I've tried several tests now deploying mojoPortal compiled in VS 2005 on mono without success so I will have to wait to start developing in VS 2005 until it works. I'm getting a 500 error with no real details in the apache error log so I'm not sure how to proceed, other than to periodically update mono/xsp/mod_mono from svn and try again.

I'm also going to try creating some small test projects in VS 2005 and see if I can get any of them to work. For now work will proceed in VS 2003

If any of you have good luck getting a web project built in VS 2005 to work on mono please let me know any tips for making it work.

Update 11/17/2005
Miguel posted a good bit of information today about where things stand in the mono project including info about the progress on .NET 2.0 features. It sounds like Master Pages is already implemented and from other things I've read recently I get the impression that to use the 2.0 stuff that is there you have to run xsp2 instead of xsp which may account for why may test deployment built in VS 2005 didn't work on my mono test machine. I do plan to move forward in VS 2005 as soon as possible but there are a number of things that I need to work through and test before that can happen. For one thing I don't want a build of mojoPortal that I can't run at my hosting company www.Grokthis.net so I will have to be sure I am happy with the way it works on my demo server before I can even begin thinking about trying to convince them to set things up for 2.0. I also want to be sure I can provide any configuration information needed so that it is easy for others to get things running on their mono servers. In short I think there will be at least one more release of mojoPortal for the 1.1 framework before we start making the move forward down the 2.0 path. There are a lot of good things to look forward to but also a lot of new things to learn.

I managed to convert a copy of mojoPortal to VS 2005 this evening without too much trouble. I had a few compile errors that were easily remedied then the Solution built fine and most importantly, the site works!

The next step is to test a deployment on mono and make sure things still work. I think they will since I'm really not using any of the ASP.NET 2.0 features yet. I know some of the 2.0 features are ready in mono so I expect I will tiptoe into changes to the new 2.0 way of doing things and test each change on mono as I go.

Then the next logical step is to tag the current VS 2003 code in svn and update the trunk to VS 2005. My timeline on this will depend on how the testing goes but I'm inclined to do it soon if things go well.

I invite comments from those of you actively working with the mojoPortal source code in VS.NET. Are you going to have access to VS 2005 anytime soon or will it cut you out of the loop if the main branch of development moves to VS 2005?

I'm excited about the 2.0 .NET stuff. There are definitely some major changes and new ways of doing things though it seems to support the old way fairly well so I think we can effectively pace our changes to coincide with mono support. I'm definitely not planning on doing anything that doesn't work under mono. It will be interesting to find out how much is already working.

Happy Anniversary!

Today marks one year since the first release of mojoPortal which was 11/1/2004

Stay tuned for another great year of progress. We have lot of exciting plans for the future.

I got to plug mojoPortal on .NET Rocks internet radio show, see my posts here and here.

For about 3 weekends now I've been thrashing with getting OpenLDAP setup and working on my Suse 9.3 machine so I could test some work contributed by TJ Fontaine for supporting LDAP authentication. I read a lot of great tutorials but I always ran into some trouble. I did manage to get OpenLDAP running and was able to query it but I had problems getting the YaST and Samba integration working. I would run net getlocalsid and it would say it couldn't get either secret but I figured ok at least I can query it but I needed some users with the right schema elements especially a mail attribute. I was using the Samba shema which has a mail property but when I would try and set that using ldapmodify and a .ldif file it would give errors like that wasn't a valid attribute. I think the trouble had something to do with Samba being setup before I configured LDAP and then trying to change the Samba setup to use LDAP it got funky. I decided to try Edd Dumbill's tutorial on my laptop running the latest greatest Ubuntu breezy but it could not find all the needed packages to follow his instructions. I tried updating my sources.list file to see if some of the other repositories had the libraries but for some reason I could not connect reliably to any of the Ubuntu or Debian repositories. Not sure if this is just traffic problems due to the popularity of Ubuntu and the new release or what. I'm sure a linux super guru could have worked past these issues but for a long time Windows guy trying to learn as he goes its been quite a struggle with obstacles at every step. I do plan to give it another try soon with SUSE 10 for my own learning benefit but for now I just needed the shortest path to getting a working LDAP implementation so I can get back to working on mojoPortal.

Then it hit me (just like in the Novell ads ;D) maybe SLES 9 has an easier setup for LDAP, there must be some value added above and beyond what comes in the free version so I downloaded the 30 day eval version last night and installed it this morning. Sure enough you can configure LDAP as part of the install process. Unless I missed something this was not in the Suse 9.3 install. Anyway 30 minutes later I have a working LDAP server and 15 minutes after that I was able to login against it(in mojoPortal) using TJ's changes! Whoohoo!

Now I can get to the parts I need to do like implementing the other 2 data layers to support the new fields and creating upgrade scripts and other things to integrate TJ's changes. I have 30 days before my eval of SLES 9 runs out so I better get working! After that I need to test against Active Directory, in theory it should work the same way. TJ's implementation uses the Novell.Directory.Ldap library that comes with mono. I put this dll into the bin folder of my app on my Windows development machine and was able to compile against it and run under the .NET framework so it will work for mojoPortal installations under Windows or mono.