It’s Thursday, and the Class Designer team is sticking to their new entry every Thursday policy. I don’t want to just post a link to their blog every week, but if they keep doing stuff this cool I’ll have no choice.

Eugene Chigirinskiy could have just posted a screen shot showing tooltips at work in the class designer. But instead, he’s built out an HTML image map on top of said screen shot and set up the areas with titles so that as you hover over areas the screen shot, tooltips pop up the same way they do in the tool. Awesome! I have no idea how long it took him to do this, but that’s dedication!

As he wrote on his blog, Pat Helland’s last day at Microsoft is tomorrow. He’s busily cleaning out his office right now. 😦 He’s starts on Monday @ Amazon to help them implement a service oriented architecture. I heard their CTO was hiring.  Pat’s a big reason why I came to work for Architecture Strategy so I’m really sorry to see him go.

On the plus side, no one will quip “it’s been nice hanging out with you” in the men’s room anymore.

Seriously, Pat’s been through some seriously hard times this past twelve months, and I think the change is a great opportunity for him. I imagine I’ll see him often enough – he’s back on campus next week to present at an architecture forum. Plus, I offered to setup dasBlog on pathelland.com so he’ll keep blogging.

Norman added AdSense to his blog, and I know several other kids that are doing it, so I succumbed to the peer pressure. So far, it’s just a single ad over there on the right, but the “Wide Skyscraper” ad format would fit there. I’m interested to see how this goes.

Ron from patterns & practices is not only blogging and webcasting but also podcasting. He’s got two podcasts up so far. The first is a discussion with Billy Hollis about smart client architectures. It’s pretty short – just enough to whet your appetite. (Quick plug – Billy is presenting with Rocky on Smart Client Architecture as part of the TechEd 2005 ARC track.) Ron’s second podcast is with Scott Densmore on EntLib’s ConfigurationContext. It’s cool stuff, but it’s alot harder to follow (for me anyway) topics related to code like this with just audio. Luckily, Scott blogged about this as well.

I’m trying to set up a community site for some old friends from high school. Got the domain name, got the hosting space, just need to figure out what to run on the site.

I started by looking the old IBuySpy portal. It’s been a while – it’s now called the ASP.NET Portal Starter Kit. Looks as good as it did when it first came out. However, there’s a slight security issue. My hoster doesn’t allow unauthenticated write access to the file system. Most of the ASP.NET Portal data is stored in the database, however the actual site layout is stored in an on-disk XML file. I could work around this by setting up a portal on my local machine, building out the site, and then uploading the relevant xml file, but I want to have my good friend back east help manage the site, so that workaround does’t work too well.

Next choice was DotNetNuke. They’re about to release their 3.0 version (3.0.11 is supposed to be the final beta). Looks really nice and installed very easily on my local testbed. However, my hoster also doesn’t give my DB account owner rights – I get reader, writer, DDL and security admin but not owner. DNN installs a series of stored procedures (which works on my machine due to having DDL permissions) but doesn’t give EXEC permissions to those procs to anyone except DBO. Woops. I wrote a small utility app that extracts a list of all user stored procs and calls “GRANT EXEC ON \<\<SPNAME\>\> TO PUBLIC” on each one. Seems to work fine, but given the size of the DNN codebase, I’m not sure I’m comfortable that there isn’t something else out there that’s expecting DBO permissions.

Assuming I don’t go with ASP.NET Portal or DNN, what other choices do I have? I’ve got pretty stringint security requirements, plus it has to use ASP.NET (go figure). I’m still looking at:

• Rainbow Portal – similar to DNN in that it started from the original ASP.NET Portal source code
• ASP.NET Community Starter Kit (CSK) – A baseline starter kit for building a community oriented site. Sounds promising.
• GotCommunityNet – derivative of the community starter kit. They bill themselves as CSK 1.1. Sounds even more promising.

Any other suggestions?