FYI, I’m presenting at the monthly meeting of the International Association of Software Architects Puget Sound chapter Wed night (4/27). I’ll be talking about DSLs and Software Factories, including a hands-on look at the tool. If you’re in the Redmond area, the meeting is on the Microsoft campus in Building 43, Room 1560 – the Jefferson Room.

I love this. Except Scott, didn’t you mean to say “I’m an architect MVP”?

I guess we’re still three months out, but TechEd Bloggers is just getting ramped up. Not to many registered bloggers yet. So far, I’m the only registered blogger in the staff category. Last year, I was staff and speaker (the only track owner also presenting I might point out) but this year I’m in marketing so they didn’t let me speak! 😄 Actually, I picked all the ARC track sessions and speakers, so I have no one to blame for myself. Yep, no one to blame but myself for significantly easing my own workload to only worrying about organizing the track, hanging out in the ARC cabana and hearding speakers (note to self, get Ted’s mobile number before the event starts) without the added worry of having to present.

Who else is going to Orlando?

I’m trying to set up a community site for some old friends from high school. Got the domain name, got the hosting space, just need to figure out what to run on the site.

I started by looking the old IBuySpy portal. It’s been a while – it’s now called the ASP.NET Portal Starter Kit. Looks as good as it did when it first came out. However, there’s a slight security issue. My hoster doesn’t allow unauthenticated write access to the file system. Most of the ASP.NET Portal data is stored in the database, however the actual site layout is stored in an on-disk XML file. I could work around this by setting up a portal on my local machine, building out the site, and then uploading the relevant xml file, but I want to have my good friend back east help manage the site, so that workaround does’t work too well.

Next choice was DotNetNuke. They’re about to release their 3.0 version (3.0.11 is supposed to be the final beta). Looks really nice and installed very easily on my local testbed. However, my hoster also doesn’t give my DB account owner rights – I get reader, writer, DDL and security admin but not owner. DNN installs a series of stored procedures (which works on my machine due to having DDL permissions) but doesn’t give EXEC permissions to those procs to anyone except DBO. Woops. I wrote a small utility app that extracts a list of all user stored procs and calls “GRANT EXEC ON \<\<SPNAME\>\> TO PUBLIC” on each one. Seems to work fine, but given the size of the DNN codebase, I’m not sure I’m comfortable that there isn’t something else out there that’s expecting DBO permissions.

Assuming I don’t go with ASP.NET Portal or DNN, what other choices do I have? I’ve got pretty stringint security requirements, plus it has to use ASP.NET (go figure). I’m still looking at:

• Rainbow Portal – similar to DNN in that it started from the original ASP.NET Portal source code
• ASP.NET Community Starter Kit (CSK) – A baseline starter kit for building a community oriented site. Sounds promising.
• GotCommunityNet – derivative of the community starter kit. They bill themselves as CSK 1.1. Sounds even more promising.

Any other suggestions?

Even though I’m a happy NewsGator customer, I decided to try out the new beta version of RSS Bandit. Wow, I really like the newspaper view. I wish I had this in Outlook.

I recently hopped on the GTD bandwagon and among other changes I deleted all my mail rules and started over. Previously, I was routing my email to different folders based on if I was on the To: line, the CC: line, it came to one of the team aliases or none of the above. I discovered that I pretty much only keep good track of my main inbox with the stuff that came directly to me. Other stuff just languished, unprocessed. Now, I route mail to folders based on the mailing list it comes from. Some mailing lists have lower priority than others. This newspaper view would be perfect for quickly scanning these low priority mail folders, esp. with the feature to mark all as read when leaving the folder.