Searching is my life long mantra.  I searched for 25 years for my wife and found perfection.  I’ve searched for 2 years for blog software… and I still haven’t found the perfect tool.

The hang up is I want to write my own controls like an image rotator with some domain logic, but I don’t want to write all the features, just this one.  So far my best choices are listed below:

http://www.dasblog.info/

and

http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/

Unless you work for a web development company your decision on how or where to setup a web site just got a lot harder.  The core factors at the heart of the build or buy choices lie in what features are required to do business and range from the necessities to ultimate luxuries.  In my conversation with a non-profit organization their concerns rely in the realms of communication, social networking and branding.  In today’s Internet world some of the easiest and cheapest freebie web applications address all of these concerns.  Here’s a list of items discussed during that conversation that I will elaborate on in the upcoming weeks.

• MySpace, FaceBook and Yahoo Groups
• Updateable web site without programming and uploading
• Cost
• Technology that you know versus that which you don’t
• Email capabilities
• Use an out of the box solution or develop custom software
• Custom URL or use location shared via a parent organization

I look forward to doing a deep dive into each of the topics and meeting people who are interested in these topics.  Please, leave your insight in the comments of this web site.

As the eyes of the world turn to the dazzling lights and new year anticipation here’s a set of techlinks that you’ll never regret aggregating. 

• If you want energy and enthusiasm in software development and a bit of everything else the man is…  Scott Hanselman.  Now, if I can just get him to accept my LinkedIn.com invitation.
• Now, when you broke the web site and the CFO threatens to call the CEO kind of situation, there’s really only one alternative… ‘If broken it is, fix it you should’  Tess Ferrandez in her series of posts on .NET debugging is a virtual, bug finding rock star.
• How many developers could write a meaningful post each and every day for 17 months?  Only one that I know of… Sara Ford.  Unfortunately, nothing lasts for ever and maybe I embellished the each and every day part… there are only 382 posts on how to improve your Visual Studio skills.  The posts eventually culminated in a book, Microsoft Visual Studio Tips: 251 Ways to Improve Your Productivity.

With so many new high quality bloggers the list could go on, but like the last day of 2008 it’s here and this article is done.  Drop the ball and enjoy your party.

My first go around with blogging was quite an experience.  My gung-ho intentions and “doer” attitude led to the creation of my own blogging software.  I wouldn’t trade that experience for two Rubik’s cubes, but WOW it was a lot of work and I didn’t have near the features implemented that I truly needed.

Here’s a list of the three best features and why I picked them.

1.  Integration with Windows Live Writer.  This single feature mentioned by Scott Hanselman drove me away from maintaining my own code base and installing dasBlog.  Writing my own RSS feeds and aggregating data was fun, but tweaking that code into the API useable by Windows Live Writer was just daunting.  Frankly, I’d rather be exploring code and other concepts here on my Site Construx blog than conforming to an API that dozens of other platforms already use.  My next statement may be hard to believe, so hold onto your hat… Live Writer is a free download!

2.  Emailed daily summary of statics.  That’s right, every day I get a list of referrers and search engine stats emailed to me.  I created a rule to put them into a folder and at the end of each week I review what the views of Site Construx are really looking at and how they arrived here.  When the powers that be (user searches) and my desires to write coincide with a single topic a smile comes to my face, cause one day, I know I’m going to have an advertiser!

3.  Ease of upgrades.  I was worried that the upgrades would be painful.  In my limited experience (I’ve only done one upgrade) it was seamless.  Just drop the files into the main folder and Viola. 

dasBlog fits really well into my ASP.NET skill set and just gets me excited about all my blogging potential.  If you’re interested in installing dasBlog, the downloads can be found on CodePlex

Let me just go on the record by saying I like Unit Tests.

But we are still in the early West stages of introducing them into the Software Development Industry.  I need to point no further than this article about running unit tests in Visual Studio.  After you get your VSMDI file generated and you check into source control, by default your going to experience some pain when the other developers on your team jump on the unit testing bandwagon.  The pain occurs in the multiple VSMDI generation, which WILL happen as more people look at your tests and write their own.

The solution is to not allow the original VSMDI file to be auto checked out.  Like all good things Microsoft has made, there are a series of steps to prevent this.  Too bad I didn’t come across them until our development team hit the road block.

The step by step solution is provided here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/957358

Over the past few years I've been asked a great many things about my ability to keep up with the latest happenings in the software development world.  For example I started learning programming with Pascal in the early 90s, then I moved to Visual Basic.  There wasn't a big fuss over me not really knowing Visual Basic when I took this assignment, it was just understood that I would buy a book and the next week I'd be programming.  No, it's not like Neo in the Matrix when he first learns Kung Fu...people just don't learn that way.  But what people are good at is taking something similar and then synthesizing those concepts to another situation.  I've often heard that an "if" statement is an "if" statement no matter what the language.  Sure it may have brackets or parenthesis around the phrase, but the concept is still the same.  Therefore, if you understand the basics of a programming language, many other languages are easily within your grasp.

Fast forward to an even more ironic day, when I was working for a training company teaching web development (originally I'd been hired to teach Visual Basic) and we just went through a round of lay offs.  Management was showing a slide deck of the "new" organization when my name appeared not only by the web development instruction team but also under a team which I had real world exposure but had not dreamt of teaching.  True to the cause, I taught the course in less than two weeks.

So how'd I learn all the information?  I have to admit every day I read at least one article related to technology.  After the course of a decade these small commitments add up to thousands of articles read and a huge breadth of knowledge acquired.  But I've been able to go even farther this year.  I started listening to Podcasts of software development gurus as well as management gurus on my drive into work.  This allows me about an extra hour of learning that was normally spent on the senseless rants of Kansas City disc jockeys.

In summary, I’m offering a few methods to maximize your learning potential.  First, you just have to display the guts to learn (pick up the book).  Second, put yourself into situations where you have no choice but to learn.  And lastly, find ways to build knowledge both cumulatively, and in your down time.

Good Luck and Happy Learning!

I'm attempting something new tonight.  I've been wanting to add code samples to my web site but haven't had much success with most methods.  Screen shots look the prettiest, but don't try it unless you want a whole lot of readers ticked off about not being able to copy and paste your code.  My dream is to be able to easily post code samples and accept comments and suggestions. 

The magic post that pushes my blog into the stratosphere is posted at the following link.

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/BestCodeSyntaxHighlighterForSnippetsInYourBlog.aspx

With as many new modules as I've created for my web sites and shared between them all, I've developed a need for custom sections in my web configs.  That way it's easy to copy and paste setting for a component into a new (or existing) project and not worry about overlapping (i.e to config elements with the same name).  I've been doing this for a long time but it always took me 4 or 5 lines of code to access the values in the elements.

Here some example web.config code:

<configuration>

   <configSections>

      <section name="RSS" type="System.Configuration.DictionarySectionHandler, System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089"/>

   </configSections>

   <RSS>

      <add key="ContentType" value="text/xml"/>

      <add key="Title" value="Site Construx's Article RSS Feed"/>

   </RSS>

</configuration> 

Here's how to access the custom config element with a single line of code

	(string)((Hashtable)ConfigurationManager.GetSection("RSS"))["Generator"];

If you're having trouble with this feel free to post a comment and I'll help you out!