Telligenti

Wyatt Pruel - Graffiti UserAgent Theme Switcher

Wyatt Pruel — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 12:43:00 GMT

Here is a package for Graffiti that allows you to specify a theme to present to an iPhone user or the Google Bot. The package comes with a couple of themes I created for each type of user to get you started. I originally created this to provide a more performant scenario for when a Google bot visits my site. Google has stated on their webmaster blog that you should avoid providing different content to the Google bot other than the content you provide to a normal user. However, I believe they are more focused on the content that is delivered, instead of how the site is laid out. Either way, the plugin for switching themes allows you to disable either theme for the iPhone or Google.

You can download the package below:

User Agent Theme.xml

You only need to install this through the graffiti control panel. After this you will have 2 new themes and a new plugin installed. You need to edit the settings on the plugin to have it running, both the iPhone and Google theme switchers are disabled by default. Also, if you want to provide a different theme you can change the name in the settings.

The iPhone theme is from Engage Interactive with only minor tweaks. Here is a sample of what this looks like on an iPhone, mind you I added margins and better formatting in general after this picture was taken. I should also point out that I don't have an iPhone, so any feedback from iPhone users on how my site looks would be helpful.

For any developers out there, you should note the following lines which show how simple it is to switch a theme in Graffiti inside a GraffitiEvent object.

        public override void Init(GraffitiApplication ga)
        {
            ga.BeginRequest += new EventHandler(ga_BeginRequest);
        }

        void ga_BeginRequest(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
                GraffitiContext.Current.Theme  =  "MyThemeName";
        }

DaveBurke - Nordic Track Book Club Review: Tribes

DaveBurke — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 12:40:58 GMT

Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us is 5-star material. I loved it. I’m giving Tribes the highest Nordic Track rating in spite of the fact that it’s only 140 pages. I’ve purchased and read almost every book Godin has ever written, but I don’t like the fact that his books seem to be getting shorter and shorter. The Dip (which preceded Tribes) was the first Godin book I didn’t purchase in years because I refused to pay cash money for a book of only 96 pages.

But enough about me. On to the Tribes excerpts. This is probably the most inspiring book Godin has ever written. Too bad it was missing 100 pages. :-) I’ll be providing excerpts from the first half of the book, or the first 70 pages. An equal number of great bits are found in the remaining 70 pages, so if you like the following excerpts there’s more where these came from.

-----------------------

p.1 A group needs only two things to be a tribe, a shared interest and a way to communicate.

p.3 We want to belong not to just one tribe it turns out, but to many. And if you give us tools and make it easy, we’ll keep joining. Tribes make our lives better, and leading a tribe is the best life of all.

p.7 What makes Gary so successful is the way he uses a new medium and new techniques to communicate his passion, connect people and to create change. And so a movement grows.

Everyone is not just a marketer, everyone is now also a leader.

The explosion in tribes, groups, covens and circles of interest means that anyone who wants to make a difference can.

p.11 Heretics are the new leaders, the ones who challenge the status quo. The ones who get out in front of their tribes to create movements. With tribes flourishing everywhere, there is a vast shortage of leaders. We need you.

There is a tribe of fellow employees or customers or investors or believers or hobbyists or readers just waiting for you to connect them to one another and lead them where they want to go.

Managers make widgets. Leaders make change.

Today, marketing is about engaging with the tribe and delivering products and services with stories that spread.

p.22 A manager can’t make change because that’s not his job. His job is to complete tasks assigned to him by someone else in the factory. Leaders, on the other hand, don’t care very much for organizational structure or the official blessing of whatever factory they work for. They use passion and ideas to lead people.

Great leaders create movements by empowering the tribe to communicate. They establish the foundation for people to make connections as opposed to commanding people to follow them.

p.30 Most organizations spend their time marketing to the crowd. Smart organizations assemble a tribe.

p.32 Defending mediocrity is exhausting.

Instead of always being on the hunt for one more set of eyeballs, true leaders have figured out that the real win is in turning a casual fan into a true one.

p.35 The tactics are irrelevant, and the technology will always be changing. The essential lesson is that every day it gets easier to tighten the relationship you have with the people who choose to follow you.

p.38 Tribes are just waiting to be turned into movements. (And occasionally to stop to have a beer together.)

p.49 Heretics are engaged, are more powerful and happier than everyone else, and they have a tribe that they support and which supports them in turn.

Great leaders focus on the tribe and only the tribe. Great leaders use attention to unite the tribe and to reinforce its sense of purpose.

p.52 It is tempting to make the tribe bigger to get more members, to spread the word. This pales, however, when juxtaposed with the effects of a tighter tribe. A tribe that communicates more quickly with alacrity and emotion is a tribe that thrives.

p.64 …and the riskiest thing you can do is play it safe.

This leads to an interesting thought. You can choose the tribe you will lead. Through your actions as a leader you attract a tribe that wants to follow you. That tribe has a worldview that matches the message you’re sending.

p.67 Great leaders realize that a motivated, connected tribe in the midst of a movement is far more powerful than a larger group would ever be.

p.70 The first thing you need to know is that individuals have far more power than ever before in history. One person can change an industry. One person can declare a war.

DaveBurke - Sueetie Blog Support. Engage!

DaveBurke — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 01:34:36 GMT

The BlogEngine.NET integration DIFF Source is now on CodePlex and setup documentation on the Sueetie Wiki. BlogEngine.NET’s flexible configuration options made Sueetie Community integration a simple affair. What was interesting about integrating BlogEngine.NET was that from the beginning I felt it was important to support multiple blogs in Sueetie, as demonstrated at Sueetie.org with a main site blog and a “Sueets” blog. BlogEngine.NET does not support multiple blogs out-of-the-box, but again, with its flexible configuration options this was a snap. The approach I took to support multiple BE.NET blogs while leveraging Sueetie's ASPNET Membership support was to store user data in SQL Server and blog content in that blog’s /app_data folder in XML format. All blogs share only three SQL tables.

