Long time no post

It has been a while since I last posted. So instead of a technical post I thought I would bring you upto speed on what is new in my life.

My morning view!

• After a rewarding 10 years working for the City and County of Denver I have moved on to a new and exciting opportunity at TriZetto as an IT manager of the platform services Wintel and Citrix teams. Trizetto is a healthcare software / hosting provider for many different payer / provider healthcare related software suites. This has been a growing opportunity and so far I am loving it. Plus I have a great view from my desk!

• Updates from the country side. After much resistance from me, my wife has done it again; she wore me down and we now own many more large farm animals than we really need. I have to admit it is fun when they have babies.... 

• Overall life is good! I hope to be more regular on my blog posts this year. I plan to alternate, technical posts with my other posts about my hobbies, passion (the great outdoors) and family. Until next time, Keep on Keepin on!

Denver takes 5th in Best of the Web city government!

Proud to be a part of this accomplishment for the City and County of Denver! Next year we are striving for first place!

Denver takes 5th place in Best of the Web city government

Jump start Denvers DNN user group

http://denver.dnnug.com/news/itemId/44/Jump-start-Denver-DNN-user-group.aspx

We are excited to have our DenverDNNUG founding father Chris Hammond return to visit with us from the heart of DNN corporate offices in sunny California.  For those of you who don't know Chris Hammond used to live right here in Colorado and led our DenverDNN user group,  when in March of 2010 he got the opportunity of a lifetime, to go to work for DotNetNuke Corporation as Director of Training Programs. You can read more about Chris on his personal blog at www.chrishammond.com.

Chris will be speaking to us about,  DotNetNuke 6.2 and Using the Journal API.

Description: With the forthcoming release of DotNetNuke 6.2 there are a number of changes coming to the platform. Chris will present an overview of some of these changes in the first half of this session, then will spend the latter half of the presentation showing you how your own custom modules and extensions can implement the new Journal API to create a Facebook like effect within your DotNetNuke web site.

Rumor has it that Chris will also come prepared with some DNN corporate "swag" so don't be late. We look forward to seeing you all there.

Join us Wednesday March 21st 6pm 

Wellington E. Webb Building.

 201 W. Colfax ave. Denver Co 80202 

(Conference Room 1.D.1, enter on the Court street side of the building) 

Notes from DNNWORLD 2011

DNNWorld After Dark Party

This week I attened and presented the first anual DotNetNukeWorld conference in sunny Orlando Florida. The conference was "first class" and I met a lot of smart and ineresting people. This post will capture my notes from the conference happy reading...

Shawn walker keynote dnnworld 2011-
CMS - cloud, mobile optimized, social
Site groups- cross portal groups! Share content and security accross portals!
Active modules company- social media company
Less releases - only 2 major last year
How people find your site- search, social, mobile, scalabilty cloud.
Theme for dnn6 was user experience (client side interactions)
Reasons for going to C# - dominant language in the community, the community wanted it.
Cloud- windows azure excelerator
Cloud storage- providers amazon s3 and windows azure
Sharepoint connector- push from sharepoint to dnn.
theme was mobile, to simplify delivery of mobile websites instead of mobile apps, device detection built in to redirect to mobile site. Device content previewer built in. Included mobile website template, adaptive rendering and html5.
Performace - 6.1 reducing client requests by 70%
Dnn is a framework the cms is built ontop of that framework.

2012 will offer a pe cloud offering. Redesign of snowcovered.
Turnkey solutions installs for business needs, intranet install, ecommerce install.
Q2 and q4 of 2012 social releases, cross site content sharing, advanced seo and url management, document management more integrated, content staging improvements, framework rest service layer API.

