If you see this post it means that BlogEngine.NET 1.5 is running with SQL Server and the DbBlogProvider is configured correctly.

Setup

If you are using the ASP.NET Membership provider, you are set to use existing users. If you are using the default BlogEngine.NET XML provider, it is time to setup some users. Find the sign-in link located either at the bottom or top of the page depending on your current theme and click it. Now enter "admin" in both the username and password fields and click the button. You will now see an admin menu appear. It has a link to the "Users" admin page. From there you can change the username and password.

Write permissions

Since you are using SQL to store your posts, most information is stored there. However, if you want to store attachments or images in the blog, you will want write permissions setup on the App_Data folder.

On the web

You can find BlogEngine.NET on the official website. Here you will find tutorials, documentation, tips and tricks and much more. The ongoing development of BlogEngine.NET can be followed at CodePlex where the daily builds will be published for anyone to download.

Good luck and happy writing.

The BlogEngine.NET team

Near the end of any year every magazine, newspaper, and website come outs with their own top ten list for something. Some even one-up each other by having top 100 lists. For example, the top 10 movies of the year, or the top 100 games of all time.

I admit that I might be a little late on releasing my own top ten list for the year. This post has been bouncing around my head for a while, but two things have happened that caused me to get off my duff and write it.

The first is that I have bought a few albums from MC Frontalot lately, and have been really enjoying them. He has a song titled ‘I hate your blog.’ You can listen to it for free here. I really hate those stupid Top N articles magazines, blogs, etc put out at the end of the year. This song inspired me to think up the idea of having my own top ten list.

The second motivator is that I was hanging around with Leon and told him of my idea. He thought it was funny, and encouraged me to finally post it.

My top ten list is here…

Top Ten Numbers

1. Zero – Zero is important to us. It is paired with 1 to make binary, and without binary you would be reading this on hand made paper tacked to the front door of the local church.

2. One – The first natural number. This number existed before zero. Also, 1 is the loneliest number.

3. Infinity – Not all infinities are the same size. There are whole branches of math that wouldn’t exist without the concept of infinity.

4. Two – Without two we couldn’t have powers of two, which is important for binary to work. I also seem to always see numbers that are the power of two all around me. It is kind of like that move 23 with Jim Carey. Another number I see a lot is 12:34. I see this on clocks all the time. I like it because the numbers are in sequence, and that makes it a calm number for me, instead of all of the chaotic random numbers the rest of the times during the are made of.

5. 3.1415…. – Pi. The ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter. Again, a lot of math wouldn’t work without this invention.

6. 42 – ‘nuff said.

7. 1701 – As in NCC-1701. As in James T. Kirk, Spock, and Kahn.

8. 360 – Both degrees of a circle, and the name of my favorite gaming machine. Yay!

9. 1.6180339887498948482 – The golden ratio. This is seen all through nature, and leads to beautiful, graceful designs.

10. 9.86 – If you tack on m/sec^2 you get the local acceleration due to gravity on Earth. This one time in college we were finding g through experimentation, and no matter what we did the local value for g in this one corner of the lab was always lower than everywhere else. We would reproduce the experiment in another part of the lab and we would get the right result. Go back to the ‘weird’ corner and get the result again. I am sure that will become a plot point in a Dan Brown novel. Gravity. Its not just a good idea, its the law.

Microsoft often holds events on how to use our latest tools and technologies. I love going to those events, and helping people get the most out of our tools and frameworks.

One thing that I am passionate about is how we can all be better developers. Jim Holmes put on an event in Columbus a few months ago called Software Engineering 101 that covers how to be a better developer. The morning is comprised of presentations on SOLID, etc. The afternoon is just one big pair programming session to work and learn hands on how to use the principles discussed in the morning. The afternoon will provide guidance and challenges to give you something to work towards.

The Columbus event was sold out and packed very quickly. It was such a huge success I begged Jim to bring is to Nashville. We will be holding the event in the Nashville office. The event will also be webcasted so people will be able to participate online. We will even be able to help people who are pairing at home.

While we will be using mostly .NET and Visual Studio, these practices work for any language or platform. Please spread the word. And bring your computer!

Event details:

Saturday, February 27, 2010
8:00am - 5:00pm
Microsoft Office
2555 Meridian Blvd., Ste. 300
Franklin, TN 37067

Seating for the live event is limited, so register today. If you can't join us for the in-person event, register for the online experience.

8:00 am – Introductions

8:15 am - Principles of Object Oriented Programming 

9:30 am - SOLID Software Development

11:00 am - Understanding Code Metrics

11:20 am – Hands On Demo

12:30 pm - Lunch (not provided)

1:30 pm - Hands on Test Driven Development 5:00 pm – Closing

Software Engineering 101

This is a one-day, FREE event focused on core skills that modern developers need to have to be successful today. This isn’t about learning the basics of Silverlight, WPF, or <insert_new_tech_of_day>, rather, this conference will help you understand how to build software that is better designed, more maintainable, and more testable.

