Alec Whittington

I'm alive...and so is the project

awhittington@crystaltech.com — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 18:22:30 GMT

I bet the majority of you thought this project was dead along with myself, or maybe wished for the latter half of that...

4.5.4 Shared SSL support

awhittington@crystaltech.com — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 19:13:07 GMT

If you are hosting your site on a shared server, your hosting company might provide you with a shared SSL site to use with your normal site. Up until now, there was no way to make this work with DNN as the user would need to start on the shared SSL site to keep the SSL experience. The only option people had was to purchase their own SSL certificate and have it installed on their site.

Mix 07 Day 2

awhittington@crystaltech.com — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 04:00:00 GMT

*** This is gonna be a long one so bare with me ***

As I sit in my hotel room watching "Deadliest Catch" (I love that show), pondering all that I have seen over the last few days, I wonder what was the most memorible part for me. There has been so many great things that have been annouced, shown, and / or discussed. I have had the opportunity to meet so many interesting people it is unreal. Most people that know me, know that I am an freak about reading blogs. I even go so far as to require that the developers I work with read blogs daily. This leads me into "The Lunch"

The Lunch
Well today I had lunch with 5 of the most interesting people that I have ever met. The lunch crew consisted of Jeff Attwood of Coding Horror, Phil Haack of SubText and Haacked.com, Jon Galloway of Jon Galloway.ToString() blog fame, Miguel De Icaza of Mono, Dave Nielson of StrikeIron, and Rob Conery of Commerce Starter Kit and SubSonic (huge fan of this). The conversation ranged from whether or not I read Phils blog ( and I do, it was on my feeds so get off my back, j/k) to the Miguel De Icaza challenge 2007. Gathered at that table were some brightest minds in the Open Source and .NET communities. I mean I am sitting at a freaking table with Miguel De Icaza, Phil Haack, and Rob Conry. Holy cow!! These guys are legends within the .NET community as well as BIG proponents of Open Source. It truly was an honor to be included in this circle, thank you Dave for the invite and insisting aI talk with Rob. I owe you one.

Silverlight, Silverlight, Silverlight?
By now I am sure you have read many blogs about Silverlight, well let me tell you, this is going to be a very hot item going forward. My mind is already racing to find exactly where I will use this in CrystalTech's control center and web site. I can already see huge benefits to this. The cross platform remoting debugging is amazing. I think as developers we have been waiting for this for quite some time. I will not touch on this anymore as I am sure there is already a multitude of fresh blog posts on this.

Orcas Beta 1
C'mon Microsoft, I cannot wait anymore for the finished product on this. It really is going to be a great product. The targeted framework functionality, melding with silverlight / expression, and Javascript Debugging. Can you say Wow!

Fellow DotNetNuker's
Tomorrow I am having lunch with Antonio Chagoury, Philip Beadle (hopefully), and hopefully Jim Bonnie. I met Jim today while in the lunch line. Very wierd being called out by name, it caught me offgaurd, but in a good way. It will be nice to put faces and vioces to the names. I missed the mash-up Monday night, and apparently I missed out big time. Not again I say.

My Top Moments

Meeting Rob Conery and Jon Galloway
Meeting Antonio Chagaury - fellow DNN'er. We clicked from the moment we met.
Flying over with Scott Cate
Defending DNN in the Windows Web hosting talk (whole 'nother blog post - it is on video and audio)
Silverlight
Open Source panel discussion
Key note

I will revise this list tomorrow when I get home and after I meet the fellow DNN'rs as that will be a highlight for me.

Well it is time for me to hit the sack. Tomorrow is a long day and I still have a tone of emails to fire off.

Alec

Mix 07 - Day 0

awhittington@crystaltech.com — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 07:00:00 GMT

It is not often I blog about non-DNN subject matter, so allow me a little leeway in this posting. I am often allowed to travel to industry conferences so that I can keep abreast with what is going on in the world of .NET. This week I will be attending Mix 07 with several people from CrystalTech Web Hosting as well as a few fellow DNNer's. On the way here today, I had one of the most interesting opportunities to sit next to someone who I think is one of the most profound supports of .NET, Scott Cate from myKB.com. Being in Phoenix we often forget just how much of a hot bed of .NET development it truly is. Scott is a Phoenician and someone I had not had the pleasure of really sitting down with and sharing some experiences with. He runs our local DNUG, but I find it very hard to get there. Something I have vowed to change after todays meeting. In our hour long flight we shared some great conversation, thoughts, stories, and ideas. We even managed to give each other a few tips and some laughs.

