James shared the news here: http://www.coveryourasp.net/Technical/TheTelligenti, but we're thrilled to announce that Telligent has acquired this popular and powerful CMS system. We haven't announced how we'll package the new CMS solution with Community Server, but version 1.2 will contain some basic CMS capablities. Version 2.0 of Community Server will also have full integration of the CMS system.
Ziff-Davis recently launched 2 new sites using Communtiy Server:
Great stuff!
Today Fritz is starting a 15-part MSDN webcast series on ASP.NET 2.0. Fritz is both a great presenter (it's his job after all) as well as an expert on ASP.NET -- so this is sure to be a series of events not to be missed!
Here is the URL for more information: http://www.microsoft.com/events/series/essentialaspnet.mspx
The CodeSmith 3.0 Tips & Tricks talk at the North Dallas .NET User's Group last night went great! Not only did we shatter the group's attendance record (265 attendees), but we gave everyone a free copy of CodeSmith 3.0 Professional! Yes, this means we gave away over $100,000 in software.
You can grab the slides here: http://www.codesmithtools.com/download/tipsandtricksslides.zip
I'll be visiting several other user group's over the next couple of months where we'll again be giving every attendee a free copy of CodeSmith 3.0 Professional. Below are some of the upcoming events:
CodeSmith will also have a booth at Microsoft's PDC this year -- stop by and say hi!
If you live (or can travel to) the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex, please join the North Dallas .NET User Group on August 3, for a CodeSmith 3.0 Tips & Tricks demo-filled session. As an added bonus all attendees will get a *free* license to CodeSmith 3.0 Professional --- a $399 value!
As an added bonus, please help us make the Dallas .NET User Group VP, Shane Henderson, eat some crow. He absolutely thinks there is NO way we will have 200 attendees at the event and Scott Dockendorf doesn't agree. It's a $50 bet and Scott has promised to donate the money to a charitable cause when he wins (you can tell which side I'm on in this debate)!
More information here:
http://weblogs.asp.net/scottdockendorf/archive/2005/07/26/420584.aspx
We recently updated the NNTP server that runs news://forums.asp.net.
About once a day I get an email from either LinkedIn (url purposefully not included) or Plaxo (again, url purposefully not included).
Let's talk about Plaxo first. Here's the scenario: you want to keep your address book up-to-date so Plaxo (amongst others) is the "free" service you choose. Have you ever read the fine print? Basically if Plaxo sells their business your privacy rights go out the window because they can sell your contact information too. Don't get me wrong, Plaxo is a great idea in theory -- but I guess I just don't grok the difficulty of mananaging an address book without it. Also, maybe I'm paranoid but basically Plaxo is a direct marketers ideal tool -- people enter in and then help validate hundreds of thousands of email addresses, phone numbers, and addresses. Gee, I'm excited about all the new junk and spam mail I'm sure I'm soon to recieve. Thanks.
Then there is "Linked In". Linked in is viral marketing at its best and utterly annoying ...and, I'll admit it, I keep getting sucked in thinking that having a "network" will someone result in some uber positive experience. So far... nada mucho. Linked in appeals to the type "A" personalities that like to compete and play ego warfare. I mean, so what if you've got a network 5,000 plus people. Is that even useful? Personally, I would think the people with smaller < 50 people lists are more valuable.
Part of my skepticism comes from trying to understand what business both Plaxo and Link In are in and how they make their money. Nothing is free and it just seems like both of these companies are helping build a direct marketers dream "customer" database.
Btw, I'm in Linked In as rhoward@telligent.com ...see? It's just addictive.
The endless debate: should you use web based forums or newsgroups? Web based forums, such as those at http://forums.asp.net are great because they provide a rich interactive experience and foster true communities. News groups, on the other hand, are fast simple and support offline as well as online reading.
Unfortunately the technology usually divides the communities - just look at http://forums.asp.net vs. the Microsoft ASP.NET news groups at news://news.microsoft.com. Both 'communities' have expert and knowledgeable contributors, but have isolated themselves from one another due to preference in technology.
One of our long standing goals at Telligent is to remove the technology barriers for collaborative communities through Community Server. I'm happy to announce that we've been piloting NNTP support for the http://forums.asp.net site and we're now ready to announce it publicly:
news://forums.asp.net
Using the same login credentials for http://forums.asp.net you can now use any RFC compliant news reader, such as Outlook Express, to connect to, browse, read, reply, and post either online or offline.
If you want to learn more about the Community Server NNTP Server -- a commercial add-on for Community Server -- visit www.communityserver.org (currently available as a release candidate).
Full details
Version 1.1 is a performance focused release. We will also release our NNTP Server (use it at news://communityserver.org) within the next several days.
Planning for Version 1.2, the theme of which is "simplicity" has already started.
Scott Watermasysk put together a cool little utility for people that want to browse the Community Server code base:
http://code.communityserver.org
Woohoo!!! CodeSmith 3.0 released on Monday May 16th!
Download CodeSmith 3.0 now
CodeSmith 3.0 free 30 day trial.
Learn more about CodeSmith 3.0
Visit www.codesmithtools.com
Code generation tools represent one of the most interesting areas where a tremendous amount of innovation opportunity still exists for improving the software development process. By automating the process of creating framework, database access, or other common/repeated code patters developers can save time, companies can save money, and users of the end product will get better solutions. Why? Instead of spending hours repeating the same logic flows, data access layers, or implementation frameworks just write it once as a CodeSmith template. That's right -- using .NET code you can write a template for how you want your code to be generated. It's still your code with your formatting your comments and your style -- CodeSmith just helps you write it faster. In fact, you could say it's like hiring your own personal army of developers!
If you haven't experimented with code generation before -- and even if you are already familiar with it -- I would highly recommend checking out CodeSmith 3.0. It will change the way you think and write your software.
At Telligent we're so convinced in the importance of code generation that we partnered with Eric Smith, the founder and creator of CodeSmith, to found CodeSmith Tools, LLC.
Eric Smith has just released CodeSmith 3.0 Release Candidate 1 for testing and preview! You can learn more at: http://www.codesmithtools.com/
We use CodeSmith extensively here at Telligent and it's just a phenomenal tool. One of my favorite new features with this release is statement completion (aka, IntelliSense) in the CodeSmith Studio. It make writing and working with templates super easy.
CodeSmith is one of those tools that once you start using it ... you can't work without it.
CodeSmith 3.0 is also being offered under a special, but not heavily advertised promotion too: if you purchase CodeSmith Professional version 2.6 within the past 90 days (once version 3.0 goes gold) you get the 3.0 upgrade (a $399 value) for FREE!!!
Are you using Community Server? We've been nominated for an ASP.NET Pro Reader's Choice award:
http://www.aspnetpro.com/ReadersChoice/
Community Server is listed on the third page under 'Forums'. Of course it's much more than a forums system, but we'll take what we can get! You can also submit us for Product of the Year too!
Check it out -- and more importantly vote for Community Server :)
Filed in the interesting, but probably won't use category...
http://www.php-compiler.net/ - some people have written a PHP implementation built on top of the .NET platform. What's more shocking? Some initial benchmarks have it out-performing PHP on Apache. The developers said they are not Mono compatible yet, but something they'll be looking at.
What I'd be most interested in finding out is did they build on top of the HttpRuntime? I wrote a light-weight Cold Fusion implementation on top of the HttpRuntime a long time ago, so I know something like this would be possible - or did they write all the plumbing themselves. If the core is built on top of the HttpRuntime it would make integration of PHP and ASP.NET applications together on IIS amazingly easy.
