HTC Magic usability nightmare

You would think having an example as the iPhone would give you a lot of inspiration to create a great product. But the HTC Magic has one crazy design flaw that I call a usability nightmare. When you receive a call the big button on the front lights up. It asks for attention and almost forces you to press on it. That's the effect of a flashing button :-) But it doesn't do anything! Answering a call happens by pressing the much smaller green button. The big flashing button should be ignored. It's hard, but it can be done. Just take a deep breath and stop before you press, then choose the green button. Not the big flashing one!

SDL Tridion 2009

Not SDL Tridion R5.4 or SDL Tridion R6, but a brand new SDL Tridion 2009! A brand new naming convention for the start of a new future for SDL Tridion.

• One package with all the different add-ons included.
• A greatly improved Outbound Email (TMCS), with all those extra features now included allowing for a much greater control of contact groups, security, temporary users and campaigns.
  
• A new Interface with new icons (don't worry you can still use the old ones as well)
• The Categories and keywords have been given a shot of Steroids and are now called Taxonomy Categories and Keyword allowing for categorizing and retrieving the content in a much easier and faster way.
• Content Porter has been given a full .NET upgrade making it much faster and more reliable, and allowing for rollback when things don't work out so well.
• I am sure i am missing many more features, but I haven't been able to properly play with it yet.

Personally I am most excited about the Taxonomy categories and keywords allowing for all those need dynamic features, which before Tridion 2009 was a bit more problematic. Needing a lot of creativity to work around these issues. This will allow for a lot faster retrieval and organization of dynamic content on the presentation side. Something I have had to deal with many times over the last years.

The new and improved Outbound Email is also worth a little celebration. SDL Tridion have listened closely to the needs of the customers and really turned it into a multi-language, multi-website(publication) mailing tool. Making it now much easier to accomodate temporary profiles, imported profiles and campaign mailings.

Besides all the great technological changes there are some other great initiatives by SDL Tridion, which will really boost future enhancements...

SDL Tridion World
http://www.sdltridionworld.com/ is now the url to bookmark not only when you are developing in Tridion, but also when you use Tridion as a customer.
I'll highlight two "public" features, which you should really follow. I put public between quotes, because you do need to sign up for one of them to get the full access.

1. The eXtension community allowing to re-use standard functionality on your projects. And the other way around you can share something great you have developed with the community.
2. The Ideas website. This is my personal favorite, because now it is possible to submit and promote those new features you would like to see in the new release of SDL Tridion. It provides the Tridion community with a much more transparant overview of what might be expected in the future, but also if other users/developers share the same views. And the good thing about this site is that it has been created for anyone working with Tridion not just the developer!!

All in all good new features and direction for making SDL Tridion a good choice for a future proof CMS!

PS: for all you Twitter fans out there! SDL Tridion has two channels you can subscribe to: http://twitter.com/SDLServices and http://twitter.com/sdltridion

Ardennes 2009

For the 4th year we organized our official long weekend. This year we went to the Belgium Ardennes for an adventure filled trip with the Dutch office of Indivirtual and Sentia. Our long weekend is also open for partners of our employees, so all husbands and wives of our staff could see what our company is all about.

We rented a huge villa in Spa (see picture). From this villa we had a choice of activities, all organized to perfection by Stephan Compagner our Management Assistant. People did: mountain biking, quads (four wheeling), high rope challenge, kayak trip, swimming, cocktail workshop, midnight dropping, archery (bow and arrow), visting Spa and just enjoying a lot of good food (by private chef Jesus) and drinks in a gorgeous villa with a fantastic private park.

It was great, thanks to everybody that was there.

DevDays ‘09 The Netherlands day #2

The second day of DevDays and 5 more interesting sessions to follow.

At 9:15 the first session of this day started it called “Functional Programming in C#” from Oliver Sturm. In this session we dived deep in to C# with a lot of C# 3.5 LINQ and lambda expressions. The question was, why would we use functional programming in C#, the answer was given with some practical examples.

The second session of today was about “Building RESTful services with the ADO.NET Data Services “given by Jurgen Postelmans. ADO.NET Data Services is build on top of the Web Programming Model of WCF. In this session we find out how easily it is to create and consume REST data services on the web. In a few minutes you can create a service that exposed your data to the web.

A funny and cool session was the third session of today, “Make Yourself Rich with XNA” from Rob Miles. He shows us in a funny way how you easily create a game in XNA. He uses the PC and a xbox controller to control the game, he also deployed the game on a Zune player. In the session we build a pong game from scratch that can be controlled with the wireless xbox controller, it was surprisingly easy to create. Oh and I think I should mention his book ;-).

