With all the troubles I’ve had with hosting plans throughout the years, I’ve always wondered how to avoid those same problems for a second time.  Of course, I’d love to avoid them for the first time, so I Google them first.  No, not the problem, but how to avoid problems doing something “odd” with my service.  Let’s say I want to do something really strange like cancel a server or hosting service.  I know, it’s way out there, but please bare with me…I ask the Service Provider what I need to do, after starting with the on-line FAQs, help, forums, etc.  and they say go to this “special” site for canceling service.  OK, it must be “intuitive” or they would have given me more details, right!?  The stand-up comic in me wants to draw this out to its proper conclusion…lots of laughs; but the software developer, architect, infrastructure novice and business owner in me wants to lend a hand.

What Problem was actually resolved?

There are way too many scenarios to list in one sitting, but I can probably link to them from here later, or answer specific questions in comments if I see them.  But my most recent issue was due to the fact that I wanted to upgrade a 1and1.com VPS account to one that was half the price I was paying (for 3 months…and I highly recommend this.)  That wasn’t the deal maker though. More...

Received this e-mail today, it speaks for itself:

I just wanted to let you know that Markus Egger will be doing a free 4 stop upstate NY User Group tour Monday July 6 - Thursday July 9.

Markus will be discussing "The State of .NET":
What is the state of .NET today? Which of the many .NET technologies have gained traction? Which ones can you ignore for now? What is new in .NET 3.5 and the coming .NET 4.0? What other Microsoft technologies should you include in your development efforts? This event is It is designed for developers as well as (IT) decision makers. Specific prior knowledge is not required.

Topics will include:

• Silverlight 2.0 and 3.0
• WPF and Visual Styles
• Expression Blend 3
• Microsoft Surface
• Windows Azure and Cloud Services
• WCF
• SOA

Markus Egger's Bio:
Markus Egger is the President and CSA of EPS Software Corp. and its associated brands and companies, such as CODE Magazine, CODE Online, Xiine, Tower 48, EPS Austria GmbH, JockTock, and others. EPS is a custom software development and consulting firm located in Houston, Texas (USA) and Salzburg (Austria). He specializes in consulting for advanced business applications built on the Microsoft platform. EPS does most of its development using Microsoft Visual Studio (.NET) and SQL Server (among other technologies). EPS has worked on numerous software projects for Fortune 500 companies including Philip Morris, NEC, Qualcomm, Shell and Microsoft. Markus has also worked on campus as a contractor for the Microsoft Visual Studio team.

Venues:

Buffalo - Monday July 6th, 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM: http://wnydnug.org/2009Meetings/tabid/54/Default.aspx#July.
                Address:  Daemen College, Schenck Hall, Room 210 - 4380 Main Street, Amherst, NY  14226-3544
                To register, send e-mail to:  events@wnydnug.org (Please include your first & last name by 12PM on Monday 7/6)

Rochester - Tuesday July 7th, 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM:  http://www.vduny.org
                Address:  Microsoft Office 100 Corporate Woods, Rochester, NY 14623
                To register, send e-mail to:  BobNims@vduny.org

Syracuse - Wednesday July 8th, 6:00 PM - 8:30 PM:  www.cnydevelopers.net
                Address:  New Horizons, 6711 Towpath Road, East Syracuse, New York, 13057
                Register at: www.cnydevelopers.net, or send e-mail to:  andy@beaulieu.com

Albany - Thursday July 9th, 6:30 PM - 8:30PM: www.tvug.net
                Address:  VersaTrans Solutions, Inc., 4 British American Blvd, Latham, NY   12110
                Register at: www.tvug.net, or send e-mail to:  president@tvug.net

Download details: SharePoint Designer 2007
SharePoint Designer 2007

And I Quote:

SharePoint Designer 2007

Brief Description

SHAREPOINT DESIGNER 2007 IS NOW FREE! Be sure to watch the video (read more below) to learn more about details and future direction. Office SharePoint Designer 2007 provides the powerful tools you need to deliver compelling and attractive SharePoint sites and quickly build workflow-enabled applications and reporting tools on the SharePoint platform, all in an IT-managed environment.

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 with Service Pack 2

Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 x64 with Service Pack 2

Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer 2007 Service Pack 2

For anyone who tried to figure out where to purchase or acquire SharePoint Designer (aka: the new version of FrontPage) it’s even easier, and cheaper than ever.  I may actually support FrontPage extensions on my web server again…if I can get it to work.  And, maybe SharePoint itself.  Enjoy!!!