I used to be a data purist in that all data had to reside in one place, in this case everything in SQL. That’s not the case any more. The SQL-for-user, filesystem-for-XML-content configuration is clean and works great. If SQL content data is required in the future for add-on functionality, a simple background task can retrieve the XML data and store it SQL-side as needed.

Also interesting in the BlogEngine.NET integration with Sueetie was taking advantage of BE.NET’s built-in “Administrator” and “Editor” roles with ASPNET Membership. Sueetie uses a “BlogAdministrator” ASPNET role to support global blog administrative functions. (This is part of the BLOG DIFF pack, replacing occurrences of “Administrator” with “BlogAdministrator.”) Each blog would also have an associated ASPNET Blog Editor role assigned to the author or authors of that blog.

One or two BlogEngine.NET tweaks completes the process, one of which is to remove the sidebar Administration widget. All Authenticated users must have a record in be_user to link BE.NET and ASPNET user authentication. This is done with a Linq-to-SQL call in the Sueetie Registration page. Done. But with a known user the administration widget says hello with a single “Change Password” link, something we obviously don’t want or need. Ain’t nothin’. Editors of the blog (designated by ASPNET role) will be shown the Blog Administration link in the page header. And because the smart guys behind BlogEngine.NET already thought the matter through, editors have a sufficient but limited set of blog administrative capabilities. All we have to do in Sueetie is display the link.

We’re getting closer now, with only the packaging and documentation for YetAnotherForum.NET and Gallery Server Pro yet to go!

ZacBowling.Com - Push Technologies over HTTP - Part 1

ZacBowling.Com — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 02:20:00 GMT

While I’ve been looking for a job, I’ve been doing a lot of free time projects, designing applications and web apps for various social networking and video sites. Mostly little tools to make my life and others easier and help integration. There is one thing that I wanted to talk about and that is the [...]

DaveBurke - Drive v1.0.4 with SubForms Support now Available

DaveBurke — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 01:04:56 GMT

I’m looking forward to the day when I’ll be announcing new releases of my Drive CodeSmith template library to generate custom code for Sueetie, but while I’m still doing a lot of Community Server stuff I will continue to release updates to Drive for CS development. Version 1.0.4 has support for creating Chameleon SubForms. I also made a number of modifications to the Form templates to reduce keystrokes. Drive is available at http://driveframework.com.

Template updates

- Removed SourceTable requirement on Forms - FormEmptyStructure.cst
- Removed ControlUtilityPrefix property requirement from FormFilledStructure.cst
- Added ability to generate ints in SubFormFilledStructure.cst as TextBoxes rather than only the default DropDownList control. Will add to FormFilledStructure.cst when able to do so. Updated DRIVEHelper.cs library accordingly.
- Added ability to generate FormHTMLElements.cst ints as TextBoxes
- Fixed bug in creating NText SQL parameters that was limiting the field to 16 characters

New Templates

SubForms - SubFormFilledStructure.cst

DaveBurke - A Tweetful post from Vermont to Kansas and Back

DaveBurke — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 05:56:46 GMT

This post is essentially a collection of tweets about my Christmas 2008 experience of visiting wife-side family in Manhattan, Kansas for 5 days. I’m of the opinion that more than 3 tweets in succession should take a different form, so I am sticking them here in one place. This post might also be viewed as an Everyman Links-Lite, instilling faith that the genre has not died and another full-bodied Everyman Links post is coming soon.

We flew out of Burlington for Manhattan, Kansas on Christmas Day. Christmas is a great day to fly.
United provided excellent service in both directions. No Jet Blue, but close.
There were 3 Chinese young people talking loudly in their native language over flight safety instructions during pre-flight from Chicago O’Hara to KCI. Didn’t know how to feel about that.
Why is it that when I psychologically need my Zune the most (during flight take-off and landing) I’m forbidden to use it?
Kansas City International is a great airport with exceptional car rental facilities. It needs a lot more outlets to plug laptops into though.
Stayed in a Best Western near KCI before heading to Manhattan the next morning. $49 a night for a decent room. Kansas has a lot of great qualities…
The MacDonald’s on the I-70 toll-way between Kansas City and Topeka rocks.
The more I visit Kansas the more I enjoy its distinctive landscape, particularly as we get closer to Manhattan. Flint hills dotted with grazing beef stock and buffalo if you’re lucky.
Manhattan is the home of Kansas State University and a great college town. Small town feel. Good honest folk.
When in Manhattan be sure to enjoy great Mexican food at the La Fiesta. Another Manhattan restaurant I enjoy is Sirloin Stockade, but we didn’t make it there this visit.
Started each geek day in Manhattan on my laptop with a triple black coffee-of-the-day from Radina’s Coffeehouse in Aggieville.
I got a ton of work done on the trip and managed to stay in family form. At least my wife is happy with me, so I’m good and all is well.
The alcohol laws in Kansas are set at the local level. When in Manhattan you cannot buy beer or wine (or bourbon) on a Sunday. Make all necessary preparations!
Three hour layover in O’Hara on trip back. Two hours is cool. Three is on the long side. O’Hara is a beautiful airport though. It needs a lot more outlets to plug laptops into though.
We happened to return from Chicago to Burlington on the same flight as a family from church who was returning from a week visit with family in Iowa.
The weather in Manhattan was over 50-degrees and beautiful nearly every day. Freakishly unusual for a Kansas December, but I’ll take it!
I started reading Future Files: The 5 Trends That Will Shape the Next 50 Years heading out of Burlington airport Christmas Day and finished it on the return flight to Chicago. 5-stars. Review coming soon.
Watched two episodes of Deadwood Season Two on my Zune on the final flight from Chicago to Burlington.
Arrived in Vermont 20 minutes ahead of scheduled arrival time. Happy to be back in spite of the 17-degree temperature on arrival.

