I attended the Microsoft Architects Forum in London last month. (Since I was officially on hols I didnt get round to writing up my notes and blogging about it, but I will do so shortly). It was on Software Tools and Methods and was quite brilliant. I found the presentations by folks from Conchango and Tesco very informative, especially being a newbie to the Agile Methodology world. I think Im beginning to see the light. It was even more interesting to realize that Agile and XP are not the same and that XP is only one of the variants under the Agile umbrella. I like the longer iterations of Scrum, in theory, more. [When I actually start using it, I'll be able to post more raves and rants on the same].
James Simmonds of Conchango has some good stuff on his blog. I really like the one on Scrum Sprint Best Practices. Howard Van Rooijen has also put up his slide deck replete with notes and its very nicely done. Havent had time to read more of the other blogs but Im sure they would be good.
I also had good conversations with Aravindra Sehmi about the Enterprise Library and with Michael Platt about the Architect Certification that he had blogged on some time ago. Need to ping Aravindra and Clemens to find out whether Proseware will be released publicly like ShadowFax.
My previous post sang the praises of DNN. Here's a bit of background.
I went back to DNN again because i nearly tore my hair out with Rainbow. I had built the site with the menu structures I wanted and decided to start working on the skin. So i copied an existing skin, renamed the folder and started working on the CSS. All I intended to do initially was change the banner color and the color scheme for the tab highlighting (active tabs, inactive tabs, hovering etc). But no matter what I did, the active tab name always remained blue which made it invisible when the background happened to be the same color. There was also no entry for the Blue color in the corresponding CSS class. I just couldnt find the blue setting anywhere. I dont know if there is some kind of inheritance in CSS and if this class had an unholy alliance with another class which caused it to be rendered in this color. But i looked for the hex representation in the code and couldnt find that either. A total mystery. And since Im not the patient sort, i just dropped it and turned back to DNN in desperation which, as I explained, has turned out to be a really cool app.
This reminds me of another time where I wanted to change the orange skin in Rainbow to something else and found the orange color hardcoded in the menu building module.
However I wont blame the Rainbow team . As one of the documents (in DNN) pointed out, skinning can be awfully hard especially in a generic portal software. All it takes is one module developer or skin developer to harcode color schemes or absolute positioning and everything gets screwed. In DNN they appear to have taken a different approach to skins which allows a complete separation of modules and presentation. Perhaps in the next version of Rainbow we will see something better.
I'm already very impressed. I downloaded and installed DNN 3.0.8 and then installed one of the competition winning skins, the BLUE theme and was immediately presented with a graphical set of layout options dealing with menu alignments (horizontal and vertical) for the skins and another set of options for the containers. The Preview and Apply options worked flawlessly too and the site I built on my laptop looks really amazing. Its very close to the kind of thing I was looking to build earlier and I've got some ideas on how I can extend and customise it to get exactly what I want. The ASP.NET forums have a good post on "dogfooding" the DNN main site and the lessons learned, issues and workarounds.
I also found an interesting DNN developer site with some nice skins to download and information on module development. Coupled with the other site which has training videos, Im more excited than I have been in a very long time.