BlogEngine.NET appears to be closer than ever to a Multi-Blog implementation thanks to work done by Jacob Proffitt found here: Multi-blog Obsession.  The SQLBlogProvider allows multiple blogs to be supported by a single SQL Server database.  Imaging the maintenance and resource requirements, compared with “n” blogs and “n” databases, or “n” folders with “n-times-x” xml files for all those posts.  Currently, this provides for a single folder and any number of application instances, all pointing at the same folder.  There may be a few potential answers to this, but only if someone deems it a problem.  I’m now running about 12 (BlogEngine.NET) blogs in a single location with a single database using the SQLBlogProvider.  A few details were worked out to bring this solution up to the 1.5.x version of BlogEngine.NET.  While looking at this, I’ve learned a lot about some new features and found some useful and straightforward applications of Linq to SQL. More...

Or that’s the idea at least.

More...

Life is busy, imagine that.

After a wonderful break from a wonderful project, I’m finally sitting in the home office thinking about what to Blog about.  Since BlogEngine.NET 1.5 has been released recently, It’s probably about time to upgrade my sites.  Of course there is also a new MultiBlog approach available, as well.  It’s a separate provider based entirely on SQL Server and Uses Linq.  After another “minor” extension tweek for BlogRolls, the 2 became out of sync.  I help rectify that by creating a stop-gap update for myself that I shared with the original creator.  Since I only tweaked what was already done, I can’t take much credit for the results, but I’m sure I can help if the need arises now that I’ve taken a peak a bit further under the hood.

I’m going to try to get a million things done I’ve been putting off since last Summer, the last time I had any kind of break.  Who wants to help me publish a book???  Next step is to configure my main blog sites to use the new BlogEngine release, with updates, of course, and see if I can nip the maintenance boogeyman in the bud.

Time savings is awesome.  This week I need to install a second doorbell/chime, design a bathroom, clean the garage/prepare for a community garage sale, and spend some more time spectating the kids’ sports.  I’m also going to add a few more virtual dev servers and 2 domain controllers to the office.  Next week, I may wash the car…it’s only been since last fall.

Merry Christmas to All!

DateTime Format for Blog Posts for BlogEngine.NET

...or wherever you want to standardize output formatting.

Here is a rather simple solution to my issue of Date Time formatting on my blog posts.  I noticed that as of a recent version of BlogEngine.NET, the Date looked something like this: "29. June 2008 09:00"  I wanted to change it to something more readable to my target readers, some very local, such as: "Sunday, June 29, 2008 09:00 AM".  Well, I might want to change it sometime, AND I would like to drop it into multiple Themes, so I decided to place the format in Web.Config AppSettings. I looked up my specific Format and added an appSetting.  Then I just replaced the code used in "PostView.ascx" and tested away.

Here's what you can do to implement this yourself.

1. Go to .NET Framework Developer's Guide, Custom Date and Time Format Strings and/or locate your format string.
   • I used "dddd, MMMM dd, yyyy hh:mm tt"
2. Create an appSettings key such as: Custom.DateFormat and assign your format to the value.
   • <add key="Custom.DateFormat" value="dddd, MMMM dd, yyyy hh:mm tt" />
3. Now add the code to use the format string.
   • <%=Post.DateCreated.ToString(ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["Custom.DateFormat"])%>
   • original: <%=Post.DateCreated.ToString("d. MMMM yyyy HH:mm") %>

 More...

From: TVUG President, Griff Townsend:

Sorry for the delay in getting this out: things always seem to get hectic around the time to put announcements out, and this month was no exception. With that said, I've spoken with this month's presenter (in the mirror), and he is ready to go.
Using the Entity Framework in .Net 3.5 SP1

Speaker: Griffith Townsend, MCP.Net, MCSE
When: Tuesday September 8th, 2008 - 6:30-9PM
Where: VersaTrans Solutions, Latham, NY

When developing multi-tiered applications, it’s not uncommon that to encounter code and architectural “noise” where a developer is forced to shift languages between the business logic layer and the data layer. The preference of many developers is the use of tools (typically Object Relational Mapping solutions) to abstract the database-specific aspects of the data layer into objects usable by the upper layers by object-oriented programming languages. More...

A simple way to adjust or tweak a theme to your liking can be as simple as a few lines of css code in styles.css.  I made a couple very minor changes to achieve the affect of a new background color, content on the right when it was always on the left, and a font color change to go along with the background better.  This is what it looked like:

/* I replace the Standard body formatting:
body {
    background-color: #F1F1F1;
    color: #444444;
    font-family: Verdana;
    font-size: 11px;
    margin: 0 auto;
    width: 980px;
    position: relative;
}*/

/* With the following: */
body {
    background-color: #6699FF;
    color: #444444;
    font-family: Verdana;
    font-size: 11px;
    margin: 0 auto;
    width: 980px;
    position: relative;
}

 More...