I suppose I should add a link to my twitter stream on my blog, but in the interim here’s my twitter stream.

DaveBurke - Sueetie Wiki Now Ready for Pickup: Some Assembly Required

DaveBurke — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 04:17:19 GMT

It’s been a productive New Year’s Day with the Sueetie Wiki DIFF source code and Setup Documentation now online. My convention of cross-posting original material here and at Sueetie.org continues with this post containing only the intro and closing excerpt from the Sueetie Wiki Release Announcement.

There are several interesting issues involved in integrating the ScrewTurn Wiki with Sueetie because of ScrewTurn’s lack of support for ASPNET Membership. That’s really not a problem and takes nothing away from Sueetie capabilities now or in the future. ScrewTurn is the best .NET Open Source Wiki out there. I’m spending a lot of time in it cranking out Sueetie documentation and I’m impressed with its ease of use and extensive feature set. I like it a lot.

On to the Sueetie Blog Post, or go directly past GO to the Step-by-Step Sueetie Wiki Setup Guide. Otherwise enjoy the Sueetie post tidbits below.

-------------------------

We're about half-way there on packaging the source code and providing the supporting documentation for complete assembly of a Sueetie Community site. The Wiki source is now on CodePlex and setup documentation is available in the Sueetie Wiki. Below are the step-by-step instructions for configuring ScrewTurn Wiki with Sueetie. Updates will be made to the wiki page as warranted.

ScrewTurn Wiki and Sueetie Configuration Overview

The ScrewTurn Wiki is unlike most other applications used on a Sueetie Community Site in that all user and application data storage is located on the file system and not in the database. One of the reasons for this is because ScrewTurn does not have cleanly delineated SQL object names with application-specific object prefixes. Another reason is because ScrewTurn, unlike all other applications used in Sueetie, has no support for ASPNET Membership. This can be added through ScrewTurn's plug-in framework and thus may be added to Sueetie over time. For now, however, user accounts are stored in the wiki/public/users.cs file and created by a Sueetie autologin.aspx page used in conjunction with Sueetie's login and registration functions.

Get ScrewTurn Wiki 2.0.35 Source

Obtain the ScrewTurn Wiki 2.0.35 Source located on the ScrewTurn Wiki Downloads page.

[see post or wiki doc for the chewy nugget center]

Administrative Access

Based on Sueetie's ASPNET Membership, users with membership in the "WikiAdministration" role will see links to the wiki administrative area as shown below. Attempts to directly access wiki adminstration by non-admins is prevented through ASPNET Forms security.

ZacBowling.Com - Dallas Holiday/Meedow Inn Demolition

ZacBowling.Com — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 11:38:50 GMT

On 11-9-2008, the Holiday Inn Dallas, on Central Expressway was demolished. I got video footage of the event, and was going to post the video to youtube. What I didn’t realize is how many other people posted the same video. Here is mine in 720p: Here is a BUNCH of others:

Wyatt Pruel - Simple steps to upgrade Graffiti CMS to v1.2 in under 5 minutes

Wyatt Pruel — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 11:57:00 GMT

Last night I logged into my site and noticed that the Graffiti News section in the dashboard mentioned that a new version was available. I clicked the link and downloaded the updated version. Because the update doesn't include any database changes the update process involves only xcopy steps. Here are the steps I followed to upgrade my site and avoid interrupting service to it.

Extract the 1.2 .zip package to a temporary directory.
FTP to your site and download the api, bin, graffiti-admin, and search folders to a temporary folder on your local drive. This is a just in case step so that if something does go badly with the upgrade you can roll back your changes.
Now open a browser and point it at your site so you can guarantee your site doesn't go down
Copy the Search and api folders over the live copies on your site. So upload these two folders from the "Upgrade 1.1 to 1.2" parent folder to your site, overwriting the copies on your site.
Copy the graffiti-admin folder from the upgrade package over your live copy
The last folder to copy is the bin folder, so copy the assemblies in the bin folder over the top of those on your site
Refresh the browser window you have open directed at your site to see your site automagically be on a new version. To verify that your site is indeed updated you should view the source on your homepage and look for this line:

<meta name="generator" content="Graffiti CMS 1.2 (build 1.2.0.1451)" />

If for some reason your update fails, follow steps 4-6 except use the backup copies of the files you made in step 2 to overwrite your site files.

Here are a couple of other notable updates that were also released in the last 24 hours.

Rob Howard - Graffiti 1.2 released

Rob Howard — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 04:18:00 GMT

Graffiti 1.2 is now available for download.

This release includes a number of updates and bug fixes (yes it was a long time coming). We've also published the product roadmap and all current customers will get a free upgrade to the 2.0 version.

I also want to apologize for us taking so long on getting some of this information published. When we initially launched Graffiti we didn't anticipate its popularity and staffing plans for the product weren't properly made. We're fixing these problems and making some bigger investments in both the platform and our thinking for how people will use Graffiti in the future (more on that with the 2.0 release in 2009).

