Web development

Made it through the storm

Devin L. Ganger — Mon, 18 Dec 2006 20:52:00 GMT

Although Redmond (and the 3Sharp offices) lost power last Thursday night, we had power again by Saturday and were able to get back up and running Saturday afternoon, with only one minor glitch that was straightened out this morning. To celebrate, here are a couple of quick links:

Visual Studio 2005 SP1 is released. It includes the Web Application Projects, so if you've installed the stand-alone download from last May, uninstall it before running SP1 setup.
ASP.NET AJAX RC1 is released. Big change: the server-side components have changed namespaces into the System namespace, breaking existing server-side code (client-side JavaScript code should be fine).
Exchange 2007 RTM evaluation builds are released. Remember, the 32-bit version is only for evaulation, training, and testing; you must run 64-bit in production (where "production" is generally understood to be "a real mailbox that someone actually uses"; no setting up a 32-bit "test lab" for a pseudo-dogfood testing group as an end-run!)

Community Server 2.1 SP2 is now available

Devin L. Ganger — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 20:31:00 GMT

Wow! Telligent is on a roll!

Community Server 2.1 Service Pack 2 is now available for download. This SP fixes bugs, increases security, and provides feature enhancements.

Some of the notable fixes include:

UI and help text fixes and improvements
Support for the MetaWeblog API newMediaObject method, allowing you (with a MetaWeblog-compliant blogging client) to allow images & files to be saved to your blog
Security and performance improvements

If you're using CS 2.1, Telligent recommends that you download and apply this SP.

Community Server 2.1 SP1 is now available

Devin L. Ganger — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 18:55:00 GMT

Community Server 2.1 Service Pack 1 is now available for download. This SP fixes bugs, increases security, and provides feature enhancesments.

Some of the notable fixes include:

CSS fixes and improvements for blog skins
Performance increases in the TinyMCE editor, aggregate blog caching, stored procedures
Security bugfixes, including a potential cross-site scripting issue

If you're using CS 2.1, Telligent recommends that you download and apply this SP.

Exchange 2007, the OWA experience, and AJAX

Devin L. Ganger — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 14:44:00 GMT

If you haven't had a chance to use Exchange 2007 Outlook Web Access (OWA) yet, you're missing a treat. As one of the partners here told me the other day, "It's just like Outlook!"

As was the case in Exchange 2003, OWA has two modes: a rich client mode when run on supported versions of Internet Explorer, which gives the full user experience, and a fallback mode (referred to in various places as the "reach" client, apparently because it's reaching out to everyone else) that has more limited functionality but gets the basics taken care of. Exchange 2007 OWA continues with this dual-world approach; Users with IE on Windows get the full rich "I can't believe it's not Outlook!" experience.

Before I go any further, I want to make it clear that Exchange 2007 OWA rocks on toast in both modes. OWA has always been one of my "run in IE if at all possible" web applications, as the Exchange 2003 implementation of OWA was good enough to do a quick email or contact lookup in, but wasn't robust enough for my day-to-day email habits. In contrast, I've spent many weeks on various projects where I was logged into Exchange 2003 OWA all day long as my primary mail client, and not really suffered for it. From the testing I've done on Exchange 2007 OWA so far, this will only improve in both cases. The non-IE version is such a better experience.

However, this is one area where I think the Exchange 2007 team needs to concentrate some effort and produce some updates as quickly as possible, because given the rise of AJAX, the excuses for having the two-tiered level of support break down to "IE on Windows" and "everything else" become a lot less convincing.

If you've taken a look at some of the software being produced in the collaboration suite market these days (Zimbra comes to mind), it's obvious that one of the main competitive points against the entrenched market leaders is the user experience. Zimbra, in particular, has a particularly rich web UI that works well in just about any of the leading browser/platform/version combinations.

Regardless of the technical merits, there are a lot of people out there who are convinced *now* that IE is an insecure platform and that it is too hard to properly secure. These are not the people who are waiting with baited breath for IE7 so they can ditch their corporate investment in deploying and securing alternative browsers such as Firefox and Opera. There are some days, where, reading the various pitches, it seems that Exchange marketing thinks that the promise of a better OWA experience will somehow lure these users back to IE. Color me doubtful.

There are times when it seems like Microsoft's emerging "Better together" strategy suffers some gaping holes in communication, and the OWA/IE divide seems to be one of them. Firefox, Opera, and Safari all offer good CSS and JavaScript support; it's not hard to understand why some people feel that Microsoft is making a deliberate attempt to leave them as second-class citizens. It doesn't help when you see announcements such as the relase of ASP.NET AJAX Beta 1. If the ASP.NET team can produce easy-to-use components that allow rich AJAX applications, the casual viewer starts to wonder, why can't Exchange leverage those components and provide first-class support for alternative browsers?

Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by inertia. Let's face some realities here:

The ASP.NET AJAX beta has just recently been released. Exchange 2007 OWA has been under development for quite a while now. They couldn't very will sit and wait for the AJAX components to be released before beginning development work.
Exchange moves to a different project schedule than ASP.NET does. It's probably really bad project management to sync such a large piece of Exchange 2007 to components that are being developed outside of the control of the Exchange group, because now a key piece of functionality is outside of your control. It's really, really difficult to make meaningful estimates on how long development will take under those conditions, and Microsoft gets a bad rap for slipping ship dates as it is.
As the Exchange team has pointed out, it takes more testing resources to be able to run the battery of tests that the rich client OWA is subjected to against a large matrix of browsers and operating systems. On the other hand, I'm personally far less sympathetic to this point because clearly their competitors are managing to do it. Even IBM's Workplace offering is fairly browser-agnostic.

Now that the ASP.NET AJAX controls are comign to fruition, I for one certainly hope that the Exchange team can retrofit those controls back into OWA. That may be a major engineering task -- a daunting one -- but I think that it will produce some important wins for Microsoft as a whole far beyond the immediate concerns of "how many additional seats will this allow us to sell?" The main benefit I see is yet another blow to the claims that Microsoft is only interested in promoting its own technologies at all costs. There are some great features in IE that the Exchange team could extend with in the spirit of "Better together" without sacrificing good user experience for Firefox, Opera, and Safari users, still providing a compelling reason to use IE. (The RSS integration, for one, makes me think cool thoughts, especially when Exchange 2007 is accessing SharePoint 3.0...)

The other major benefit is that the Exchange team can certainly help give the ASP.NET AJAX controls a thorough workout. I bet they'd be a major source of bugs and enhancements, which would in turn eventually benefit every single developer and user in the .NET ecosystem. How cool would it be to know that ASP.NET AJAX powers Exchange OWA? Wouldn't that be a great dogfooding story for Microsoft to tell, to be able to evangelize?

Free image manipulation software!

Devin L. Ganger — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 13:44:00 GMT

Every now and then, I need to work with images in a way that goes beyond the use of MS Paint. Unfortunately, 3Sharp hasn't seen fit to keep me updated with a license for the latest and greatest version of Adobe Photoshop, and I've never really liked using the GIMP or any of the other commercial contenders.

One of my favorite SF authors, John Scalzi, maintains not only his own popular blog The Whatever, but also does a paid blogging gig for AOL Journals (their version of blogs). This morning on his AOL journal By the Way, he linked to a free .NET image maniuplation program with some features that are usually the mark of more advanced packages, such as layers and built-in effects. It even includes a plug-in architecture.

I've not used it yet, but I'm downloading it right now and will let you all know how it goes. Frankly, while I love Photoshop, there's so much functionality I don't understand that I always feel slightly guilty for using it, like I'm somehow taking away a license that some genius kid in Portugal could be using to become thenext Einstein. Having a lighter alternative (less than 4MB download!) will be nice. I'll let you know how it goes.

Note: this only works on Windows machines, BTW, since it requires .NET 2.0. The download page has a link to a "full" version of Paint .NET that includes the .NET 2.0 runtime, if you don't already have it installed.

Community Server 2.1 is released

Devin L. Ganger — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 20:06:00 GMT

CS 2.1 is out, and boy does it look good.

Shirts vs. Skins

Devin L. Ganger — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 08:10:00 GMT

I've taken the plunge into learning how to create skins for Community Server. My first attempts will be aimed at getting the basic aggregator pages modified to fit 3Sharp as part of our pending upgrade from .Text to CS, coupled with some custom blog skins. I've also got some work to do for my personal blog, which is going to be part of a larger community of blogs, galleries, and shared forums whose other members will include my wife. That's a lot of skins.

The goal is to be able to start writing and posting some decent tutorials and references that will fill in the gap for the lacking documentation. That's part of the fun of being a tech writer; you see great software that is missing equally good documentation and your fingers itch to start writing.

In the meantime, let me leave you with my current list of CS add-ons, skins, and tutorials since the doc wiki doesn't seem to be updated that much. I really don't like wikis to begin with; if I want someone to come along and edit my work, it'll be someone like Phil in whose skills as an editor I have faith. I've done them as an article so I can come back later and easily keep it up-to-date.