Catching up!

So it has been a little over a week since I got back from CodeGarden 2010, and everybody has gone away on summer vacation it seems (around these parts of the world anyway). I've been busy with a customer project (on Umbraco), so I haven't really gotten around to getting anything done on my own Umbraco projects/extensions.

I feel like I've been out of the loop for about 6 years. 6 years ago we started developing Synkron VIA, so I've been so busy with that and lately busy with running my own business. I know it's a bad excuse, as I developer I need to keep up with new technologies etc.

So in lack of anything else to do with my free time at the moment (like finishing some of my own projects), I'm looking into interesting new frameworks for .NET. If the core team at Umbraco decides they don't need my help, I'll be starting my own project up soon, so I need to take a look at all the shiny new stuff that has been happening with .NET for the last 6 years.

I've been working on my own ORM project for years, and even though it doesn't support LINQ, I think I might use it as a datalayer for my own projects still. I'll have to make it support more dynamical queries, and I'll probably look into making it deploy on it's own, so that it will automatically create the database based on the objects. Well, more on this later.

At the moment I'm looking at IoC (Inversion of Control) and DI (Dependency Injection). Nothing new there, I just need to get updated.

When is Codegarden '11?

I'm just back from Codegarden '10 (Copenhagen), 3 hours in the bus and an hour on the ferry! And not even that trip can get me down. I for one am looking forward to next year, this Umbraco community is one happy and nice bunch.

Just a few headlines from this year, Umbraco 4.5 (was 4.1) released, Umbraco 4 going completely open-souce (MIT) - wasn't it already you might ask, but no, the Umbraco UI actually wasn't - Umbraco 5 - first release probably a year out.

Other interesting subjects (imo): hosting Umbraco in the cloud, Umbraco with LINQ, a build-in search engine with Umbraco 4.5 - Examine, ASP.NET MVC and a really nice session about what Umbraco 5 is going to be like.

Well, I've been thinking about starting on my own CMS project again, I've been compiling ideas and doing a few simple POCs the last couple of years, but with the Umbraco core team opening up more for the projects and process, I guess I'm better off offering my help. So that's what I'm going to do one of these days.

Codegarden '10

It's Friday, it's open session day.

I've just attended the open session on deployment, and it was good to hear other people have similar problems as we do, when working more people on the same Umbraco project.

The sessions has left me thinking. Couldn't the problem, or at least part of the problem, be sorted by using source control? Yes I know, you can't put a complete Umbraco solution in your source control system, but what if you could?

Being more a system/software developer/architect than a web developer, I'm used to having everything in source control. Yes, databases does pose a problem, but what if the important content of the database was actually put in files?

What if you could extract macros, document types, etc. to files?

I'm going to do a brainstorm session (on my own) on my way back home later today, put down my ideas, problems, solutions etc. and then get good old Visual Studio fired up.

Doing major surgery on my framework.

One of the initial important goals of my Custom Website Framework was to keep design and code seperated, so that changes to the design could be done without changing the code.

That goal was reached a long time ago, but the xslt snippets used for creating the output has been included in the project as resource files, so changing the design actually didn't need any changes to the code, but the code had to be recompiled anyway.

So now I'm changing this. I've moved the xslts snippet out of the code. They're now regular files, and these files will be loaded and cached when needed. As I was reworking this area of the code, I started using the generic asp.net cache object, instead of having to make my own with about the same features. It has a nice feature that will actually flush a file from the cache if the file is changed, so now I can make small changes to the xslt files and get the changes live right away without having to restart the application.

Another thing that has been bothering me, is the way I've been handling texts in the framework, or more correctly, localized texts. Instead of having these in the database, as they've been until now, I've also moved them into files. This makes it a lot easier getting someone to translate the site into another language. More on this soon.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Every now and then a game is release that I just have to play.

Tuesday (2009.11.10) Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (MW2) was released and after a quick "shoulder game", I just had to buy it. I played Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (MW) a lot with some friends. Both MW and MW2 are actually a lot more arcadish than what I usually like, but they're good fun and great games for some team play with the mates!

So MW2 is probably the game with the biggest hype ever, it has been released for PC, Xbox360 and PS3. Several other games have been postponed to avoid being released too close to the MW2 release date.

Unfortunately the PC version is pretty much like the console versions. Seriously this game is only going to be entertainment until a proper PC game is released (Battlefield: Bad Company 2). I know the company behind MW2 has to make money, and that is their main concern, but seriously guys... No dedicated servers!? Some times this is slightly annoying, some times a huge head-ache! Bad choice! Hardcore can now only be played after you reach level 19, and then only on 6vs6 maps? Bad choice! Rumor has it that there'll be no modding. Sorry guys, that's the best way to make players stick with a game! Bad choice!

A small hint to PC gamers behind firewalls, if the game tells you that your "NAT setting" is strict, you can forward TCP + UDP port 28960 to the computer you play on! Voila!