Posted to Telligent

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Wyatt Pruel - Best album of 2008: Wye Oak - If Children

Wyatt Pruel — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 01:55:00 GMT

Before I say why If Children is the best album of 2008 (even if it is a re-release), let me first explain why you should consider me an authority on the subject of best albums. First and foremost, I listen to music, new music, daily, constantly, and have been doing so for half of my life. Secondly, my taste in music is stellar, I am a hipster in this way, just trust me when I rate music. Finally, I listen to a wide range of music, a wider range than you do, trust me on this, like I said I am a music hipster.

I tried to be objective when deciding the best album of 2008. One of the ways I did this was to send my friends songs and to hear their responses. Everyone who I consider to be a credible source who listened to Wye Oak said that they sound excellent. This was a large predictor for me that they would have the best album.

Another criteria for this rating is novelty. I consider this probably the most important reason to like a band and an album. Novelty in music I think is completely underrated. Wye Oak in general, and If Children in particular is original. I give them a 4.5 our of 5 in this department. The minus .5 is only because for whatever reason Jenn reminds me of Kim Deal, but only slightly.

The next factor for me, and should be for everyone, is the amount of resources that a band has and their resultant sound. While Wye Oak does have a good label (Merge), they are only two people. And yet, the music that they create is more consistently good than a band like Arcade Fire. Which leads to another factor, that all of the tracks on If Children are great to listen to, repeatedly even.

As my last point indicated, If Children can be listened to on shuffle or repeat, or both. All tracks are great to listen to, enough said.

Finally, I picked their album in part because I want to support a newcomer to the big time who rightly deserves it. If Children is their debut album, and we should all buy it.

Here is a track from If Children for your enjoyment.

ScottWater.com - Microsoft Cloud Data Options

ScottWater.com — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 01:49:36 GMT

I mentioned previously that there is a lot to the Microsoft cloud story, in particular, around data.

Hopefully, this helps clear some things up.

Core Options

Data storage is provided by two distinct services, SQL Data Services and Azure Storage.

SQL Data Services (SDS)

SDS provides a cloud scalable set of web-based services enabling you to store store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. With each passing release of SDS you can expect more (where applicable) feature parity with SQL Server proper. Today it provides basic query and crud functions and will hopefully add query aggregates (count, sum, etc) in a release soon.

Azure Storage

Azure storage comes in three flavors; Tables, Blobs, and Queues.

Tables is designed to support a near infinite number of rows. However, unlike SDS they will only provide a very limited API for querying. All records in a table must use a 2 “column” composite key consisting of a partition key and a row key. Choosing the proper key extremely important with tables. Azure will store items with the same partition key (close) together. In addition, it will seek to optimize access to hot data by the partition key. Anytime you execute a query without a partition key, a full table scan will be required.

Blobs provide as the name implies, storage for files.

Queues, again as the name implies queues are well…queues. Messages in a queue need to be 8kb or less and (at least during the CTP) any message which exists in the queue for more than 2 weeks will be automatically deleted. The Queue API will ensure that a single message is returned to a single caller for a designated amount of time. If the message is not deleted with in a designated amount of time the message will be re-queued.

What, when, where, why?

Both options provide blob storage. However, the SDS blob functionality is very simple. Files can be a max of 100mb. On the Azure side of things, files can theoretically be of any size. However, anything over 4mb must be inserted in blocks using the blocklist API. I would expect to see a lot more innovations/options on the Azure side of things.
If you need to query your data, use multiple sorts, and/or joins, SDS is what you are looking for.
If you need to have related objects exist in a list that you may or may not use and in memory ordering/filtering is a viable option, Azure table storage is for you.
While these are separate services, I fully expect most applications will leverage both of them (as well as .NET Services).
Neither Azure tables or SDS provide query aggregates at the moment (count, sum, etc). These are on the roadmap for SDS and I would expect you will not see them anytime soon in Azure.
Queues are built on tables. Not sure why that is helpful, but I found it interesting.

Posted to Code and tagged as azure , sds , cloud-computing

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Wyatt Pruel - 5 simple things to put caramelized onions on

Wyatt Pruel — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 04:47:00 GMT

A shortcut to making caramelized onions is to cook on med-high until the onions start to brown. Uncover and cook on medium. Once they begin to caramelize add sugar and balsamic vinegar. Cook and add sugar/vinegar until the onions taste caramelized.

1. Pasta - I am making this dish now. Prepare some fettuccine, then add olive oil and caramelized onions with some parmesan

2. Pizza - I make this one every two weeks. I usually make a BBQ pizza and use caramelized onions as part of the base

3. Philo - Put caramelized onions in Philo cups, simple as that

4. Eggs - Fry up some eggs and top with caramelized onions

5. Salmon - I think this speaks for itself

Another tip is to always have 8 onions on hand. Because my wife and I are cooking vegetarian meals we go through onions rather quickly, especially if we are going to caramelize any. Every house should have an ample supply of onions and garlic in my opinion. I also vote for peppers if you can manage it. These are all things you should use as bases in just about every meal. Another item I keep on hand are good rolled oats and rice. I should probably make a post on things to keep in the kitchen. look for that tomorrow.

Wyatt Pruel - Are Johnette and Janet Napolitano related?

Wyatt Pruel — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 05:40:00 GMT

The answer is no, but both women do share enough similarities that when I hear one's name I automatically think of the other. Of course, this is to be expected when their names are so similar. And in case you don't know who I am talking about, one was the lead singer of Concrete Blonde (I really do like them) and the other is the governor of Arizona.

Here is a breakdown of the similarities:

1. Both women were born in 1957, a little over a month apart.

2. Both currently reside in the southwest.

3. In 1991, a year between Concrete Blonde albums, Janet worked as an attorney for Anita Hill.

4. Both names look very similar, although the pronunciations differ.

5. A google search for their last name ends up with both women in the top results (http://www.google.com/search?q=Napolitano)

of course, they do not look anything alike.

