I am proud to announce that I have released my first independant commercial module on Snowcovered.com: the ACIA Silverlight Slide Show and Photo Gallery. The module provides a management UI for a popular open source Silverlight Slide Show control. The gallery provides a Silverlight 1.0 control for publishing highly-customizable photo slideshows on the Web.

Buy My Module at Snowcovered.com!

Best decision I ever made.

I rarely have an original thought (if I have ever had one) and this entry is no exception. A while back while comparing the Commerce Starter Kit with the DNN Core Store Module, I found an interesting post on “Spooks Blog” (link) discussing the merrits of a DotNetNuke ecommerce module.

In response to this post, Sean Walker posted a very eloquent response, in which I found the following especially pointed and relevant to DotNetNuke's use in a great whole:

“In response to Rob's comment that DNN is not suited for e-commerce, I would obviously have to disagree. The fact is that anyone who needs to sell goods online also needs a whole array of other services on their website. They will want to customize the look of the website to match their business branding. They may want to provide forums for online support of their products. They may want a Newsletter to push information to their customers. They may need to designate private and public areas of their website for inside/outside sales or marketing information. They will need basic pages which describe the company and their mission. DotNetNuke handles all of these requirements and much more. And I am sure an e-commerce application could eventually provide all of these services, but in my opinion it is then losing its main focus - commerce.”

He also addressed performance issues, always a sticky subject with old school manager types:

“In terms of performance and scalability, I definitely need to address the facts. DotNetNuke.com is running on a single dedicated web server connected to a database server ( so 2 boxes - no web farm or load balancer ). It is running the DotNetNuke framework with all of the standard defaults for the environment and application - so no custom tweaks or "squeezing" whatsoever ( we purposely avoid custom tweaks so that we stay in touch with our user community ). In January 2006, the site had 4.5 million page views ( or about 150,000 per day ). Obviously, this could scale much higher if we moved to a web farm model ( ie. I have heard of DNN sites handling 1.0M+ page views per day ).

February 16, 2006 3:12 AM”

I don't understand why Excel doesn't (appear to) have a Row To Column function built in. If it does, I couldn't find it. The following macro does the trick, and only took like five minutes to record edit and run to get right. I figured this has to be a common enough problem, so here was my own solution:

Sub RowToColumn()

 

    Dim i As Integer

    For i = 1 To 27

        Range("B1").Select()

        Selection.Cut(Destination:=Range("A" & i + 1))

        Range("C1:Z1").Select()

        Selection.Cut(Destination:=Range("B1:Y1"))

    Next i

 

End Sub

Recently I was fortunate enough to be hired on full time with my current employer as an Enterprise Application Architect. The Software Architect discipline is still in it's infancy, and as such, there are many talks like “The Role of a Software Architect” by Jeff Barnes, a south Florida Microsoft Architect Evangelist. What follows in this blogging is the start a meandering history of my own experience in this field and eventually will include some of the insight I gain in my current integration project.

I would say roughly half of my career or for that many any single project I have worked on has entailed some form of integration and or the maintenance of integration components. On one of my favorite projects, I spent a year on contract the largest home finance corporation on a team of nine programmers and three managers. My team's sole role was the maintenance and support of home grown integration applications interconnecting the numerous loan origination systems with a central proprietary loan processing system. The department wrote and maintained all of the code to perform such activities as orchestrate the a process identical to the case study used in the Enterprise Integration Patterns using BizTalk 2004 white paper. This system used a proprietary asynchronous messaging system to receive and dispatch these loans to third party lending services such as Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, consolidate these results and post them into the load approval system, wait for the loan approval processor to process the loan, convert the results of the loan approval, and transmit that approval back to the originating system using multiple transport mechanisms including IBM MQ, MSMQ, FTP, and a sophisticated fax back system using Microsoft Word automation and a third party fax solution from Brooktrout technology.

Elsewhere, I designed, coded, documented, and implemented a CRM consolidating the disparate practices of a rapidly growing health care industry software company in downtown St. Pete. At this company, my partner and I developed a CRM framework which used an elegant multi-tier architecture and meta data to “inflate” smart objects which included many cool capabilities including field level role-based security, data binding, and more. This system replaced five separate departments existing systems including custom asp applications, access databases, excel spread sheets, and a few sneaker nets: all in about four months. About a year after I left, the system was replaced with a commercial package. I am certain the lessons learned in that integration process were invaluable to their successful deployment of the new CRM package.

To be continued ...