To me this was the kind of story I had only read about in blogs. Well now I see just how awesome something like this can be. It made me remember why I was a developer, why I love to program, and more importantly why I love being around other developers. It is that brother / sisterhood we form that only comes with from spending hours upon hours of writing and reading code. As we sat and talked, I felt as if I had known him for years and that he was one of my dearest friends. That I think is in part due to the fact we have chewed on the same bone and have had the same experiences. It reminded me of just how important developer to developer contact really is. We often get ourselves surrounded by the same people we forget how important those outside influences are to continuing the creative juices that we all so desperately need.

Tomorrrow will be a long day, I hope to get some face time with Scott Guthrie, but I doubt it will happen. There are some very interesting tracks tomorrow as well as a mashup session from 8PM until 2AM. I will let you know how that goes as I am most interested in that.

Well it is time to sign-off. The drinks are fading and so is my energy. I will write more tomorrow. Maybe I can get a hold of Antonio and Phillip, it would be nice to meet some others that volunteer for the project.

Links 03.03.07 has been released

awhittington@crystaltech.com — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 07:00:00 GMT

It is my pleasure to announce the release of version 03.03.07 of the Links Module has been released. You will find the latest version at http://www.dotnetnuke.com/tabid/125/default.aspx#3366.

I would like to thank the following people for their help through this whole process:
Matt Kellogg
Scott Willhite
Michael Washington

without their help it would not have been possible.

The following changes are included in the release:
enabled nowrap to be set as a setting for the module.

Improvements to Compression Module

awhittington@crystaltech.com — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 07:00:00 GMT

Today we are going to look at improvements to the Compression Module for DotNetNuke 4.5. These were confirmed using DNN 4.5 RC2.

Let's start with a little history. Early versions of DotNetNuke had no provisions for page compression. There were options, such as the Blowery HttpCompressionModule, but they generally required the user to modify the default installation of DNN. In addition to modifying the application, you also had to manually exclude paths and mime types. If you wanted to upgrade your site, you had to modify the web.config to remove the compression. If you did not, hold on it is gonna be a long night.

Starting with version 4.4 of DotNetNuke, compression was implemented in the core. This was a nice feature for many people, but for just as many it was a source of problems. Most problems were found to revolve around the fact that the user had to exclude mime types and paths via the compression.config. This could often lead to a trial and error process that would quickly sour the user experience as well as increase the number of problems an implementor had to deal with. After a thorough review of the problem, it was decided that Default.aspx was the only page that needed to be compressed. Enter DNN 4.5.

Starting in version 4.5, the compression module will only compress the default.aspx page. The end user will no longer have to set-up excluded paths or mime types. You can still exclude paths via the Host Settings -> Compression Settings -> Excluded Paths field. The proper format for this would be TabId=xx, where xx equals the actual number of the TabId. This feature is there in case there is a page (tab) that is giving you problems do to compression. So if I create a page named AlecTest, TabId 357, that has a module on it that is giving me trouble do to the compression, I can then exclude it by adding tabid=357 to the Exclude Paths field.

Overall, I think the improvements are going to eliminate a large number of problems that users were seeing with HTTP compression in DotNetNuke. Under a default installation, the default home page was returning 44k in text. After turning on compression, that shrunk down to 17k. This is a significant savings of bandwidth over many requests.

Links 03.03.06 has been released.

awhittington@crystaltech.com — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 07:00:00 GMT

Well after much trial and error, version 03.03.06 of the Links Module has been released. You will find the latest version at http://www.dotnetnuke.com/tabid/125/default.aspx#3366.

I would like to thank the following people for their help through this whole process:
Scott Willhite
Michael Washington
Steve Fabian

without their help it would not have been possible.

Project Road Map - Updated

awhittington@crystaltech.com — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 07:00:00 GMT

Ok well here it is as promised. First off I would like to thank Michael Washington for taking the time to help me with this. His insight into DNN as well as his ability to listen and help are invaluable to me. We had a wonderful conversation on Saturday and discussed a wide range of topics as well as what direction the project is going to take. Without any further ado here is the plan.

Overall Project Goals
The main goal for this project is to be an easy to use links module that provide some advanced features. The most important thing it needs to do is pass the "Mom" test. If my mom can use it, then I know others will be able to use it as well. The main features we would like to incorporate are the same as before, but I will list them again as well.

Templated Links - This one thing I believe is key to the rest as it will allow the users the flexibility to create links in the format and style they want. Ideally all links formats would be templated with the default being to install the List and Drop Down List templates. Possible templates would be:
- Image Link
- List
  - Horizontal
  - Verticle
- Drop Down List
- Icon Links
- Categorized Links
AJAX - Many area's of the module would benefit from using client-side scripting including the creation / edit process as well as the expanding of the (...) section.
Multiple Link Creation - Allow the creation of multiple links to minimize post-backs. With the Enabling of AJAX, this maybe moot. But it is an area that we would like to keep an eye on for future development.
Known Release Schedule - Adopting an Ubuntu style release process will allow the end users to know when releases are scheduled as well as informing them exactly what will be in the release. Our goal is to release 4 times per year. The release cycles will be 3 months each and will consist of a 2 month coding cycle coupled with a 1 month release cycle. Once a scheduled release has entered the release cycle all development will be stopped and the code base locked unless changes are required to pass the release cycle. This will ensure that feature creep does not become a problem.