Rob Howard - Measuring Social Media

Rob Howard — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 07:19:39 GMT

It's not that often that I'm right (and probably much more often that I'm wrong!), but there are several things that Telligent called before the market that I don't hesitate to see us take credit for:

Before there was "Social [Networking | Media]" we had a vision for building a community platform that integrated in a suite of tools. This is what became Community Server, our main product.
Nearly 2 years ago we started investing in tools to help measure activity. This became Harvest.

This morning someone forwarded me a paper that Peter Kim published, Social Media Predictions for 2009. One of the macro points at the end was, "Measurement needs to be addressed, soon".

I couldn't agree more!

We've been working on this problem for nearly 2 years now and it is why we hired Marc Smith, whose doctorate is in sociology, to help us think through this problem even more. Version 3.0 of Harvest is due out in early 2009 and will help answer questions about usage that usually required traditional web analytics tools tying them back into the social analytics. In fact, you can see some of the roadmap details here:

http://telligent.com/products/road-map/road-map-overview/

So yes, Measuring Social Media is going to be a critical success factor for 2009 (and beyond). ...and Telligent has been there from the beginning.

BTW, you can watch a quick video overview of Harvest on YouTube here:

Posted to Industry

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Dan Hounshell - Real-time code reviews with CommitMonitor

Dan Hounshell — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 06:42:00 GMT

After reading DaveD’s blog post about using CommitMonitor back in March I downloaded it and have been using it since. CommitMonitor is a small tool that lives in your system tray that monitors SVN repositories for new commits. Up until recently, as part of a large dev team (for us) on a large project I used it to just keep an eye on the codebase to have a general idea what was happening. But today I realized that my usage has changed quite a bit and that I use it every day (multiple time per day mostly), really depend on it, and that it has really transformed my development process.

When I’m between tasks and see a notification that a new commit has been made I open up CommitMonitor and check out the details:

If I see a check-in that I’ve been waiting for or something that looks suspicious I can easily and quickly open up the files and view the changes right from the application with a couple of clicks. I’ve got it setup to use Tortoise-SVN, which in turn I have setup to use WinMerge for diffs. Without browsing through my file system or firing up Visual Studio I can do a quick check.

More importantly for me, this doesn’t require me to set aside a specific time to review check-ins each day or to actively search them out. I can take a few minutes right then and there and then not have to worry about it again. Additionally it helps me keep track of which checkins that I have and haven't reviewed - the ones in bold in the top image have not been reviewed yet.

Yes, our CI process publishes build reports and sends out emails – so I could find all the information to get me started in those. But, truthfully, I’m subscribed to so many project builds and get so many build emails that they’re just filed away into folders and I never see them again. The only ones I end up really paying any attention to are failed builds. It would probably take me 3x the amount of time to hunt those emails down, review them, then go back to Tortoise-SVN or Visual Studio and hunt down the files, diff them, etc. YMMV and you may be better off scheduling an hour at the beginning or end of your day to review the latest commits. Personally I’m not that structured and I think that I am more efficient with reviewing them as they come in.

If you’re using Subversion and work as part of a team with more members than just you, you should check out CommitMonitor. If you’re leading a team or a project and are finding it difficult to set aside time to review recent commits then you owe it to yourself to definitely check it out!

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Dan Hounshell - What are people saying about me?

Dan Hounshell — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 06:01:15 GMT

I was catching up on some blog posts this evening and one of them sparked an interest in sharing.

Earlier this year a couple of other devs and I were gathered around talking to Jeff Blankenburg while he was cleaning up after doing a presentation for a .NET user group. During our discussion he popped up something like this on his computer screen (well, with his name instead of mine):

He said something like “you guys don’t use Google alerts?” and after the only thing we returned was blank stares he went on to explain how Google Alerts works. Basically you define some terms you want to watch and then Google send you an email when it finds a reference to them. Jeff explained that he likes to use it to track mentions of his name or projects that he’s working on or that he’s interested in.

At the time I thought to myself “I’m not an MS evangelist and I don’t do marketing so what would I need to track?”. On my drive home I realized my initial reaction was wrong. I am in the marketing biz. We’re all in the marketing business – marketing ourselves at the very least. I also blog about the company I work for, the products I work on, my team, my own creations, etc.

Since that time I’ve been using Google Alerts to follow my name and some of my web sites. Being able to read and respond to those references has been a tremendous experience. After doing a presentation at a Day of .NET event I found a blog post a few days later where an attendee of my session said that the material was good and he learned a lot. Awesome! I’ve also used it to leave “Thank you, glad you liked it” comments on blogs that mentioned finding the AspDotNetMVC site and saying that it was a good resource. In fact, one blogger mentioned that the main RSS feed of the site provided way too much information and he had to unsubscribe after a couple of days. As a direct result of reading this feedback I created a second feed for the site that included a lot less “noise” and responded back in a comment to the original blog post that I had done so.

Along with Google Alerts, Jeff provides some other great tips in his Seven Steps to (Shameless) Self Promotion post. It’s definitely worth checking out. Thanks for the reminder about personal business cards, Jeff. I ran out a couple of months ago and need to re-order.

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Rob Howard - Enterprise 2.0 Keynote at VSLive!

Rob Howard — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 05:03:05 GMT

Slides from my keynote for the VSLive! conference in Dallas, "Building the Infrastructure of Enterprise 2.0", is published on SlideShare:

http://www.slideshare.net/robhoward/vslive-dallas-keynote-presentation/

Posted to Industry

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ScottWater.com - Multiple Work Roles on Azure

ScottWater.com — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 01:51:16 GMT

One of the early Windows Azure features that really excited my was the worker role functionality.

