of "Developing DNN Modules 101" that I gave in March at the NoVa Code Camp South. If you were not able to join the session in March, be sure to join us in May at the Microsoft Technology Center in Reston, VA

Here is some additional information:

What: 
NoVa CodeCamp 2008.01 a free mini-conference created by and for the local .NET developer community.

When: 
May 17, 2008 from 9a - 6p (we'll provide pizza for lunch, other options nearby)

Where: 
Microsoft Offices in Reston, VA. (Directions)

Registration is limited t ... Read More »

Every once in a while, and especially when I build virtual machines from existing images, I run into a weird error when running SQL Server Management Studio:

With a little google-ing around did find a solution, well, actually two.
Once solution involves running an update to some registry keys (which is what always works for me) and the second a re-registration of a DLL (you've gotta love COM).

Option 1 Read More »

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The CTO 2.0

Ok, file this one under "just plain silly but fun nontheless" :-)
Starring, my wife Calli, my daugther Aurora (5), and my son John (6 months), and of course, yours truly.

The slides and code of my presentation from last Saturday's "Developing DotNetNuke Modules" presentation were posted on the NoVa Code Camp South website.

Thanks to everyone that attended the event, and my session (of course). I had a great time attending other great sessions as well as doing my own presentation.

For those of you who could not make it this time, but are still interested in learning more about DotNetNuke, I have volunteered to do the same presentation at the Reston Code Camp in May '08. None of the sessions have been confirmed yet, but I will let you all know if there will be room for another great DNN talk.

Alternatively, you can always join us at the Capital DotNetNuke User Group; We host a monthly meeting there as well. Chances are that I wi ... Read More »

For those of you who are in the Washington DC metro area and are interested in learning more on building DotNetNuke Modules, I will be presenting at NoVa CodeCamp South on Saturday, March 29th at the Strayer University Woodbridge Campus. 

NoVa CodeCamp is a free all-day developer event and has become an international trend where peer groups of all platforms, programming languages and disciplines band together to bring content to the community.

My presentation, Developing DotNetNuke Modules, is scheduled for Saturday from 1:00pm - 2:15.pm 

Registration is limited to 100 attendees and is filling up fast so please register today if you're interested!

When Read 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 Read More »
  Comments (2)

  The CTO 2.0

I don't know about you, but for the past two years I have been using a virtual machine to do all my development.
The thought process is simple:

• I can back up the entire machine into one file
• I can have as many configurations as I wish (operating systems, IDE version DB Servers, etc)
• Clearly defines my business workspace versus my development workspace
• Well, there is lots more, but I am not try to sell you on using virtualization here, just how to access it from anywhere you want ;)

My setup is fairly simple:

• One powerful desktop machine running Windows Vista Ultimate and hosting Virtual Machines
• Software on this machine is limited to:
  • MS Office and a few other business apps
  • MSN Messenger
  • Skype
  • and a few other productivity tools.

My Original Problem

If you are a developer and like me you mostly develop data driven applications, then I am sure that you have had to write a couple of paging functions and controls. I very rarely use the asp.net datagrid control as I find it bloated and harder to customize its UI. Instead I use the handy and much lighter weigth datalist and repeater controls.

Of course the drawback with the afore mentioned controls is that they do not come equipped with an integrated paging control as the datagrid does, but the folks at DotNetNuke did a fine job at remedying the situation: they built a re-usable Paging Control. If you are a DotNetNuke module developer, you should definitely consider using it instead of building your own. This is exactly what I did, and I am now sharing my experience since finding these "nuggets" of useful built-in functions and controls within Read More »

The other day I had to build a simple listing of data that required having a radio button on each line so as to enable a user to select and option. I planned to use a datalist control and to place a radio button control in the itemtemplate.

When I ran a quick test I immediately noticed a peculiar issue, all the radio buttons where selectable at the same time!

As usual, I googled the symptom and quickly found that there seems to be an issue with both ASP.net 1.1 and 2.0 where the radio button controls in the list become all selectable (more like checkboxes) while the whole idea behind a radio button is to have just one in the list selectable at a time.

After further reseach, I found that the reason why this is happening is simply because of the way the asp.net assigns the Control's ID at run-time.  Basically this problem occurs because the Repeater/Datalist server control implements the INamingContainer interface, which requires that all controls that are nested within it must have a unique name when rendered in H ... Read More »