For some time now we've been working on a new option for ASP.NET Developers. ASP.NET MVC !

Phil Haak and the crew have been furiously at work on ASP.NET MVC and Stephen Walter (with great work from Phil, Tom, Jay, Jay-E, Rich, Zac, and JM) has been building a gallery to show off great MVC designs.

It's NOW LIVE HERE (http://www.asp.net/MVC/Gallery/)

To kick things off WE'RE HAVING A CONTEST !!!

You can get all the details and submit your design until January 31st HERE (http://www.asp.net/MVC/Gallery/Competition/)

SplendidCRM Software, Inc., a  provider of Microsoft-centric Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions for open-source use, announced the launch of Version 3.0 of SplendidCRM.

The release of Version 3.0 marks a milestone as it introduces the SplendidCRM Workflow Engine as a flagship feature in the new SplendidCRM Enterprise product.

"For many companies, workflow is a critical feature and we are pleased to be able to tightly integrate SplendidCRM with Microsoft Windows Workflow Foundation," said Paul Rony, President of SplendidCRM.

The Community version is FREE !

http://www.splendidcrm.com/

I thought this article at LinuxWorld was interesting [ Click HERE to Read ].

"Some customers are finding that they have a place for both and that Linux isn't necessarily an economic no-brainer"

Now before the SlashDot army starts to spam the MisfitGeek, I'm a LONG TIME Unix guy and Linux user.

I just hate buzzword jockeys that churn popular phraseology to support their emotional argument without qualified data to back it up !

I often want something between Visual Studio and NotePad :)

ActivieState makes some GREAT software and I recently installed Komodo 5 (I'm a longtime Komodo user)

I especially use it or Python, Perl, and various script dialects !

Some of the new stuff as described on the Komodo web page...

Shared beauty: Consistent formatting improves code readability and maintainability in a team. Easily hook external code formatting tools (like PHP Beautifier, Perltidy, and astyle) into Komodo IDE 5.0 or add tighter integration via an extension.

And more, of course: Like multiple top-level windows, slicker UIs for tabs and sidebars.... Check out the Komodo IDE 5.0 documentation for all the details.

[ If you click HERE you can get a free trial. ]

Mehfuz Hossain has created a cool open source application based on ASP.NET MVC

The CodePlex project can be found HERE !

You can use the application LIVE - HERE !

Huge congrats to Miguel De Icaza and his team on the release Mono version 2.0

You can read all about it here - http://www.mono-project.com/

From their description .....

nAML (.NET Application Language, pronounced as “namel”) is a visual modeling semantics to model .net applications with wide range of specific details. It contains extremely powerful visual notations and semantics to illustrate complex application components, processes and operations easily.

The primary objectives of nAML can be considered as follows:

• Provides a single space to visually describe one or more application systems with structural and behavioral components.
• Provides a single space to visually describe one or more application systems with logical and physical components.
• Provides a single space to visually describe one or more application systems from top to low level.
• Provides a single space to visually describe a part or whole of one or more application systems.
• Extremely simple and easy understand and learn from readers and designers perspective.
• Concentrates on .NET applications, with its related logical and physical entities (user interface, application logic, business logic, database etc).

http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/naml

I'm working on my demos for ZendCon and updating a PHP Chat application built on the Microsoft Ajax Client Libraries and the PHPMSAJAX codeplex project.

Since I want to use a JSON serializer and PHP 5.2 has one built in, I wanted to upgrade the default PHP version on CentOS (5.1) to 5.2.

To do this, I needed to install from an alternate repository maintained by "Remi" .

He has a repository for many distros, but since I'm updating CentOS, I used the RedHat ES5 repository.

Here are the commands you need to run.

wget http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pu...5-2.noarch.rpm
wget http://rpms.famillecollet.com/el5.i3...emi.noarch.rpm
rpm -Uvh remi-release-5*.rpm epel-release-5*.rpm

Ater these steps the .rpm(s) are you your system but that not installed and active.

To "install" them do this.....

yum --enablerepo=remi update php

PHP 5.2.6 should now be installed.

Check by running this command in a console.

# php -v

The output should indicate the latest version of PHP.

To see the results from phpinfo(); you'll probably have to restart Apache. (Or at least I did.)

Christian Wenz has pushed a new release of he PHP libraries for the Microsoft AJAX libraries with support version 3.5.

Get it here on Codeplex http://www.codeplex.com/phpmsajax

The Slackers have been busy !

Check out the Open Source project on CodePlex.

http://www.codeplex.com/AjaxDataControls/

Not only is there a controls library and all the source code for the controls but a RICH set of demos that illustrate utilization.

I'm now using them in my own projects.

Check 'em out !

There is a reason they call me the Misfit Geek :)

I've been doing PHP work for almost 10 years and I've worked at Microsoft for 7 of them.

When I talk about Open Source, it's not form a "religions" perspective. I'm interested in the applications, the people and the business model.

A PHP friend, Wez Furlong,  share a passion for making things that were necessarily designed to work together do exactly that. Wez is a pretty big figure in the PHP world and we did a panel together a few years ago at MIX in which Wez brilliantly described Open Source as "Itch Driven Development".

