Jan Blomquist

MVP Summit, Hanselman, The FAQ & AJAX

Wed, 11 Apr 2007 23:00:00 GMT

Attending this years MVP Summit was a great experience. Finally the opportunity to hook up with the DNN Core Team. Also had a long chat with Scott Hanselman (to the left), maybe one of the most influental people in the asp.net community. I've read his blog for many years now and if you haven't, you can find it here: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/

The new and improved FAQ module was released and can be used along the latest version of DotNetNuke and I am quite pleased with the result. Don't forget to put the FAQ module in AJAX mode (settings) and add your own styles.

In fact, making ajax easy to develop has been something that has caught my attention for a long time and I am pleased to announce that the Gaia Ajax Widgets 2007 Q2 was released today. The difference between Gaia and most other frameworks is that Gaia mirrors System.Web on the client and once a control is constructed it is never rendered again. In other words, state is never lost on the client.

This has huge implications and if you haven't checked out Gaia yet, you can download a free version here: www.ajaxwidgets.com

I have also created a quick introduction video that demonstrates Gaia and shows the semantic differences. You can view the video here: http://ajaxwidgets.com/videos/introduction_to_gaia_flash/default.html

FAQ Project almost there & check out ajaxwidgets.com

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 05:00:00 GMT

Only the formal process again before the FAQ project is ready for deployment. Meanwhile I have been busy holding a few AJAX seminars for Microsoft here in Norway. We achieved all time high in amount of visitors and more than 2000 people signed up for the four events in Oslo, Trondheim, Bergen & Stavanger. Still two more to go!

www.ajaxwidgets.com
Apropos AJAX there's something really interesting going on here in Norway. Two friends of mine have been doing ajax bottom up for the last couple of years and now you can see the result on this site: www.ajaxwidgets.com

The implementation is on a pr/control basis and is perhaps the simplest way to do ASP.NET ajax I have ever seen. All the controls can be downloaded for free and tons of sample applications are available.

The magic is it's ease-of-use, it's lightweight and it uses the code-behind model we all are familiar with. No updatepanels or web service calls. It's definately worth your time checking it out.

Anyway,

Talked to Scott Willhite here yesterday too and we agreed to do a couple more DNN videos in www.traincert.net quality in the next couple of weeks too. Those videos will of course be put out on the DNN site for free when they are ready.

Cheers,

FAQ Module v3.3 released.

Mon, 07 Aug 2006 23:00:00 GMT

FAQ Module v3.3 released. This module will upgrade the built-in FAQ module. Some features was removed from the beta to have it fully stable, but AJAX, Templates, Ordering & Categories are still there.

AJAX mode is optional and can be turned on in module settings. For slow web sites you can also setup a loading template to give some feedback to the user while retrieving the result from the server.
The FAQ items can be ordered by popularity or date.
The Category field is optional, but can be displayed in the Faq Item Template. Future versions will have filtering by category.
The module supports templating of Q/A and a token based approach for injecting the various data items.
List of tokens include [QUESTION], [ANSWER], [USER], [VIEWCOUNT], [CATEGORYNAME], [CATEGORYDESC], [DATECREATED], [DATEMODIFIED], [INDEX]
FAQ module stores the Click Count on a particular FAQ item.

The module has been tested successfully on several DotNetNuke 3.3 and 4.3 installations.

The testing feedback and bug reporting from the community was an important part of the development cycle in this release. So thanks to all of you.

FAQ beta 1 available

Wed, 10 May 2006 03:00:00 GMT

I just posted a beta of the new FAQ module on the project page. Highlights include AJAX capabilities, categories, viewCount, paging, sorting, templating and a few other minor details.

Project Kickoff and future roadmap for the FAQ project

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 10:00:00 GMT

This is actually my first blog post ever. It just had to be about DotNetNuke :-)

I have been working with DNN since the early dawn of version 1. I was hooked immediately. As many others.

I was also so fortunate to meet Shaun Walker in Seattle Okt 2005 during the MVP summit and we agreed that I was to be responsible for the FAQ project. In my opinion the FAQ module has a great future and my head is already "spinning around" thinking about features, bugs, requirements and everything related to software development.