It's been awhile since I have posted, I have so much to say I can hardly contain myself.

For the past few weeks, I have been working with a group of individuals in forming a Tallahassee area .NET user group. The full name of the group is "Capital City .NET Users Group of Florida", we added the Florida bit so it wouldn't be confused with other capital cities throughout the nation.

I had volunteered to build the site to host our UG to the world; I headed into the dark waters of portals on the net and decided on DNN 2.1.8? (Dot Net Nuke), it's built in VB.Net (always a plus) and had a nice system of modules and supporters. From there I added all the features that would be needed. The site can be found at (www.tlhdotnet.net).  I found several things to be rather difficult, one being the .Text web log application. I spent quite a bit of time on that one to find out the only thing that was wrong is I needed to add a flag value and a blog number (if memory serves), I ended up just adding them as defaults to all newly created blogs (in the table). 

The site was my very first glimpse into DNN and I was pretty impressed, then again some would say I'm easily impressed LOL. I give it 7 out of 10 for ease of use and 9 out of 10 for productivity. My biggest compliant is the use of the stupid pencil, I had puzzled over the site for a bit to figure out how to do things; you would think it would offer some pop up documentation as well (not a bit), or any online. So for UI and documentation I give it 5 out of 10.  Some of the modules that I have found were also pretty good, some worthless and some needed lots of TLC to get them working right.

We are set to have our launch on the 7^th of October in conference room 301 Building 4052 at the South Wood Office complex. Russ Fustino will be giving the opening presentation and I will be giving the closing presentation, which will be 6 to 8 for a total meeting time. We are all very excited to have Russ join us and he will be providing Pizza for us all. We all look forward to our launch.

In other news, for those interested, I'm just about done with my house in Madison, now I get to sit around and see if the realtor is going to do his job, though he did manage to get me to sign a 6 month contract, oh I regret it now.

Here it is in all it's glory, soon he will take inside pictures to show off and it will be that much better.

http://www.unitedcountry.com/ucforms/uconline/uconline/searchNS/Search_View_Selected_Property.asp?SID=3201561&Action=Edit&Item=519621&Page=2&Office='09022'

So if anyone you know is interested in moving to the sunshine state or out into the country let them know.

My IDE project continues to bump along and once we have a company name down pact, I'll be able to build a support site and start asking for beta testers.  You haven't heard of it? Well, to refresh everyone's memories, it's an IDE that designs forms for a framework I built, it allows users to build data enabled applications fast and easily without any to very little programming knowledge.  Users are able to drag and drop and set things up and then compile and run the application, it's so simple, together with a suite of controls to make it easier (which would also be sold separately for those that want to use them with VS.NET). Plus the framework is designed to be smart client enabled and allow it to be used via the browser (client machines need .Net installed).

Some might ask why I bother to go though such trouble, well, that's easy. I believe that tools such as VS.NET and others are just way too Coder targeted, I wanted something that was lean and mean and targeted the layman that had enough knowledge to know what the controls do (or supposed to do) and understands the data they want to work with. They can then build forms to work with their data and not have to hire a coder to do easy things like change the font or color of fields and what not, for special bits, code can be entered and that's where they would get a coder involved. Basically it would be possible to hire 7 to 10 UI specialists to 1 coder that is good in events and business logic and they (the UI people) can design all the forms and how they look and act and the coder can do the business logic bits and server side bits like stored procedures as well as reaction (event handler code) code in forms.

Hence it makes the possibility of building applications better and faster and easier to maintain, since all use a common base of templates (which can be customized), then the issue of debugging is narrower and less bugs in the entire process.  The real power of the IDE project isn't in the IDE it's the controls/components, the IDE just offers a slim down easy to use interface that isn't as complex as the VS.Net IDE. The controls/components are how people are able to do what they want to do without writing code.

Enough with that, as you can see I've been a very busy person, fixing house, helping to setup a UG and working on this project have been quite a chore. I sit here and I so look forward to this weekend (I don't have to go to Madison), so till next time, take care.