I just came across an article titled "At a Glance: ASP.net vs. PHP."  Let's be clear up front: I don't know diddly-squat about PHP.  I'm not here to start yet another language battle, in a war that will never be won :)  However, I do have some comments for the article regarding ASP.NET.  And, since there doesn't seem to be a way to post comments on the "Market Day" site, you get the benefit of reading them here :)

Ian Wilson writes:

In order to develop with ASP.Net one must obtain the extremely expensive Microsoft Visual Studio Programming Suite.

I won't argue that Visual Studio 2005 Professional or Team Edition is very expensive when compared to free.  However, the author fails to mention that you can develop ASP.NET using one of the free Visual Studio Express Editions, or even your favorite text editor.  What can you do with an Express Edition?  Just about anything you can imagine.  If you really need features that aren't available in the Express Editions, chances are you're developing for a company that can afford to pay for the upgrade.  For the individual Web developer, check out Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition and one of the many starter kits that are available.

One of the arguments the author uses for PHP is the wealth of community resources.  I believe the same argument is true for ASP.NET.  Check out my list of free tools and resources.  There are lots of other great sites and online blogs for ASP.NET developers.

ASP.NET is a viable solution, even for individual developers who are community-minded, budget-conscious, and into open source.  Happy coding!

Speaking of great apps that keep getting better, there's an interesting mojoPortal vs. DotNetNuke post over at mojoPortal.  Also, take a look at the interesting comments from a DNN user (www.wwwcoder.com). 

Joe reports that a new release is just around the corner.

dasBlog continues to improve.  The list of new features is very impressive.  I was able to upgrade without much effort.  If you're looking for simple-to-use and yet very powerful blog application, dasBlog is worth a look.  Also, check out the dasBlog documentation.

I just read that Virtual PC is now a free download.  If you've never used it, Virtual PC allows you to setup and run other operating systems (Windows XP, 2000, 98, DOS, Server 2003, etc.) in a virtual environment on your existing PC.  This is all done with a big file called a virtual disk.  Virtual PC simulates all the hardware, and the guest operating system never knows the difference.  It can even share the host computer's CD-ROM and network connection so that you can install software and get connected to the Internet or local network.  Guest OS's will even show up as additional computers on your local network!  You can start, shutdown, suspend and resume your virtual environments at will.

One of the best features is being able to "undo" changes to your virtual environments.  When this feature is turned on, every change made to the guest OS is saved to a separate change file.  When you "undo" a Virtual PC, all the changes are completely blown away and it is as if those changes never happened at all.  This is ideal for testing application or Web installations, giving demos, or trying beta software, because you can always roll back to the exact same state to repeat your tests or if something goes wrong.  We all know that uninstalling an application doesn't always (and more likely never does) put your file system and registry back the way it was before you installed.

 

Awesome!  Red Gate has released SQL Prompt, and it's FREE!  Get Intellisense for Query Analyzer, Enterprise Manager, SQL Management Studio, and Visual Studio 2003/2005.  It even supports UltraEdit and EditPlus.

SQL Prompt can also automatically upper-case SQL keywords, and provides a code snippet engine.

Matt Hawley has been working around the clock, it seems, and has publicly released v2.0 of his free ASP.NET server controls.  Controls included:

CalendarPopup	a great calendar tool to allow users to choose a date
CollapsablePanel	a panel that can be collapsed on the client
FaqRepeater	databound FAQ-style listing control
ListTransfer	(re-order listbox or move items from one listbox to another)
MaskedTextBox	add a masked textbox to your forms
MultiTextDropDownList	drop-down list with multiple columns
MultiTextListBox	listbox with multiple columns
NumericBox	add a textbox that only accepts numerical input
TimePicker	add time selections to a form

I believe that each of these controls are cross-browser compatible.  Download the release candidate and check them out!

Go download the Consolas font.  I've been using it for the past couple of days, and it is beautiful ;)  I'm now using it in all my editors, including TextPad and SQL Server Management Studio.

As Scott Hanselman says, make sure you have ClearType enabled and get the ClearType Tuner PowerToy.

ArgoSoft have just announced a free e-mail validation Web service, based on their years of experience with their Mail Server product.  Plug it into your ASP.NET app for real-time e-mail address verfication!

I've used ArgoSoft's Mail Server for years and have found it to be a great product at an unbeatable price.  ArgoSoft support has always been top-notch, as well.  Highly recommended.

One of my hosting clients has signed up to beta test "Gmail for your domain" and will be moving their e-mail accounts to this service.  I think I read rumors about this service a while back, but didn't know it existed yet.

