Yes... it's been a while since my last post. These few moths were very exhausting for me. Several projects and tons of paper and presentation needed to be done. Thank God now my workloads is decreasing and I have a little time to blog again. Well, my hard work has been paid off, I've got promotion to Technical Solutions Manager as per May 2008.

At the end of this month I will  be traveling to Las Vegas to attend the Annual Couture Jewelry Show at The Wynn Resort Las Vegas. This is my third participation at the show as Application Assistant/Expert of John Hardy booth. Hope everything will be working fine.

Finally, Graffiti 1.0 is released. You can get it here. For you who don't know Graffiti yet, Graffiti is a lightweight, simple content publishing system you can use to quickly and easily publish a blog or an entire web site. It blends together traditional CMS tools like revision history and workflow with more modern blog-style publishing. Graffiti is available as both a free Express Edition as well as several commercial editions.

There is not much changes from the Beta 2 but surely many bugs has been fixed and also there is something really cool integrated to the Themes, Widget, and Plugins which is direct download the latest cool stuff from Graffiti Marketplace.

Just received an email from Telligent that said:

We're excited that Graffiti CMS is on schedule to release this Friday.

But that means your time is limited to get your hands on a Graffiti license at the pre-release price, $99.

Remember . . . after Graffiti releases on Friday, February 15, the price will be $399.

So don't miss your last chance to get Graffiti for only $99!

Click here to take advantage of this great deal: http://graffiticms.com/get-it-now/

Thanks for your interest in Graffiti - and help spread the word!
The Telligent Graffiti Team
graffiticms.com

I've been a fan of Community Server from since its old time (version 2.0) but I have to be honest that Telligent's new baby Graffiti has distract my interest (not my love) to Community Server. Couple of days ago Telligent announced the public availability of Community Server 2008 Beta 1 and outlined the list of enhancements for the newest version of Community Server.

Yesterday I got an email from Scott Watermasysk with the download link to Graffiti CMS Beta 2 file as a response to my email regarding the pre-launched tester. I've downloaded it, installed it and now I'm playing with it.

Does it change much from Beta 1? Of course not. No big development can be done with only about a month (minus holidays for Christmas and New Year). And I think that Telligent will only focus on shipping Graffiti on time. But that's not stopping me from testing this Beta 2. Now let's see the enhancements (from my point of view of course).

Back in 2007 I wrote about how to create Flickr Add-in for Community Server 2007 website. Now it's even easier to create a Flickr widget on graffiticms. First, you need to have an API key, click here to get it. It shouldn't take long to complete the request process. Once it completes, please write down your API key and Shared Secret key. Second, don't forget to thank Sam Judson for his great FlickrNet API Library.

Over the last few weeks I've been trying to put my hands on LINQ but my other activities keep me away from learning this new feature in .NET. On this blog I want to show a simple master-detail using two gridviews and LinqDataSource control replacing the commonly-used SqlDataSource.

The <asp:LinqDataSource> control is an ASP.NET control that implements the DataSourceControl pattern introduced with ASP.NET 2.0.  It is similar to the ObjectDataSource and SqlDataSource controls in that it can be used to declaratively bind other ASP.NET controls on a page to a datasource.  Where it differs is that instead of binding directly to a database (like the SqlDataSource) or to a generic class (like the ObjectDataSource), the <asp:LinqDataSource> is designed to bind against a LINQ enabled data model.

One of the benefits of using the <asp:LinqDataSource> control is that it leverages the flexibility that LINQ based ORMs provide.  You don't need to define custom query/insert/update/delete methods for the datasource to call - instead you can point the <asp:LinqDataSource> control at your data model, identify what entity table you want it to work against, and then bind any ASP.NET UI control against the <asp:LinqDataSource> and have them work with it.

This is weird, today I just found out that all of my old post URLs are no longer valid, they are not found!!! I have to re-published them again from my admin panel and now they are live again.

I wonder what makes it disappear?...

New year, a perfect time to move to something new. After some times reviewing and analyzing Graffiti (the new CMS from Telligent) I made up my mind and moved my blog at http://syuhada.com from CS to Graffiti. Yet I still think that Graffiti is need a lot of Improvements but I do also see that this application will be rock and very popular soon and the most important is Graffiti is so light and easy to use so it's more suitable for a single blog like http://syuhada.com than using a powerful but heavy Community Server.

Community Server is a great example of software that is built on top of the ASP.NET flexible membership services. The ASP.NET membership services enables their software to easily interoperate with other products that also use membership services, in this particular case SharePoint Server 2007.

I remember a while ago some folks in INDC talking about DNN vs SharePoint vs CS, and yesterday I found this article authored by Hans Hugli on MSDN. What a coincident!! I hope this link can be useful.