If you are not familiar with work roles they are basically a very simple way to do back ground processing when hosting an application on Azure.

Here is a worker role skeleton:

public class WorkerRole : RoleEntryPoint

    public override void Start()

        while(true)

            //Do work here

    public override RoleStatus GetHealthStatus()

        return RoleStatus.Healthy;

In most case, your work role is going to simply process messages added to a queue. This has a couple great benefits:

It is drop dead simple.
Provides a structured path to move heavy processing out of your web application and does not require managing your own back ground threads.
Since queues (and all of Azure storage as well SDS) are REST enabled, you can easily push tasks to a worker role from just about anywhere (Azure web application and existing applications)

However, as of today, you can only have a single worker role (although you can have multiple instances) associated with an Azure project. I am really hoping this is changed before RTM since working around it is pretty ugly.

Multiple threads - you could create multiple threads within a single worker role. This is very easy to do, but will be very hard to scale since all of your threads will be treated as equals. There are some other things you could do to control this, but it just gets more complicated and uglier with each attempt.
Additional Role Projects - you can today add multiple roles to a single solution file. You can then configure multiple start up projects which gets you the necessary functionality but has two major issues.

Deployment - You will now have to do multiple deployments. There maybe times when your additional work roles are out of sync with your web application and vice versa (in addition, the current CPT limits you to one hosted project, so there is no way to build an application today using this model).
Duplicate configuration - you will now be forced to manage multiple configuration settings. This is not rocket science, but something that will likely catch you off guard at some point.

Overall, I love this functionality and it will simplify (and promote) building more loosely coupled message driven applications...which is a really good thing. However, without support for multiple roles it is going to be severely crippled. I know the Azure team is definitely listening, so hopefully this is something we will see supported very soon.

Posted to Code and tagged as azure , workerrole , cloud-computing

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ScottWater.com - Balsamiq

ScottWater.com — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 04:17:40 GMT

Ayende's post today (or yesterday) about Balsamiq reminded me that I needed to write up a quick review.

Disclaimer: As you see this is a great tool. However, in the current economic climate I could not pass up a free post/review for a tool that I already like. So yes, I did receive a free license in exchange for writing about this tool. And yes, that will make some people a little creepy and I am usually one of those people. However, I liked the tool so this post is technically saving me $79 for the 10 minutes it took to write, which is way more than I will make in advertising.[1]

I have been using the demo version of a couple of weeks and I have to say that while it is relatively simple it is a very handy tool.

Since I do not have anything interesting to share, I grabbed a nice example off of the Basamiq site.

Here are the basics:

Everything is drag/drop and resizable.
Most items allow you to edit the text by clicking on them.
Complex items such as tables, tabs, and breadcrumbs use a comma delimited format.
It is built with Adobe AIR and does not post to Twitter. Seriously, an AIR application that is also not a Twitter client. I was stunned as well. :)

This is a great little tool for any developer, PM, or business type person who could use a little help expressing themselves visually. At $79 this tool is a steal. However, see my disclaimer above.

[1] Now realizing how great a gimmick this free license move is. Kudos Balsamiq on the great tool and clever marketing. :)

Posted to Software and tagged as balsamiq , marketing , easy-things

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ScottWater.com - GraffitiCMS RoadMap

ScottWater.com — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 02:03:03 GMT

We finally got an updated version of the Graffiti roadmap up on the site. There are some very noticeable updates and reprioritization. We (Telligent) have some lofty goals with Graffiti, but we came to the conclusion that we need to focus some more time on the basics before we start muddying the waters with features such as forums.

For those of you following Graffiti, you are well aware that we had not done a great job on getting updates out the door. Being (previously) a bootstrapped company[1] you have to make tough choices about where you position resources. We knew we wanted to do much more with Graffiti, but until recently the picture was not nearly as clear. Since resources where tight, we decided to focus our attention in some other areas like Community Server, Evolution, and Harvest where what needed to be done was crystal clear.

There are obviously (and rightfully) some users who are very frustrated with the situation. The first thing we are going to do is give every 1.x license holder a free upgrade to 2.0 when it is released in 2009. The next thing (and really only thing that matters) is we will just have to show you.

We are well aware we are not the only game in town, but I love where we are going with this and for those of you who choose stick with us, I am sure you will love it as well.

[1] In today's economy, even when you are founded or earning billions you need to think like a bootstrapped company.

Posted to Business and tagged as graffiti

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ZacBowling.Com - Bulk Twitter Import Tool

ZacBowling.Com — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 04:53:03 GMT

I created this tool a little while ago but didn’t talk about it much. It’s a little tool that helped following everyone in my company at the time really easy. One big missing feature in twitter is to be able to follow a big list of users easily. So I created this tool. It requires [...]

ZacBowling.Com - IPv6 Traffic

ZacBowling.Com — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 01:42:25 GMT

I’ve noticed a spike in IPv6 traffic to my blog lately. I guess I have one of the few blogs on the web with IPv6 accessibility. It’s something that amazes me isn’t more widespread yet. I’m just waiting for Time Warner to support IPv6, but that means that my cable modem will need a DOCSIS [...]

ScottWater.com - Bloggers Holiday Charity Challenge - Apple

ScottWater.com — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 05:36:32 GMT

Others are starting to get involved in the Bloggers Holiday Charity Challenge and not using eBay, so it is time to drop eBay from the name.