The point is, it's the community need that drive the success of an Open Source project, no matter what the underlying technology.

This one died.

Check out my next blog post for a not on a COOL project that is alive and well !

Lots, even MOST PHP applications are Open Souce but what if you want to distribute your application but don't want to distribute your PHP Source Code ?

Check out Nu-Coder from NuSphere.

Nu-Coder converts the source code of PHP Script into compiled PHP bytecodes for both accelerated runtime performance and maximum security.

http://www.nusphere.com/products/nucoder.htm

Not really "new" news but I stumbled across this while trying to figure out why Twitter seems to be down every day these days.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/01/twitter-said-to-be-abandoning-ruby-on-rails/

“We’re hearing this from multiple sources: After nearly two years of high profile scaling problems, Twitter is planning to abandon Ruby on Rails as their web framework and start from scratch with PHP or Java (another solution is to stick with the Ruby language and move away from the Rails framework).”

Its hard to know in a scenario like this if it's the architecture, the framework, runtime issues, etc.

Anyone know the specifics behind Twitters performance issues ?

Version 1.0 of the SQL Server 2005 Driver for PHP is available for download on the MSDN download site.

The possibilities are endless !!!

I installed Yahoo's Browser Plus and run it though it's paces today (few passes as they are in the current preview.)

This download is a quick 4 Megs and it installs the  VC++ 2005 Redistributeable.

Due to what are primarily described as security concerns the use of BrowserPlus is currently restricted so that it will only run of Yahoo's own web properties.

There are 2 demos.....

1. A File Uploader
2. An IRC client
3. A JSON Inspector.

Clearly we, as web developers, have a growing understanding that we need more than what the browser offers, at least in specific scenarios.

But why Yahoo Browser Plus.

Yahoo more or less describes the effort as a philanthropic one, built and offered up for the good of the rich web, but I wonder is there some value I'm missing.

Silverlight and even Flash seem to me far more feature rich and, for that matter Google Gears and JavaFX also seem more promising.

It's the new web so I'm always interested in what it will take to build the next great ASP.NET application.

Check out and let me know what I'm missing.

http://browserplus.yahoo.com/

WUX315 - PHP on Windows: Not an Oxymoron!
Session Day/Time: 6/6/2008 10:15AM-11:30AM
Room: S230 A

Is it a well kept secret? From Microsoft Internet Information Services, to AJAX, to Microsoft .NET, Windows is a viable platform for your existing PHP based applications. In this session, see how to configure PHP on Windows for performance and reliability and how you can take PHP applications to the next level by leveraging .NET and Windows.

WUX314 - AJAX Programming with the Microsoft AJAX Technologies
Session Day/Time: 6/5/2008 4:30PM-5:45PM
Room: S320 C

Microsoft AJAX Developer technologies are a collection of offerings that make AJAX programming slick and productive, but have you wrapped your head around all the pieces? This session provides a soup-to-nuts explanation of the Microsoft AJAX Technology Stack and demonstrates how to use Microsoft Visual Studio for AJAX, The ASP.NET Extension for AJAX, The AJAX Control Toolkit, and non-Microsoft third-party AJAX Libraries to develop true RIAs.

Microsoft announces the CTP release of SQL Server 2005 Drivers for PHP

This opens up some very cool possibility for heterogeneous environment developers.

My first project ? A PHP Class library to integrate with ASP.NET's Membership & Profile System.

Click HERE to get the SQL Driver CTP

Click HERE to get the FREE Express Versions of SQL 2005 & Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express for ASP.NET

I'm still at the Lang.NET Symposium.

I cornered Miguel today to ask him a question about Novell's Distos.

He said "Joe !!, You always &^%-slap me in your blog."

I felt bad. My negative opinions about Mono have only been about the IP issues and never about the technology or Miguel.

If you don't know Miguel, he's the genius behind The Mono Project, and when I say genius, I mean he's a friggin' genius. (Not to mention he's a super nice guy, the kind you want to come to your dinner party.)

What he was referring to is that I've comment in the past about mono as it equates to my personal opinions about Microsoft's Intellectual Property.

I have been harsh, but Microsoft LIKES Miguel. (I don't know specifically but I'm sure that Miguel would be working for Microsoft if he choose to.)

In fact, Miguel is one of those rare people in the Open Source community that is an advocate without being a zealot.

What Miguel and a few of his very clever friends have accomplished is truly amazing.

Mono is cool enough. C#, ASP.NET, Winforms in a Cross Platform Way.

More recently, Miguel and Friends and built Moonlight.  Moonlight is an implementation of Microsoft's SIlverlight for Linux.

So Miguel, at this very moment, I'm downloading the VM on your site for Moonlight.

I'm going to try to confirm with Tomas that Phalanger will run on Mono and build a Phalanger demo, complete with Silverlight that runs on both .NET AND MONO !

.... and I will SHOW both in my spring Open Source Conference Presentations.

And.....

If there is a hatchet to be buried, dinner and drinks are on me one night at Mix !