Since the free license for .NET User Groups was very successful, we decided to release a Free Edition of Kentico CMS for everyone!

It can be used for both personal and commercial projects. It’s intended for smaller corporate sites, on-line communities and personal sites (it also supports blogging).

The Free Edition supports:

- WYSIWYG editing

- Rapid web site development without complex programming

- SEO-friendly URLs

- Open API and detailed documentation

- Flexible menu controls

- News

- Blogs

- RSS feeds

- Forums

- Polls

- On-line forms

- Product catalog with shopping cart and PayPal support

- Image gallery

... and it comes with 3 starter sites – Corporate Site, E-commerce Site and Personal Site.

The Free Edition is limited to 1 administrator, 1 editor, 1000 pages and 100 site members, plus there are some limits for particular modules (http://www.kentico.com/cms-asp-net-features/Feature-Matrix.aspx) and a requirement to keep Powered by Kentico logo on the web site.

The Free Edition can be downloaded at http://www.kentico.com/Download/Free-edition.aspx.

Visit us at PDC

Kentico will be exhibiting at this year’s PDC in L.A, please be sure to stop by at booth #419!

Here are some site using Kentico !

http://chennaiitpro.net

http://www.acsug.co.nz

http://www.FLPSUG.com

http://www.madnug.net

http://www.chadnug.com

http://mankatodotnet.com

http://www.dotnetbuzzdelhi.com

A couple of folks have emailed me because that haven't been able to reconstitute the Video Database I've been using in the Data Access video tutorials.

Here is a .zip file.  http://www.misfitgeek.com/downloads/SQLDATA_VideoDirectory.zip

It contains a .mdf as well as a .sql script and the data exported to an Excel file.

Hope it helps.

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 !

Yesterday my wife and my children left the house and my 6 year old asked where they were going.

When Jill told Mia they were going to the mall, Mia said "Good, I wanna get my ears pierced."

She went through with it with no crying and only a few tears and was excited to come home and tell me.

So what does that have to do with Software Development.

Well, it was a reminder to "go for it" !

A while ago I was asked to speak at a conference about something I didn't know if I could make work :)

I've been dragging my feet getting down to working out the implementation details.

So today, I'm going to solve some tricky interop problems !

60 Free controls are available from DevExpress.

Some for ASP.NET and some for Windows Forms.

Check them out at ......

http://www.devexpress.com/Products/Free/WebRegistration60/

The first three videos are live.

#1 | Data Access Layers in ASP.NET Applications

#2 | How to Manually Bind a Dataset to a Datagrid

#3 | How to Work with Datasets and Filters from an ASP Application

More coming soon.

[ Get them here. ]

#8 | Changing Membership Settings in the Default Membership Schema

#9 | Configuring SQL To Work with Membership Schemas

#10 | Understanding ASP.NET Memberships

[ Get them here ]

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

Mike Taulty recently uploaded and amazing collection of Silverlight 2.0 screencasts on how Silverlight works, controls, File IO, networking, UI design,  data-binding, interacting with HTML pages, and more. If you want to learn about Silverlight, this set of screencasts should definitely help!

Here is the full list of screencasts:

1. Silverlight - Hello World
2. Silverlight - Anatomy of an Application
3. Silverlight - The VS Environment
4. Silverlight - Content Controls
5. Silverlight - Built-In Controls
6. Silverlight - Width, Height, Margins, Padding, Alignment
7. Silverlight - Using a GridSplitter
8. Silverlight - Grid Layout
9. Silverlight - StackPanel Layout
10. Silverlight - Canvas Layout
11. Silverlight - Databinding UI to .NET Classes
12. Silverlight - Simple Styles
13. Silverlight - Custom Types in XAML
14. Silverlight - Binding with Conversion
15. Silverlight - List Based Data Binding
16. Silverlight - Simple User Control
17. Silverlight - Templating a Button
18. Silverlight - Resources from XAP/DLL/Site Of Origin
19. Silverlight - Animations & Storyboards
20. Silverlight - Uploads with WebClient
21. Silverlight - Downloads with WebClient
22. Silverlight - Calling HTTPS Web Services
23. Silverlight - Calling Web Services
24. Silverlight - Making Cross Domain Requests
25. Silverlight - Using HttpWebRequest
26. Silverlight - File Dialogs and User Files
27. Silverlight - Using Sockets
28. Silverlight - Using Isolated Storage
29. Silverlight - .NET Code Modifying HTML
30. Silverlight - Using Isolated Storage Quotas
31. Silverlight - Calling JavaScript from .NET
32. Silverlight - Evaluating JavaScript from .NET Code
33. Silverlight - Handling HTML Events in .NET Code
34. Silverlight - Handling .NET Events in JavaScript
35. Silverlight - Calling .NET from JavaScript
36. Silverlight - Displaying a Custom Splash Screen
37. Silverlight - Passing Parameters from your Web Page
38. Silverlight - Loading Media at Runtime
39. Silverlight - Dynamically Loading Assemblies/Code
40. Silverlight - Reading/Writing XML
41. Silverlight - Multiple Threads with BackgroundWorker
42. Silverlight - Insert/Update/Delete with the DataGrid
43. Silverlight - Getting Started with the DataGrid
44. Silverlight - Embedding Custom Fonts

View article...

Deitel books are great learning tools and often used as course text or soup to nuts learning guides.

Also the physical quality of the book (printing, paper choice, color, etc) make it a collectors item if your a book lover)

I had the pleasure of being a technical reviewer on this one (though the way these guys write there isn't much review to do :)

This book includes coverage of the new features in ASP.NET 3.5, Web Services, Silverlight, Winforms, LINQ, WPF and More.

Get more info here: http://www.deitel.com/books/vb2008htp/

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 !!!