I'm donating all of my Lounge ad network earnings for November and December to our local food bank [1]....And not only that, but after talking with James, he's decided to sweeten the deal by donating his portion of revenue of any blogger in The Lounge who does the same thing. That's pretty cool. [Dave Donaldson]

A big early things to Dave, James, and any other Lounge blogger who takes James up on the deal!

I am still moving forward with my eBay listings. Today's theme is Apple.

Remember, 25% of the purchase price of all of these items will go to Alex's Lemonade Stand.

Posted to Life and tagged as apple , bhcc

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ZacBowling.Com - Turkey Love

ZacBowling.Com — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 01:09:15 GMT

Click to Play http://zbowling.com Love your turkey… Happy Turkey Day….

Dan Hounshell - Looking at ASP.NET MVC – following my own lead

Dan Hounshell — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 08:53:00 GMT

Several months ago I posted about one of my newest sites, ASPDotNetMVC.com. One of the main reasons for creating the site was for my own selfish purposes. I had begun digging into ASP.NET MVC and I wanted a site that aggregated all the good ASP.NET MVC news and blog posts so I could keep up to date. Since that time I’ve done a lot of reading but little doing, other than a side trip with Kigg, a Digg clone written with ASP.NET MVC (Upgrading Kigg to ASP.NET MVC Preview 3, How to decouple the ASP.NET Membership database from Kigg and How to use Kigg as a service from another site).

This weekend I finally made some time to get my hands dirty. My first task is to convert the ASPDotNetMVC.com site from web forms to ASP.NET MVC. So far things are going well and I’m actually surprised at how quickly it is progressing. In a couple of hours I was able to get the master page setup and convert all of the static pages and content to controllers/views (things like the About page, some of the home page, etc). The next step, which I’m currently in the middle of, is converting the Contact Us form. Then the more difficult parts: converting existing controls, rss feeds, and the dynamic content (the majority of the site!). It’s been a long time since I’ve had to hit Google for nearly every little piece of code that I write. It’s a bit frustrating, but challenging and invigorating at the same time.

I won’t set a timeline because I don’t know what challenges I will run into yet. I should have time through the holidays to keep plugging away. I’ll be sure to post if I run into anything interesting.

BTW, I updated my Preview 3 version of Kigg to the ASP.NET MVC Beta bits on Friday night and it was a piece of cake. I just followed the Beta Release Notes instructions for “Upgrading and Existing Preview 3 application to Beta” and things went well.

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Rob Howard - Harvest 2.0 now available!

Rob Howard — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 04:41:09 GMT

Harvest 2.0 is now available. This release includes a significant number of improvements (scorecards, sentiment/tonality, forecasting, and more).

Want to learn more? You can watch a great video overview that Jana, the Harvest Program Manager, put together or download the Harvest Product Overview PDF.

The planning for the next version of Harvest is well underway and Marc Smith will be helping shape a lot of the functionality as Telligent continues to invest in Social Analytics.

If you would like to speak with someone about Harvest, please contact us!

Posted to Harvest

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Rob Howard - Telligent hires Sociologist Marc Smith

Rob Howard — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 12:58:27 GMT

Marc Smith, formerly Senior Sociologist Researcher on Microsoft's R&D team, has joined Telligent as our Chief Social Scientist.

Marc will lead Telligent's R&D efforts around analytics and business intelligence (tools to help you understand what people are doing in your communities), specifically Telligent Harvest.

For the last 10+ years Marc has been instrumental in defining, understanding, and describing the relationships that people form in online communities. You can read about some of his previous work in this 2003 C-NET article or this Online Community Report article:

The industry, more than ever, needs help defining what's important and how you measure the value of communities. Groundswell set the stage for describing this problem, we aim to address it even further. We’ll have more news to share about Telligent’s commitment to business intelligence around social analytics and what we expect Marc's impact will be in the coming months.

The short-story: we’re making a big bet on BI and analytics.

Posted to Telligent

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Dan Hounshell - Can I get a Mulligan on the case order?

Dan Hounshell — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 01:07:00 GMT

This is part 4 in a series about building an Eco-Friendly Economical Windows Home Server.
Part 1: In search of an Eco-Friendly Economical Home Server
Part 2: In search of an Eco-Friendly Economical Home Server 2, Electric Boogaloo
Part 3: A Cheap and Green Windows Home Server
Part 4: Ordered parts for Eco-friendly Economical Windows Home Server

After some post-mortem review of my order I’m feeling some buyer’s remorse. The case that I ordered for my eco-friendly economical Windows Home Server box wasn’t as small as I remembered to be. At 15.4” x 7.1” x 14.8” (HxWxD) it is a little smaller than the case of my Dell Dimension 5150 but it is nowhere near the size of the HP MediaSmart servers at 9.8” x 9.2” x 5.5”. But it was still cheap at $39.99 and free shipping!

If I were looking for something a little more compact and a little more stylish while still fitting into my budget theme (and if I had a Mulligan) I would probably opt for something more like one of these Athenatech cases:

	Athenatech A100SC.200 Black/ Silver Steel MicroATX Desktop Computer Case 230W SFX Power Supply – Retail 13.5” x 5.8” x 14.5" (HxWxD)	$42.99 Shipping: $11.99
	Athenatech Black Steel A100BB.270 Micro ATX Media Center / HTPC Case – Retail 13.5” x 5.8” x 14.5" (HxWxD)	$49.99 Shipping: $11.99
	Athenatech Silver/ Black Steel A106SB.200 Micro ATX Media Center / HTPC Case – Retail 14.5” x 5.8” x 15" (HxWxD)	$62.99 Shipping: $15.99

The A100SC and the A100BB are both 2 inches shorter, more than 1 inch narrower, and about the same depth as the CompuCase 6K28BS and I think they look a little sleeker, too. Swapping for either of these would increase the build price by $15-$20. The A106SB is not quite as diminutive as the other two but it still comes in 1” shorter and 1” narrower than the CompuCase 6K28BS, but looks a lot nicer for a $35 price increase. Any of these three cases would look just as good set horizontally or vertically. I like the looks and reviews of these cases, I may keep them in mind for a future budget Media Center/HTPC build. Or I might just go ahead and order one of these now for my WHS box and store the previously ordered case for a future project.

