Wednesday 30 April, 2008 (Blogging | dasBlog)
I am thinking about doing a complete graphic do-over of this blog due to the home and item templates being pretty messed up after all my editing and experimenting with them over the last couple of years. While I was going over some of the macros that you can use I found a nice little page with most (if not all) of the dasBlog macros described including syntax, screenshots and which version they are available from. It takes a lot of the guessing out of using the built in functionality.
http://www.jforsythe.com/jforsythe/projects/dasBlogMacros.html
I also found a customisation category at dasblog.info where you can find information about how customisation of the templates and themes works: http://dasblog.info/CategoryView,category,Customization.aspx
I have also switched the rss feed over to feedburner so that I can get some proper rss statistics.
Monday 21 April, 2008 (Architecture | SOA)
I spent last weekend with a bunch of my Norwegian colleagues at Objectware listening to their experiences implementing SOA and looking over the material that they have produced. It's great to hear some really pragmatic and developer-oriented ideas about how we can implement SOA. In contrast to many of the theories and ideas that I have been reading up on in my current project, Objectware's patterns and theories support the developers as well as the architect/analyst. A lot of the theories on SOA are at such a high level that they really aren't much help when you're looking at actually implementing something.
For me the main points of interest were:
- A new categorisation of services: Human to Application, Application to Application, Aggregated Core Services and Core Services.
- Enterprise Domain Repository Pattern (EDR): basically a hybrid entity service and Master Data Management (MDM) which makes it easier to create services with multiple backends.
- Evolving Service Endpoint Pattern (ESE): A service endpoint WS-*, REST or whatever you want that supports different dialects over time without using client-breaking versioning if previous client calls can still be supported by the business.
I will be looking into the patterns more closely over the next few weeks and may try my hand at implementing some of these ideas with BizTalk.
Friday 18 April, 2008 (Blogging | Reviews)
I have been trying out Windows Live Writer for a couple of posts just to get a feel for how it works. Since my change of jobs and using four different computers on a daily basis for a couple of months I haven't got my IT workspace back in order again. Previously I was using Zoundry for offline editing which I thought worked ok.
Using Live Writer seems to be on par with Zoundry so I'll stick with this for a while and see what happens. The only feature from my original feature list that is missing is support for trackback pings, I have a feeling that most blogs probably don't allow trackback pings due to the risk of spam anyway so I don't feel that this is much of an issue.
Tuesday 15 April, 2008 (.Net | Blogging | Bugs | Fixes | Web)
I seem to have managed to get server pings from dasBlog to work in medium trust! This has been a major issue for me previously, not as much of an issue now that I primarily use off-line tools but it is still great to have it. The key is that originUrl in the medium trust settings supports regular expressions! More info on Haacked, which is where I found the solution. Just to make things clear:
<trust level="Medium" originUrl=".*" />
will allow your web site to send web requests to any external site...
Tuesday 15 April, 2008 (.Net | Blogging | dasBlog)
It turns out that it really was very simple to upgrade to dasBlog 2.0 and ASP.Net 2.0. I did the ASP.Net upgrade first simply by changing which version of .Net to use. dasBlog 1.9 seemed to keep on working without a hitch which meant I could proceed with the upgrade process locally. I followed the instructions and uploaded all the files to my server...
Unfortunately I had missed a section that I had changed in my web.config which of course meant an ugly error page was the first thing that came up. In the upgrade instructions they point out that the most common cause of errors during an upgrade is problems merging changes in web.config so I could easily fix it guided by the detailed error message that I received.
Now it seems that most of the problems that I had with previous versions of dasBlog running under medium trust are gone. The only problem that remains is that the default configuration of medium trust won't allow dasBlog to ping or trackback to other sites, I can live with that!
Tuesday 15 April, 2008 (.Net | Blogging | dasBlog)
I am preparing to upgrade my blog to 2.0. Thats both dasBlog 2.0 and .Net 2.0.
It looks like this version should fix all of my previous issues with my setup, unless my host has done some weird .Net 2.0 medium trust setup, you never know... There is a guide on doing the upgrade install here. As far as I can see the process seems to be:
- Download & place all the files for you new version of dasBlog locally
- Download the content folder from your public site and place it in the local version of dasBlog
- Run the upgrader tool locally
- Merge changes in your current web.config and the new versions web.config
- Merge changes in your current site.config and the new versions site.config
- Upload all the local files overwriting existing files
Seems pretty simple. I also have to change the config of my host to use ASP.NET 2.0.
What could possibly go wrong... 
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent
my employer's view in any way.
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