Goal for Next Release
Our biggest goal for this release will be to convert the module to ASP.NET 2.0. The release that is in the current release cycle will be the last ASP.NET 1.1 release for the links module. One of the main reasons for doing this is to allow us to re-write the majority of the code that is in the links module. We would like to decouple ourselves from the core as much as possible with the ultimate goal being the only connecting to the core for security reasons (think authentication / role management) and where we need to access core tables. This is a major undertaking so no new features will be added during this time. If we do not use all of the allocated development time, we might consider introducing a new feature. But that will be determined on the fly, not now. The Scheduled release process will start on January 1 with the release scheduled to happen March 31st or before. As this release takes shape, the next scheduled release will take shape and be announced.

I welcome your comments on all of this, so please feel free to post them here or preferably in the forum.

2006 - What I have learned as a project lead and other ramblings

awhittington@crystaltech.com — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 05:00:00 GMT

Well 2006 is almost over and I thought I would share what I have learned this year as a project lead as well as give you a sneak peak at the future.

        First off - this project is not dead, not at all. We have not moved as quickly as I had hoped. I feel that this is my fault and one that can and does plague the Open Source community in general. One of the reasons this happens is because we are volunteers. It is very easy to say "I will do it tomorrow" after a long day at work. Why is this you ask? Because there is no accountability or deadlines. Often times the community does not hold us accountable for our actions (or lack thereof). While it is not the job of the community to motivate the Project Lead and Members, they should hold them accountable. This recently happened to me on the links forums and it was a real eye opener. While I knew I had not made the progress I wanted, here I was being called out in front of everybody on it. Let me tell you how this can such a great motivator, but too much of it can have the opposite effect.

        So how do we solve this going forward? Well first off we do not live in the past, what's done is done, let's move on. Second, we come up with not only clear goals (features, roadmaps, etc) that we have for this project, we come up with a true release schedule. It is no secret that I am a huge fan of Ubuntu Linix and there philosophy. One thing that has lead to their fast growth and success is the fact that they publish release dates and stick to them (well they slipped one time so far). This gives the community a clear cut time frame on when they can expect something. Like most OS's other Linux distros are upgraded on the "WHENEVER" time scale. This just does not cut it for the end user, and is that not whom matters most? So with all that said, we are going to shoot for a 4 time a year release schedule. So every 3 months the users of this module will get a new version with bug fixes and new features. This means that we will have about 2 months to program the fixes and new features with one month left for the release cycle.

       The project roadmap for the current release cycle will be posted in the forums as well as the project page for all to see. As the upcoming releases project roadmap takes shape, it will be posted in the same places as well. As bugs are reported and severity weighed, they will be placed in either the current release or the upcoming one. This will allow anyone who is interested in links to see where we are, what we are currently working on, and where we are going. Now please keep in mind that while your feature request may be very important to you, we do have to weigh the value of it to all users and see when it is appropriate to fit it in the release schedule.

       Now lets move on to feature requests and bug reporting. If you have a feature request or a bug to report, please go to http://support.dotnetnuke.com and use Gemini to record it. Once you have recorded it, post in the forums the Gemini issue number and I will make sure to get it moved to the links module. Once it is moved, I will respond to the thread accordingly. If anyone ever has a question about when a feature the requested will be done or when a bug will be fixed, I will try to the best of my ability to give you a time frame (which release it will occur in) if at all possible.

       I am meeting with my Core Team Liason this weekend and we are going to cover goals for next year. Once we get this worked out, the project page and forum will be updated to reflect this. So look for an update on Monday or Tuesday. Also, the current release is still in the release process. We are still working out the kinks, but have high hopes it will make it thru soon.

So in conclusion, I have learned the following:

Best intentions are great, but often don't cut it.
Being a Project Lead is much more demanding that it seems.
Open Source is great, but without accountability and deadlines it is very easy to slip.
and finally - The DNN community is very supportive overall, but they demand results as well.

If you have any comments please feel free to post them.

Welcome a new team member

awhittington@crystaltech.com — Thu, 26 Oct 2006 07:00:00 GMT

I would like to take the time to welcome a new team member, Matt Kellogg. Matt is a .net programmer for CrystalTech Web Hosting and I have had the pleasesure of working daily with him for over a year. He is very bright and brings many new and innovative ideas to the table. Please help me welcome him to the Links family.