Each Sunday my daughter and I head to Mt. Baker Ski Area for a few hours of skiing, soaking up some cold-air and taking a break from phones, email, etc....  Mt.Baker has a long history and still has no phones, no electricity, and no pretense.  At the end of the day we come home tired but relieved.

Here's a snap of Mt. Shuksan I made about noon on 27 January 2008.

Mt. Shuksan - Washington, US

I'll be there every Sunday until the end of February.

-Paul

Well, it's not the prettiest thing I've ever seen but it does prove that we're on our way to having a full-fledged web commerce solution for Umbraco.  www.gonzocorp.com

We completed the core commerce module integration with Umbraco and have pushed it out to a live site.  Granted, there's not much to see here but keep in mind this is the 'proof' of a dashCommerce - Umbraco integration. 

This site is running entirely from within an Umbraco installation (3.0.3).

Our next step (beyond bug fixes of course) is to complete the integration of the dashCommerce Administration Modules to Umbraco - via an Admin UI Extension.  In addition I noted several areas where the dashCommerce base code could be streamlined and I will address several of these areas.

Finally, given our earlier promises of making this project available to the community we've reserved a Code Plex name and will post the code as soon as it's consistently stable.

www.codeplex.com/dc4Umbraco

I'll update here as we continue to make progress.

-Paul

Original post is here:

http://www.motusconnect.com/blog/2008/1/16/asp.net%20membership%20and%20profiles%20with%20umbraco%20-%20dashcommerce%20integration.aspx

As our effort to integrate dashCommerce with Umbraco continues we have passed another milestone - which means we're getting closer!  We decided to use the ASP.Net Membership and Profile bits for this implementation even though this means not using the Umbraco membership feature.  No doubt this will be problematic for some folks who already have assets depending on the Umbraco membership piece.  All I can say is "sorry."  However, looking forward with dashCommerce and Umbraco this is the right choice.  With Umbraco 3.1 we'll (very likely) see support for the ASP.Net Membership and Profile providers.  This eventuality puts out integration in a better spot.  Though it is important to note that our implementation depends on the ASPMembership schema and the Umbraco Membership will depend on the Umbraco Membership schema - some data transition will be required.

So, what we've done is to encapsulate the Profile Properties in a UserProfile class.  This allows us design time access to these properties and greatly speeds our development.  dashCommerce, by default, defines Profile Parameters in web.config.  We're giving up some of the flexibility of the .config approach in order to gain the development acceleration.  If anyone has input on this I'd appreciate it. 

The UserProfile class looks like this:

    public class UserProfile : ProfileBase
    {

    public UserProfile() {}

        public string firstName
        {
            get { return (string)base["firstName"]; }
            set { base["firstName"] = value; }
        }

        public Address lastShippingAddress
        {
            get { return (Address)base["lastShippingAddress"]; }
            set { base["lastShippingAddress"] = value; }
        }
        ...

As for Membership, our implementation is quite straightforward - we're just validating users:

Membership.ValidateUser(userEmail.Text,<Password>);

and if we don't have a user with the supplied user name, we create a new one:

Membership.CreateUser(userEmail.Text, <Password>, userEmail.Text);

Obviously there's a bit more to this with the required entries in web.config, references to dependencies, creating the ASP.Net user controls with the appropriate functionality, etc....  But all in all we feel we have a solid implementation in this regard.

Please stay tuned and, by the way, the first site based on this integration is due to be live Friday (18 January) night - http://www.gonzocorp.com/ .  (NB:  This isn't my design - ah!)

-Paul

If you've had an opportunity to read any of my posts over the last few months you'll likely have noted that I tend to rave about the amazing potential of utility grid-based computing.  I particularly like to call out Amazon's EC2 service but have also noted the offering from ServePath (a host) and Media Temple (another host).  One characteristic of these offerings is that they're all based on a Linux grid - well, ServePath actually offers a Windows virtual machine but has the least progressive pricing model and appears to be selling it's 'grid servers' akin to a traditional dedicated server model.  Nothing wrong with this, but it's not really breaking the mold. 

Anyhow, one can certainly run a Windows Server on Linux using a VM.  In fact, I happen to have an AMI in the works for Amazon (which uses the Xen hypervisor) that's running Windows Server 2008 in a QEMU VM on Fedora Linux - as a platform for Umbraco and MySQL.  It works fine but will currently only run in the Amazon 'small' instance - with RAM set at 1.7 GB.  But at $0.10 USD an instance hour this is a very progressive offering and one I'm not giving up on yet.

Last week Michael Sheehan from ServePath clued me in to a new offering from his company - GoGrid.  This looks to be a super user-friendly grid server product offering native Windows machines.  Now we're talking!  If you look the the demo available on the GoGrid.com site you'll see a slick interface where adding a new machine instance is as easy as clicking 'Add.'  Michael declined to let me in on their exclusive beta but I have his blog in Google reader and plan to give GoGrid a try as soon as it's available.

The UI is cool but the most compelling part of this new offering is the pricing model.  Michael told me that there is an offering at the 'pay as you go' level - which I take to mean you only pay for what you use.  This is the model Amazon has as well.  In the case of Amazon there is no minimum charge - I'm not sure if there's a minimum for GoGrid.

So, just a few weeks later we're already closer to the Windows-based serverless internet company than in November 2007.  I see this offering, in conjunction with a cloud storage service (Amazon S3), has enormous potential to change the way start-ups structure their infrastructure and approach internet applications and services based on the Microsoft stack.  I know, for us here at Motus Connect, this opens many doors as we can scale up as needed and sink our precious resources into creating our offerings and not into (mostly) idle servers.

-Paul

Yesterday the family (significant other + 5-year old + me) decided to ring in the new year with a dip in Lake Padden - and we weren't alone.  At a brisk air temperature 37F (1 C) and a water temperature of 36F (1 C) we joined the cold, muddy group in a plunge - for about 3 seconds - and then ran for the towels and hot chocolate.  It can only get warmer from here.

Here are some photos of the so called event (warning:  includes a group of Vikings):

http://www.swim-tek.com/2008_pictures_page_1.htm

Happy New Year!

-Paul