The fourth session of today “IE8 and Web Standards” given by Peter-Paul Koch. What is the purpose of using web standards of today? He gives some examples how to implement the W3C web standards and give some tips and tricks. He also talked about the new IE8 browser from Microsoft and how it implements the web standards.

Last and fifth session of today in the great hall (with great chairs, i needed that after this long day) about “ASP.NET MVC Introduction” from Fritz Onion. This talk was about the ASP.NET MVC framework, he talked about the differences between typical ASP.NET applications and the ASP.NET MVC application. How do we use models, views and controllers to create a functional web application and what advantages does this model offer over the standard web forms model?

After this long day DevDays ‘09 came to an end, it was very interesting to attend all these sessions.

DevDays ‘09 The Netherlands day #1

Today was the first day of DevDays ‘09 in the World Forum in The Hague city. There are around 80 sessions in these two days, from cloud computing, .NET, Ajax to Silverlight and a lot more subjects.

The first sessions of today was the key note session with David Chappel, the talk was about Microsoft's cloud computing platform Azure. He told us what this new technology means and what it can do, like how do we use it in practice. The technologies that came by are Windows Azure, .NET Services and SQL services. He also mentioned some alternatives like Amazone EC2, Google Appengine and Salesforce Platform.

The second talk I went to was C# 4.0 and the Future of C# from Krishnan Subramanian, in a very packed hall he talked about dynamic & functional languages and concurrent programming. Some topics where dynamically typed objects, optional and named parameters, improved to COM interoperability and co and contra-variance. He also talked about the future of C# and gives use some cool demo’s about on the fly compiling and running of C# code.

The third talk was about attack and defense and securing ASP.NET applications from Keith Brown, after some very nice yo-yo tricks Keith talked about how-to secure our Web applications from potential hackers. The topics that came along are server side validation, user rights, filtering, SQL injection and XSS. He also showed us how easy it was to hack a product database search web application with SQL injection if you doesn’t use parameterized queries.

In forth and last talk Fritz Onion talked about ASP.NET AJAX 4.0. How do we improve our client-side development experience this was the main subject of the talk. The talk covers subjects like the new client-side template and data binding model, declarative control instantiation, the new DataView control, markup extensions, and bindings. With ASP.NET AJAX 4.0 we can faster build quickly responding web application without creating a lot of client side code your self.

The event is very well organized at a nice location, tomorrow day two with a lot of new interesting sessions.

Umbraco Demo

Last week I have seen a Demo about Umbraco, the demo was given by Richard Soeteman from Soetemansoftware an experienced Umbraco developer.

Umbraco is a CMS that fully integrated with .NET, it’s supports .NET out of the out-of-the-box, you can use .NET Custom Controls and .NET User Controls without extra effort. You can place your controls everywhere in the template and even in the rich text editor, Umbraco can also send data to your controls via Public Properties. Umbraco is fully compatible with ASP.NET Ajax and javascript frameworks like jQuery and prototype.

The templates in Umbraco are build with XSLT, with XSLT so you are very flexible to create your html. Umbraco supports also XSLT extension methods, so when you miss some functionality in XSLT you can create methods it in .NET and call them from your XSLT templates.

What’s also great about Umbraco is the event model, you can hook up at a lot of events and create your own logic. Hooking into these events is simply a matter of creating a .NET class that implements an interface.

What i haven’t mentioned yet is that Umbraco is licensed under the MIT license, so you can see and modify all the source code, but isn’t likely that you will change the source because it support mostly all features that are needed.

Richard Soeteman have given us Demo that includes most of aspects of Umbraco. First we did the installation of Umbraco. It’s very easy to install Umbraco, you only have to unzip Umbraco to the wwwroot and request the website and follow the configuration wizard. You can start with a empty Umbraco or with a starter kit.

In the demo we started with the starter kit Umbraco installation and we added also some packages that are needed for the demo, we modified some templates and created some usercontrols in Visual Studio and added them to Umbraco.

With this demo I get a good impression about Umbraco, Umbraco is very easy to use and to implement. So if your are searching for a open source .NET CMS, try it out at umbraco.org

Shaikh Mohammad sets up e-government for Dubai

Dubai: His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE, has issued, in his capacity as Ruler of Dubai, law no 7 of 2009 establishing the Dubai e-government.

The new entity will devise the general strategy of the e-government, provide leadership, guide and supervision of the migration process into the e-module at governmental levels, and design framework, policies and benchmarks for IT management and security.

Mandate of the e-government also includes delivery of e-services and management of knowledge and human capital at bar with international best practices.

According to the law, the e-government will also identify strategic initiatives to achieve highest level of public procedural integration, contribute to the development of the digital community and oversee, coordinate and follow up implementation of plans regarding IT and e-services.

Professional and institutional capacity will be built to assist the e-government deliver its objectives.