Doodle Graphics

As I said in my last post, I've rebuilt the site using ASP.NET MVC - other view engines are available, might be better, or at least better suited to your ideology, but this was the impetus I needed to actually start looking beyond the realm of Webforms.

A couple of updates on stuff:

1. Just before Christmas I launched a new website for our church: Holy Trinity Beckenham (let's say it was a "soft launch" ). This was built using the amazing N2 CMS, which gave me everything I was looking for in a content management system, running in ASP.NET MVC, without me having to build the bulk of it - I'll do some posts in the future on the tweaks I made to it.
2. You should now be able to subscribe to the latest blogs and (the new/re-instated) latest photos feeds directly from the homepage of this site. The latest photos can also be found on the albums page, and each album now has it's own latest photos feed as well.

As you might have seen, ASP.NET MVC 2.0 was released this week at MIX along with a handy tool to help upgrade your solutions, so I decided to take the plunge and see how much effort I'd need to go through to upgrade. It turns out not much.

Update: As of Entity Framework 4.1, the MinLengthAttribute is no longer needed as it's now part of the framework, but the length is the second parameter in the string format argument list, with the field name in position {0}. 06/06/2011

Flickr.NET is a ".NET library for accessing the Flickr API". It's hosted on CodePlex, and (thankfully for me) updated to version 3.0 Beta just before I downloaded it.

I host all my images here on the site, provide RSS feeds of both the latest photos and each album, however beyond using a service like twitterfeed I'd not found a nice way to integrate it into other social networks - Facebook can only accept one blog feed directly and while Google Buzz picked up on the blog feed through the "Connected Sites" options (I guess through the WebMaster tools association) it only seems to accept the first feed it finds, so I thought if I post the images to Flickr as well, then there would be more integration for them.

Update: There's now a "How-To" guide to Doodle Grouper 28/11/2011

Update: I've uploaded a newer version, for more details see: Doodle Grouper 1.0.0.3 Released 05/04/2011

Update: I've uploaded a newer version, for more details see: Further work on Seesmic Desktop 05/07/2010

This is one of those "20/20 hindsight is a wonderful thing" posts.

The basic issue is that Visio and Project aren't really part of Office, and should probably be uninstalled before you upgrade the main Office Suite - don't rely on their installers to properly clean them out.

Bit of a Link List this one, but it's got a few nuggets in there too.

Thanks to my excellent web hosts LiquidSix Hosting who upgraded our servers within about a week of ASP.NET 4.0 coming out, I've been able to focus on pulling this site over to the latest platform.

Something I meant to include in yesterday's post was around the steps I'd taken to get TypeKit working with the new GoogleApi WebFont Loader hosted version.

As I'm not using Google AJAX api  decided to just call the file directly, but I couldn't seem to get it to work using the docs on GoogleApi using the WebFontConfig object, however following the directions on the Git hub seemed to work better:

We're in the process of moving to Team Foundation Server 2010, and as part of the process, we're updating the process template we're using, creating branded versions of the default documents, etc. Also, with new projects kicking off we're able to really sort out which process template we're using.

More TFS fun and games:

Team Foundation Server 2010 will happily install and configure Reporting Server for you to power all your reporting needs, but I've come up against the following issue when attempting to modify the existing reports, or create new ones:

Update: There's now a "How-To" guide to Doodle Grouper 28/11/2011

Update: I've uploaded a newer version, for more details see: Doodle Grouper 1.0.0.3 Released 05/04/2011

So, with Seemic Desktop 2 hitting Beta this week, I thought I'd just let you all know that I've updated my plugin, Doodle Grouper to work with the current version.

I thought I'd start a new series focusing on what I'm currently working on - Tridion from SDL.

The key thing I'm trying to solve at the moment is the deployment of work from one environment to another - initially one developer machine to another, then onto a shared build/deployment setup, then on through QA, User Acceptance Testing and onto live.