Improving DotNetNuke performance-
Tools Googlepagespeed and yslow 
Tips- Sitelog history Event log buffer 
Schedule - can be set to request or timer based 
Compression - try using this 
Auto sync file system - turn off if not needed. 
Caching- use memory caching, set caching to heavy. 
Use hosted jquery setting, from google. 
Use an external folder provider. 
Skin design Minify css OptiPNG to optimize images Jsminify to optimize individual javascript files Sprites in css (combines small images into one request) lots of work, but worth it performance wise.
Use iis 7 or higher ( has iis level compression) 
Use Seperate apppools


Developing mobile strategy-
Desktopview vs mobile website
esearch what people want, not just google analytics, but talk to people.
Discover business domains- helps decide mobile app vs mobile site.




Advanced debugging for dnn 
Presentor - Cathal Connolly engineer w dnn
Good resource - Wiki.dotnetnuke.com
Use DNN eventviewer
Enable some event types in event viewer to get more info.
Look in database tables eventlog table.
Sysinternals you can run from thier open server unc, filemon and regmon.
6.0 added log4net integration
Log4view gui tool for log4net
Fiddler has watchers for security vulnerabilities.
Showed the logout issue with fiddler and dotnetnuke cookie missing when accessing a resource not in the portal that the user has permissions.
Iis 7 added ability to create configurable request tracing called failed request tracing. Time taken is a great feature!
Symbol files dnn ships with symbols since 5.2 can be installed in dnn host files can be seen in project files as. .Pdbs
Mentioned about location tag in web.config
Look up Sos,  son of strike  and sosEX extentions. Psscore
Windows task manager rightclick create dumpfile w3wp.exe
Use windbg  dae=3Ddump all exceptions


How to build a mobile site
Responsive design.
ADedicated mobile site vs. Native Mobile app
Bostonglobe has responsive design website.
Viewport = viewable area in pixels


Microsoft Azure and dnn
Microsofts cloud offering
OnDemand pay for usage
Create deployments (templates)
Azure storage. Vhd for file system
Web role is the web server
Use smb to connect to the storage, maps a local drive letter to the webserver
Cloudberry explorer allows you to upload files.
Dnn azure accelerator created by david rodriguez. Download from codeplex.
Joe brinkman has a good tutorial on dotnetnuke.com
Make sure all recources are created in same region affinity
Sql azure uses a subset of t-sql so some modules do not work.


Dnnworld notes training day
Research mit opensource license
Get contact info for denver dnn usergroup contact. Get group restarted. (email chris to come out and present, to restart denver dnnug)
Client resource management ( http://bit.ly/crm) helps improve yslow.
 Yslow (What is your site score?)
Caching in webfarm use memory cache provider
Shibbolth - shared authentication provider (look into this)
check out esher module.

Which child is your favorite child?

What a terrible question! Right? Well maybe not when it comes to managing people in the work place. A book I am reading called "First break all the rules: What the Worlds greatest managers do differently", says that managers should not treat all employees alike. High performing, committed and engaged employees should receive different treatment than low performing non-productive employees. This is something I intrinsically knew from raising my 5 children, however I thought that I had to be politically correct as a manager and I should treat all my employees the same regardless of their performance for fear of being labeled an unfair or biased boss. What I have come to realize is that if you treat employees in accordance with their performance, commitment and engagement, it serves to increase each! Who would have thunk it?

IIS pass through authentication with UNC paths

We have continual trouble with setting up an IIS 6.0 virtual directory to do windows authentication in a load balanced environment. We believe that the problem consists of a double hop authentication for the iis anonymous user and the connect as user for the virtual directory witch is mapped to a UNC path on another server. We eventually got this to work but did not have a solid answer as to what made it work. We believe it has to do with setting up an SPN for that servername and username that the connect as user is using. I am working on a more detailed writeup for this and will post it soon. After a month and we are still seeing issues with pass through authentication. If anyone out there has any ideas, I am open to them.

Robots.txt is CaSe SeNsItIvE :(

I discovered today that robots.txt is Case Sensitive. Here is a good post describing options. http://www.slicksurface.com/blog/2007-04/be-careful-robotstxt-is-case-sensitive

So the long and short of it is that you can get better exclusions of your URLs if you also use meta tags on pages that you do not want indexed. However there is no sure fire way to make sure that a page never gets indexed (except of course to remove it from your website :)