Pros:

• Google provides the same Gmail Web client for your domain -- for Free
  
• 2GB of space for every account you create for your domain
• Control panel to administer accounts, and even a bulk upload tool to add many accounts at once
  
• Free POP access, in case you want to download all your e-mail to Outlook or some other client so that you have your e-mail offline
• Use your domain accounts with Google Talk instant messaging service
• Customized logo for your domain
  
• Free.  Did I mention 2GB of storage for each account, free?
  

Cons:

• No tools (yet) to transfer your existing e-mail
• Does not work with the Gmail Notify service
• Not integrated with Google Calendar (yet)
  
• In Beta, so you have to apply and hope you're selected to use the service
  
• In Beta, 'nuff said
  

I'm tempted to apply for the beta, at least for one of my domains.  I love the Gmail interface.  If for nothing else, Gmail does a pretty good job of filtering spam.

What do you think?  Is this a great idea, or scary to think about Google having all the e-mail for your domain?

For anyone interested in learning Visual Basic 2005, you can now grab all the chapters from "Introduction to Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 for Developers" from MSDN.

Get a focused, first look at the features and capabilities in Microsoft Visual Basic 2005, Visual Studio 2005, and the .NET Framework 2.0. If you currently work with Visual Basic 6, these authors fully understand the adoption and code migration issues you'll encounter. They'll step you through a quick primer on .NET Framework programming, offering guidance for a productive transition. If you already work with .NET, you'll jump directly into what's new, learning how to extend your existing skills. From the innovations in rapid application development, debugging, and deployment, to new data access, desktop, and Web programming capabilities, you get the insights and code walkthroughs you need to be productive right away.

Download here.

I'm not a PHP developer, but I recognize that it is a very popular scripting language and there are a lot of resources available.  I just came across Phalanger, which is a PHP compiler for .NET.  This is not just CLR support for the PHP language, but a compiler that can take existing PHP script and compile it to run on the .NET Framework (MSIL). 

Under Sample Apps, you'll find popular PHP applications such as PhpMyAdmin, phpBB, and PHP-Nuke 7.5 that were compiled with little or no tweaking.  The Phalanger Forum is running under a compiled version of phpBB.

For PHP developers, this means taking advantage of the .NET Framework class libraries and the speed of truly compiled applications.  Benchmarks provided suggest that PHP applications compiled for .NET realize significant speed improvements and have a much higher throughput.  PHP developers can also take advantage of other .NET components written in C#, VB.NET, or any other CLR language.  For .NET developers, this opens up a whole world of PHP modules and applications that can be tapped for .NET applications.

Currently, Phalanger only works with .NET 1.x and does not run on Mono.  However, these features are on their roadmap.

I'm sure Paul Wilson will be announcing this soon, but just noticed this morning that he's updated his web sites, and added a new one: http://www.wilsonwebportal.com

It appears that Paul is releasing the WilsonWebPortal as a free download with sample source code demonstrating how to create modules for the portal.  I'm really looking forward to taking the WilsonWebPortal for a spin.

Congratulations on relasing version 1.0, Paul!

Just spotted this over at Scott Watermasysk's blog. 

The Open Web Design project was founded in November 2005 by Aaron "MonkeyMan" Nikula as a resource for users with no design skills to quickly put up a site and showcase their content and as a way for designers to share their designs and showcase their talent.

Currently it appears there are nearly 1,000 templates to peruse.  Very cool!

http://openwebdesign.org/

Annoucement link.  "Free to develop, deploy, and distribute" and suited (among other things) for "developers working on PHP, Java, .NET, and Open Source applications."

According to the FAQ, the Express Edition has the following limitations:

• Limited to 4GB of user data
• Only one instance per server
• Only executes on one processor if running on a multi-processor server
  
• Will only utilize 1GB of memory, even if the server has more

Oracle 10g Express Edition comes with a "browser management interface" which I assume is better than Microsoft's MSDE command-line OSQL.

My company is considering Oracle as an alternative product platform, so I'm sure I'll be giving this a try sooner or later.

Scott Guthrie points out the new "How Do I?" series of videos on MSDN.  According to Scott, these are 10-15 minute "pure code" walkthroughs using some of the new ASP.NET 2.0 features and the free Visual Web Developer.  There are currently 11 videos available, and Scott says that more are on the way.

Yahoo! has released a free library of AJAX-enabled UI components, including a set of core utilities for animation, drag-and-drop, events, DOM, as well as calendar, slider, and treeview controls.  The components are both free and open-source under a BSD license.

Also noteworthy is the new Yahoo! Design Pattern Library.  Here they attempt to demonstrate UI best practices for the Web including breadcrumbs, pagination, and other common UI elements.  This is their first installment of what they promise to be a monthly installment of the latest Web patterns and practices.

Great news for ASP.NET developers.  After joining Microsoft, Matt Hawley had to stop distributing his great ASP.NET server controls.  After 10 long months, he's finally been given permission to start distributing them again.  My company and I have used his pop-up calendar control.  I also use Unleash It (unaffected by the blackout) to deploy web applications, and it is fantastic.  Thank you Matt, and thanks for listening, Microsoft!

