I know Umbraco has been gaining momentum over the years and it seems the proof is here:

-Paul 

I have Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 (waiting for my RTM DVD to arrive) running on Windows Server 2003 in a Virtual PC instance.  There was one behavior that made this setup practically unusable - the cursor would disappear when it entered the edit pane of Visual Studio.  I must admit that I was scratching my head over this one and even tried using Visual Web Developer Express 2008 in the same instance - the cursor does not disappear in the Express version.  At any rate, I have this corrected now and following are the steps I used:

1. Right-click on the desktop, select Properties
2. Select the Settings tab
3. Press Advanced
4. Press Troubleshoot
5. Set the Hardware Acceleration slider to one step less than Full
6. Press Apply and OK

For what it's worth, I don't expect I'm using a configuration that is rare and I'm surprised that this didn't come up during Beta 1 - I expect it's fixed in RTM though.

-Paul

I've started placing my posts about Umbraco and dashCommerce at my blog on Motus Connect.  Have a look over there for new posts.

-Paul

With the increasing visibility of PCI 'compliance' is PCI (and PABP) certification an important goal for dashCommerce?

Some commercial vendors are using what I'd classify as misleading tactics to highlight their compliance (https://www.aspdotnetstorefront.com/t-pabp.aspx).  Visa obviously sees this as important (http://usa.visa.com/merchants/risk_management/cisp_payment_applications.html?ep=v_sym_pabp) and the certification process is well documented and straightforward.

Are there a number of people interested in joining me in a project to take dC through the certification process to become compliant - or to at least identify where dC is deficient?

-Paul

Some would say it's already grown up, but the sentiment today is that the scale of DNN - in terms of number of deployments is really quite large.  Bigger than we all suspected.

At the end of the day, in closing, the DNN Corp. guys participated in a panel discussion called 'The Road Ahead.'  Almost this entire discussion revolved around the amazing scale and progress made by DNN.  The mention of areas for improvement were noted, and mostly already understood by the team.

The image above is of the panel. 

All in all I'd say the first N.A. OpenForce conference was a huge success and I am extremely happy I decided to participate.  I'm looking forward to the next rev. of DNN and to continued involvement as a member of the community.

Thanks!

-Paul

First of all let me say that I learned lots and enjoyed, tremendously, the small and interactive nature of most of the presentations today.  However, the demo gods were not happy and I saw only one successful demo all-day.  It's not so much that the demos are essential to the presentations (they're not), it's that we (I) expect demos to work.  There's really not much excuse for the high-rate of failures today.  Too bad because the presentations were extremely useful and presented in a very unique venue - the first N.A. OpenForce! - and having this distraction lessened the potential impact.

Now, the good stuff! 

Creating Accessible (XHTML) Skins Using CSS

Lee and Cathal did a really fine job with this and managed to alleviate some of my fears about DNN skinning and compliance.  Kudos!

SubSonic DAL and DNN

Although the lack of a functioning demo (blamed on a Mac?) detracted the use of SubSonic with DNN was illustrated.  I'm very excited about this having worked with SubSonic in dashCommerce.

One more day to go and I'm thrilled with the format and content of the conference.  Great job Core Team!

I also had the pleasure of speaking with Lorraine Young and Philip Beadle over lunch today.  These two exemplify one of the reasons DNN is as good as it is - they have a passion for DNN and the technology stack supporting it.  Lorraine has produced the DNNGuide which is the comprehensive user guide for DNN - very well done.  Philip has too many accomplishments to list, but suffice it to say he is an instrumental part of the DNN core team.

-Paul

A very full day at OpenForce 2007 (DevConnections to everyone not in the DotNetNuke track).

Scott Guthrie and Co. did a nice overview of Visual Studio 2008, especially Silverlight.  To me, and I expect most others, one of the most compelling things about Silverlight is that it will (with v1.1) be distributed with a cross-platform .NET runtime (Mac and Linux).  I think this is huge - of course I also thought that Mono (the ASP.NET runtime on Linux) would be huge - we'll have to wait and see.  In the image below is the slide from ScottGu's deck that highlights the case for .NET in the browser (cross-platform).

e

DotNetNuke 'Cambrian' - v5.0

On the OpenForce side of the fence Shaun Walker outlined the future of DNN and it's quite exciting.  The v5.x release of DNN is named 'Cambrian' - as in 'Cambrian Change.'  The plan is to address the 'legacy' issues with the skinning engine (read: non-compliant XHTML), add-in native community and social app support, update the UI, and generally bring DNN into the Web 2.0 sphere (my emphasis here).

Another update tomorrow.

-Paul

I've been happily using the Umbraco 3.0.3 MSI installer in our dev environments (both physical and virtual instances) since it was released.  Now I'm in the process of moving some sites to the staging servers.  For some reason the installer fails with a 'sys.sql_logins not found' error with SQL 2000 databases - all the dev databases are SQlExpress.  Numerous posts in the Umbraco forums indicate that SQL 2000 is supported on Win2K3 via the installer.  I tried both using the installer and manually copying the install files, configuring IIS, then running the web-based installer pointed at an existing database - and variations on this as well.  The short version is I was unable to get this to work. 

Incidentally, I also tried using the Umbraco Data Export tool, and the MS provided Database Publishing Wizard.  While both of these work well, but did not help in getting past the installer errors, they both generated scripts that resulted in numerous SQL errors in SQL 2000.  I'm sure these errors could have been fixed with a little bit of work - I was determined to do this a 'no touch' way based on the positive experience I've had so far with the installer.

Here's the 'not' no touch method I ended up with manually install Umbraco 3.0.3 on Windows 2003/SQL 2000/IIS 6:

1. Using the .zip file distribution of Umbraco 3.0.3, extract the files to your web directory
2. In SQL 2000 create a new database:  webCMS
1. Create a new login:  webCMSUser
1. Map the user to the webCMS database and add these roles:
1. db_datareader
2. db_datawriter
3. db_owner (I expect this can be removed after install)
4. public
3. Locate the file 30clean.txt in the .../install/sql/ directory
4. Remove the following four CREATE VIEW statements and keep in a new text file

   1: CREATE VIEW umbracoContentData AS     

   2: ...

   3:  

   4: CREATE VIEW umbracoContent AS

   5: ...

   6:  

   7: CREATE VIEW cmsContentTypes AS

   8: ...

   9:  

  10: CREATE VIEW umbracoContentAll AS

  11: ...

5. Using Query Analyzer/Management Studio execute the 30clean and the 'new view' files against the webCMS database
6. Update web.config with the connection information
7. Remove the .../install/ directory
8. Open a browser and login - NB:  admin / default are the credentials set in the script

In retrospect a manual Umbraco install is really pretty easy.  Hope this helps some in the community.

-Paul