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Dan Hounshell - Ordered parts for Eco-friendly Economical Windows Home Server

Dan Hounshell — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 03:33:00 GMT

What a difference six months makes in the price of run-of-the-mill computer desktop hardware. In my last article the cheapest I could get a decently powerful Home Server setup was for about $470 including shipping. By the time I added the $149 cost for Windows Home Server I was in the same ballpark as the HP MediaSmart Home Server setups, though it was a little greener and a little more powerful. Still, it didn’t make a lot of sense to go ahead and do the build.

Fast forward 8 months and with a little tweaking of chosen parts I was able to order a kit with better specs than the $650 version of the HP Home server for just over $300. That price does not include the cost of WHS itself ($149), but I’ll be enjoying a 120-day eval for a couple of months so I can defer that cost. Even if I included it, though, I’d still be at only $450, which is about $200 less than the similarly spec’d (yet still not as much RAM or CPU and not as green as my setup) HP MediaSmart EX 475 at around $650. At $200 less and better specs the timing is right for me to pull the trigger and do it.

Here are the parts I ordered a few nights ago from NewEgg. I should receive everything this week so I plan on putting it together next weekend and then basking in the wonderfulness that is promised with WHS.

	HEC 6K28BS Black / Silver 0.8mm SECC Steel MicroATX Mini Tower Computer Case - Retail	$42.99 Shipping: $11.99
	Antec earthwatts EA380 380W ATX12V v2.0 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Power Supply - Retail	$29.99
	Western Digital Caviar GP WD5000AACS 500GB 5400 to 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive – OEM x 2	$64.99 x 2 Free Shipping
	Kingston 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Desktop Memory - Retail	$15.49
	AMD Athlon X2 BE-2400 Brisbane 2.3GHz 2 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM2 Dual-Core Processor - OEM	$39.99 Free Shipping
	MSI K9A2GM-F V3 AM2 AMD 740G Micro ATX AMD Motherboard - Retail	$52.99 Open Box: $36.76
	MASSCOOL 5F9001B1H3 80mm Ball CPU Cooler - Retail	$9.99

CASE: I wanted a case that was small(ish), looked pretty good, fairly quiet, and could hold 4 internal hard drives. The case I chose has a nice clean look, got good reviews on NewEgg, and it is fairly small: about the same size as the HP MediaSmart boxes. Over the next week I will re-review blog posts and articles I’ve read in the past about building a quiet PC.
POWER SUPPLY: I wanted an 80+ certified power supply in about the 300W range. I had been looking at the 300W Seasonic at about $40. But then I saw the Antec Earthwatts on sale for $30 and I couldn’t pass up the $10 in savings. Plus I’ve read in a couple of places that Seasonic makes those power supplies for Antec. That may or may not be true, but even if it isn’t true the two must be very close in quality for the comparison.
HARD DRIVES: I’m sold on the Western Digital Green Power drives for this application. I got two 500GB drives at $65 each. These things were over a hundred dollars each 8 months ago. With the price of the 1TB versions at just $129 I came very close to going with two of those instead. Personally I would have done that, but the WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) played a big part in that specific decision.
RAM: The HP WHS boxes come with just 512MB of RAM, even the higher end box with 1TB of drives, so I figured that is a good place to start with my setup. I could have gone with 2GB of RAM here for $30, but I figure that 1GB is good enough for now and if the box needs more I can easily and cheaply add another 1GB stick later.
CPU: I think that the AMD Athlon X2 BE-2400 may be the perfect CPU for this setup. It is 2.3 GHz, dual core, 512KB L2 Cache AND it’s rated at 45W – the same as the AMD single core processers. Plus it was only $40! So basically for the same price and footprint as a single core 1.8 GHz Sempron (like what is in the HP boxes) I was able to go with faster dual cores and more L2 cache. That is a no-brainer!
MOTHERBOARD: The minimum specs that I wanted for a board were MicroATX, AM2 processor, 4 SATAII connectors, support for at least 4GB of RAM, onboard Gigabit Ethernet, and lots of USB connectors. I chose the cheapest name-brand board that met those requirements and had good reviews. I was also lucky(?) enough to find an open-box version for $15 less. The jury is still out on whether the open box version was a good choice – I’ll let you know the answer to that after I assemble and make sure it isn’t DOA.
CPU COOLER: Since I ordered an OEM CPU it doesn’t come with a cooler. I chose one similar to the OEM style that was cheap and got good reviews. It should meet my needs fine.
OTHER: The reviews I read about the HEC/Compucase case that I selected said that the rear case fan was sufficient and rather quiet (surprising for one that’s included in a case) so I’ll delay purchasing any additional or replacement case fans for now.

The total price for everything that I ordered was right about $310 (I added 2 SATA cables that I may or may not need) and was about $330 after shipping. Had I not added the SATA cables and gone with an AMD single-core Sempron (saving $10) the total price including shipping would have been right around $300.

I’m very pleased with the parts and the value. Hopefully I’ll be just as pleased with the end result. I plan a follow up with notes on the build after next weekend.

I’m excited. I cannot wait for the BBT (Big Brown Truck) to show up at the door with my box(es) of parts.

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