Interested in Sitecore?

Apply for our Mentorship Program by emailing your resume to chris.williams@techguilds.com. Check out our ASP.NET QuickStart and C# QuckStart Libraries. Below is my latest articles.

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Sitecore Guild

I would like to take this opportunity to invite the Sitecore Guild to the family.
You can access the Sitecore Guild at:


You may also follow them on Twitter at: Sitecore Guild On Twitter

Sitecore is an amazing CMS built on ASP.NET. It is flexible as it includes full source code but is also easy for an end user to edit and publish content. For those who have not checked it out yet you need to. You will be amazed.

The next user group meeting for Sitecore in Toronto is in February. Check out the Sitecore Guild often for information on the next user group and for tips on using Sitecore.

If you have any tips, tricks or resources you would like to share please email Susan Fischer at susan@clinchportal.com




Friday, June 11, 2010

Single, Double or Triple Equal?

Someone asked me about this today so I thought I would share it with the guild. Most C# developers are familiar with the single vs double equals but in JavaScript what is the triple equals. Well it turns out the triple equal takes variable type into account. So 1 is not equal to '1' if you use the triple equal.

I did some searching and found an article on devx that explains it perfectly with an example. I have placed the link below:

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Web Farms vs Web Gardens

A friend of mine asked me this question today so I thought I would post the response on the guild in case others were wondering.

Web gardens are different from Web farms. A Web garden is configured on a single server by specifying multiple worker processes for an application pool. Web farms use multiple servers for a Web site.



Wednesday, June 2, 2010

Agile is not working? Scrum neither? Maybe you need to try Ad Hoc What's Hot

I hear a lot of complaints about Agile and Scrum, but in the next breath as they
explain how they are doing it. I realize that they are not really doing Agile or Scrum.
This article explains some of the scrumbuts that are causing you to come to this conclusion.

http://www.softwareresults.us/2010/06/agile-is-fragile.html

This brings back the idea of the new methodology called Ad Hoc What's Hot. This methodology allows you to use your existing methodology for most projects that are large or require lots of external connections or integrations. For the other projects you can use agile or scrum.

Although many hard core agile developers would argue that its all or nothing. Sometimes its more efficient for the project not to use agile either due to current environment, training, or other factors.

If you would like more information on this new methodology please email Susan Fischer at susan@clinchportal.com

Friday, May 21, 2010

Login and Registration Tips and Tricks

This link provides tips and best practices for creating user management pages for your sites. Since this blog is about asp.net I thought you might find it useful.

http://www.getelastic.com/registration-usability-tips-ecommerce/

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Ad Hoc What's Hot Methodology

Everybody is trying to do Agile development, some do it right, others end up using a hybrid solution. The "Ad Hoc" What's Hot" Methodology is for shops that are transitioning to Agile Development but since they are having trouble transitioning into the short cycles, they can run larger projects as per normal but run smaller "Ad Hoc" projects along side that have definite features that will be released in a 2-4 week cycle. These project are done to ensure they are keeping up with what is hot.

For example, you have a legacy web application but iPad is hot so you create an "Ad Hoc" project to develop an app for the iPad. It has specific features and its unit tested throughout the process.

If you would like more information on this new methodology please email Susan Fischer at susan@clinchportal.com and we can send you a white paper.

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Journalism and Debugging Code

A friend of mine twittered this earlier today and I found it interesting so I thought I would pass on the link. The article compares Journalism concepts to those developers use in developing and debugging code. Its an interesting article that is both enlightening for journalists and developers.

http://www.greglinch.com/2010/05/computational-thinking-and-the-new-journalism-mindset.html

If you have any tip, tricks, resources, or articles you would like to share with the guild please email them to Susan Fischer at susan@clinchportal.com and we will post them here.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

How to Write a Provider Model

When I search for creating custom providers, I found a lot of examples on how to create a membership provider, role provider etc. It took a lot of searching to find an article on how to write a provider model but eventually I found this one.

http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/designpatterns/howtowriteaprovidermodel.aspx

I am surprised more people are not taking advantage of provider models. They allow for a more extensible application. Take for example a crm application. The main provider could be the sql server database but you could write a google contact provider, a facebook provider, plaxo, great plains, csv, vcard provider. By doing so you could load contacts generically and save back the results to the various providers. If someone wanted to run their crm app atop google contacts why not.

If you have created your own provider model, please post comments and let us know what you experienced both good and bad.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Issues Consuming Web Services From Java or Lotus Notes

If you are running into issues regarding a wsdl for a .net web service not being consumed by lotus notes here is an article that will assist:

http://michelles-universe.blogspot.com/2009/02/consuming-net-web-services-in-notes-85.html

If you have any tips tricks, or resources you would like to share with the guild please email them to Susan Fischer at susan@clinchportal.com

Friday, February 12, 2010

Barbie - The coder

I came across this article about the new computer engineer barbie. I thought I would pass it on.
Our field goes through cycles where its cool then geeky then cool again. I guess now its cool again. This time so cool barbie is even taking a crack at it.

http://gigaom.com/2010/02/12/coders-get-a-new-colleague-barbie/

Way to go barbie. If you have any tips, tricks, resources or fun links you think would be helpful to the group please comment on a post or email them to susan fischer at susan@clinchportal.com