I am very pleased to announce that www.ChristianASP.NET is now running on mojoPortal! 

The great news is that I now have discussion forums, which is a goal I have had for ChristianASP.NET from the beginning.  The bad news is, if you've registered for an account on this site in the past, you will need to register again.  I don't have any plans at this time to convert old user accounts.

Joe Audette and other contributors have done an outstanding job and a great service to the ASP.NET community over the last couple of years with the development of mojoPortal.  mojoPortal has been designed to run not only on Windows but also on Linux and Mac OS/X using Mono.  It features a pluggable data access layer and comes with support for MS SQL, MySQL and PostgreSQL.  Other application features include:

• Html Content Management
• Blogs
• RSS Feed Aggregator
  
• Event Calendar
• Search
• Image Gallery
• File Manager
• Localization
• Skinnable Design
• Host Multiple Sites From One Database

mojoPortal is a fantastic open-source alternative with a very bright future ahead.  I know that Joe has been hard at work to incorporate some of the latest ASP.NET 2.0 features, including updated Master Pages, Themes and skins.

I've always had a severe case of not-invented-here syndrome.  However, after taking a fresh look at dasBlog this weekend, I realized that there were a bunch of cool features that I was never going to get around to putting into my own blog application.  So, I decided to swallow my pride and take a serious look at converting.  Here's what I've discovered so far.

1. dasBlog is nearly as brain-dead simple to set up as you can get
2. 10 minutes of coding based on Scott's post and I had all my existing content imported into dasBlog
3. dasBlog themes are extremely easy to modify and create
4. Blog search with keyword highlighting is awesome
5. Trackbacks, pings, comments in my RSS feed, and all the other goodies I've been missing

I've set up my old blog home page and RSS feed to automatically redirect to the new blog at http://blog.christianasp.net/.  However, if you're a subscriber, I would appreciate if you would go ahead and update your subscription to the new link.  I believe all my old blog links will continue to work here.

One of the guys here at work was asking for a utility that would quickly show the size of each folder on his disk.  Josh did a search and came up with Folder Size for Windows.  This utility integrates with Windows Explorer and gives you more options (columns) when viewing the file system in Details view.  New columns that you can add to your display include:

• Folder Size
• Folder Size Sort (same as Folder Size but formatted to sort properly)
• File Count
• Folder Count
• Sibling Count

Sizes are cached and updated automatically as things change on your system.  Plenty of other features to enhance performance.

Seth Godin (the bald marketing guru that writes about purple cows) has posted his take on Google Analytics, which is supposed to be a free web site tracking/analysis tool hosted by Google.  The site is currently undergoing some kind of "maintenance" so I haven't been able to check it out for myself yet.  More info here.  Very interesting... 

To use FCKeditor in an ASP.NET project, you also need the FCKeditor.Net integration component.  Both the editor and the .NET component can be downloaded from the FCKeditor sourceforge project.  Next, follow the instructions found on the Developer's Guide for ASP.NET Integration to get the editor working in your .NET project.

From the FCKeditor web site:

"This new version is another important step to the project. The development now is concentrated on bug fixing and stability, so this update is highly recommended. There are also some interesting new features, like the “Protected Source”, that makes it possible to use server side code in the editor and the new keyboard handling for Firefox. "

http://www.fckeditor.com/whatsnew/default.html

Microsoft has released a developer toolbar for Internet Explorer.

Wow.  Zimbra will be something to watch.  This may be the MS Exchange killer, at least for some organizations.  E-mail, group-scheduling, calendar, contacts, AJAX web client, IMAP/POP, searching, anti-virus and anti-spam support, integration with LDAP and Active Directory, and the list goes on.  All open source.  Check out the screen shots.  Can't wait to check this out.  [via TheOpenForce]

What a shame.  Matt Hawley, now a Microsoft employee, is being barred by the MS legal department from distributing his free library of ASP.NET components.  I've used these components in the past, and have found them to be fantastic tools.  Help support all the work that Matt has put into the ASP.NET community by signing the petition.

UPDATE: It appears that developer community's reaction is making a difference!

Due to other priorities and apparent curiosity in the viability of open source projects, Eric Wise has made the decision to open source his Easy Assets .NET product.  Easy Assets .NET is a web-based application created to allow organizations to track assets (computers, monitors, printers, projectors, or just about any equipment I suppose) including purchase history, warranties, service agreements, and help-desk issues.  Any organization (business, church or ministry) with more than a few computers could realize some big benefits from asset tracking.

If you find his product beneficial, I hope that you will reward Eric's efforts in the form or donations or contract work.  I look forward to hearing the results of his experiment. 

Downloads are available here.