Visual Studio 2005

I've been coding with it for a while now. The project I mentioned previously involves an Oracle 9i database rather than SQL Server 2005. This has added some difficulty in using some of the out of the box functionality as far as users, groups, etc., however, the job is still much easier than not having these object in the first place.

The application is a portal for suppliers in Asia, Middle East, and Africa to place bids to manufacturer goods for my employer. A reverse EBay, if you will. This will require fewer resources than our current solution, provide more information quicker, and allow production to begin sooner, therefore having a better time to market.

The biggest obstacle has been backend communication with me. The existing developers for production have been providing the stored procedures, while I have been coding the web interface. They don't talk my language as far as web development, and I haven't been talking their language, as far as knowing the database structure. We are both coming closer to understanding the other.

To complicate matters a bit, future phases will involve overseas developers, while I architect and support the system in the states. Visual Studio Team System appears to be the solution we will use. More on this later.

DotNetNuke

I talked my church into redoing our website with DNN. It wasn't that painful of a process. The most important thing is to have someone with the business unit who knows what they want to appear, and to have someone with computer skills to maintain the website. I had help with the skin, I'm more of a make things work person, not a make it look pretty.

Yes, I can be hired out to help with a DNN implementation, if you desire. :)

2005 ASP Connections, Visual Studio 2005

Wow... what a conference. They reported 3,000 Microsoft developers attended this conference. I learned quite a bit. My most favorite speaker was Michele Leroux Bustamante. She has an extensive resume, and her speaking ability matches it.

.Net Framework 2.0 and Studio 2005 has too many new features for me to discuss each one here. Over time, I think the most important will be Sql caching notification. Sql 2005 will report back to IIS when a cached dataset has been modified. This makes sql caching much more usable. This will cut down on database I/O drastically.

My other most favorite changes are with gridview and detailview objects. Of course, there are issues with doing it this way, but you can create a select detail, edit, update, delete datagrid and detail view without writing a single line of code in the codebehind page.

I will be using many features with a project starting.... Monday. Throwing myself into the fire with brand new Microsoft technology. This will be supply chain management applications aimed at users in the far east. Wish me luck.

Running a .net app in a DNN subfolder

It took me a while to find the answer, but finally found it under http://blogs.speerio.net/peerio/CategoryView,category,DotNetNuke.aspx. To quote
"I am particularly excited by the shared app working correctly. As you may already know, it is a pain to get another ASP.net app to work in a DNN sub-folder. That's because of the HttpModules referenced in the DNN web.config. Because of how ASP.Net manages child apps, in order to get an ASP.Net app to work as a DNN child app, you have to do two things:
1) add a element in the section
2) add all the DNN HttpModule assemblies (and referenced assemblies) into the bin folder of the child app.

This sounds counter-intuitive, but that's what has to be done to make it work. Basically, when ASP.Net starts initializing a child app, it first attempts to load all HttpModules declared in a parent app. This is why you need the assemblies in the child app bin folder. Once it encounters those assemblies become irrelevant.

Anyway, because of all this craziness, to setup DasBlog as a child app, I would have had to copy all the DNN HttpModules into the DasBlog bin folder. Ugly any way you look at it."

It worked like a charm.

Didn't quite work out 

Wisc vs. WVU