Volume 2 Edition 4 April 2010
mojoPortal 2.3.4.3 Released
April has just flown by this year. The main accomplishments of the month were a couple of bug fix releases and a few training videos, not nearly as much as I'd hoped to get done, but with software development we often need to spend time on research to keep up with the ever improving technologies and emerging possibilities. A lot of important things happened this month that made it a good time to do some research and learning.
Microsoft released Visual Studio 2010 and the final release of the 4.0 .NET framework bringing us to a transition period the likes of which we have not seen since around 2005 when we transitioned from .NET 1.1 to .NET 2.0. Sure, we had .NET 3.5 introduced a few years ago, but this was not as significant a change because it was still really the 2.0 framework with some extra stuff bolted on top, whereas the change from 1.1 to 2.0 and the change now from 3.5 (which as I said is really still 2.0 framework with some extra stuff) to 4.0 is a change to a new runtime environment. So we have new tools and a new runtime available both of which offer many improvements and possibilities. For developers such as myself it can be both exciting and overwhelming when these transitions occur because there is so much to learn.
If you are interested to learn about ASP.NET 4, here is a link to an overview of what is new in ASP.NET 4 and related things in Visual Studio 2010, and here is a link to a list of breaking changes in ASP.NET 4.0, that developers need to be aware of. There is also a treasure trove of great free video content from the Mix 2010 event. I've downloaded most of them in high quality and have been working my way through them over the last several weeks. It is hours and hours of interesting sessions and great content. I'm very interested in the OData format which is an Atom format for RESTful web services that is now well supported in WCF Data Services, Silverlight 4 looks like a very compelling platform, and I am even a bit excited about the idea of developing applications for Windows Phone.
With our release of mojoPortal 2.3.4.2 we changed our main source code projects to Visual Studio 2010, then with 2.3.4.3 we added config files for compatibility with ASP.NET 4 hosting even though our deployment packages are still compiled against the 3.5 framework. The next step will be to drop the support for Visual Studio 2008, then we will make separate projects and solutions for 3.5 .NET and will change our main project and solutions to target 4.0 .NET. This will make it easier for developers to move forward with using 4.0 .NET in custom features and will also allow us to begin using some 4.0 features in mojoPortal, but we will have to use conditional compilation so we can also continue producing builds that are compatible with 3.5 .NET. This means we will be making separate deployment packages for each framework in the coming releases.
Developer Tutorials
I completed 3 new developer tutorial videos this month and I plan to continue where I left off in May. I think I'm not even half way through covering all the things I plan to cover. I will be teaching about how to use friendly urls in your features, how to make your features searchable in the search engine and more.
Keep an eye on our blog as I will announce new screen casts there as they become available.
This edition of the newsletter has been a bit more oriented towards developers than our previous editions, but I suspect that a good number of you are developers and not just end users of mojoPortal. Hopefully it wasn't too boring.
We are continually trying to learn from our newsletter process, if any of you notice this message landing in your spam folder please do let me know.
Warm Regards,
Joe Audette
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