We’ll spend the morning on fundamentals around object-oriented programming, the SOLID principles and a few other important skills. .NET is completely object-oriented, but many developers don’t fully grasp the underlying principles to get the most of it. We will then build on this with a tour of the SOLID principles. SOLID is an acronym for the five principles that developers should follow regardless of project type or platform. This session will rely on the object-oriented knowledge, and will teach the developers how to better write their code. The next section will focus on metrics in code (and will use our tools for the samples) to show that you need to understand and instrument your codebase as you extend it. The last session will build on all of this to show modern test driven development (showing MStest and other frameworks). Using all of these skills, and our tools/platform, developers will build better software with a higher level of quality, and better customer satisfaction.

The afternoon will focus on hands-on practice with the skills, since it isn’t enough to just watch someone talk about them. A programmers problem (think like an assignment in a CS class in college) will be given. Developers will need to bring their own laptops with Visual Studio, to work through the afternoon. People will pair up on their laptops to write the tests and code they need to solve the problems. Those that are attending the session from home will participate in the same way, writing the code on their laptop to solve the problems.

We will have ‘presenters’ in the live meeting that can answer Q&A, and even check on their code by using the live meeting. We will pick one speaker and one person that is new to these skills to pair together, and color comment on what they are doing over live meeting. So people attending from home can do the work on their own VS, and watch a new person learn and do at the side of the speaker over live meeting.

While I was at PDC this fall I sat down with Mehul Harry from DevExpress to talk about Azure, Cloud Computing, and of course soft skillz. The interview is only a few minutes long, I hope you like it.

Thanks to Mehul for having me on the show.

http://tv.devexpress.com/PDC09BrianPrince.movie

While I was at PDC this fall I sat down with Mehul Harry from DevExpress to talk about Azure, Cloud Computing, and of course soft skillz. The interview is only a few minutes long, I hope you like it.

Thanks to Mehul for having me on the show.

http://tv.devexpress.com/PDC09BrianPrince.movie

I have moved my blog to my own server. I have tried to redirect every way in to the new site, so if you are seeing this you are coming to the old address "brianhprince.blogspot.com".

You should change to www.brianhprince.com.

-bhp

What happened at PDC do you ask? Lots of stuff. We are shipping more bits now than we ever have. First, watch this slide deck we have put together that is a quick lap around the PDC and find out what makes you smile.

And then you can go to www.microsoftpdc.com/videos to watch all of the sessions, and drill deep into each topic. This will give you something to do on your Zune while travelling over the river and through the hills to grandmothers house this holiday.

I want to thank the Findlay .NET UG and the Knoxville .NET UG for hosting me, and for everyone coming out to the meetings.

I also want to thank Kevin Grossnicklaus. He was the first to put a deck together,and he shared it with us to save work. Mike Wood also helped by making sure we hit all the top points, and polished up my shoddy hack job on Kevin’s deck.

Wow! A year has come and gone and the second annual DogFood conference is done. We had 19 partners come together to put on a two day event for customers in Columbus, Ohio. We had attendees from four hours away! There were over 45 sessions. I was able to deliver a talk on using Azure.

There were 400 attendees over the two days, and I think everyone had a lot of fun, and learned a lot.

I want to thank everyone who came to my session, and please connect with me if you have more questions about Azure.

The slides are here:

This is the second year for the dog food conference, brain child of Danilo Casino. It is a local event, put on by MS and our partners. This year we have two full days, with four tracks. We have both local MS employees, as well as some blue badges coming in from out of state. Many of the presenters are local rock stars that work for our partners. This event is free (unless you are in pubsec, then you have to pay for your food).

It was a great event last year, and I hope to see you there.

Since the event is two days, we have two registration links. Please bear with us, it’s just how the machine works.

The reg links:

Thursday Registration Link

Friday Registration Link

· **Attendees must register for each day separately**

What:

· Please join us for the 2^nd Annual Dog Food Conference.  We will have MS speakers, MS partners, ISVs, MS MVPs and community leads presenting 40 topics. The story behind “Eating one’s own Dog Food”

When:

· November 12-13, 2009; Attendees must sign up for both days separately

Where:

· 8800 Lyra Dr. Columbus, OH 43240.  Sessions will be on Floor 3, 4 and 5

Why:

· See the overviews and roadmaps for MS applications, knowledge transfer with your peers and meet with MS Partners and User Group leads.

Thursday, November 12, 2009: Topic List View

Collaboration:

· BPOS

· SharePoint Road Map

· SharePoint Governance

· KnowledgeLake: Document Imaging and Capture for SharePoint

· Exchange 2010 Overview

· Dynamics XRM

Core Infrastructure Optimization:

· MS Support Lifecycle

· Windows Mobile

· Windows 7

Development, Application Lifecycle Management:

· TFS: Process template

· Test Driven Development

· LINQ

· F#

Data Platform:

· SQL 2008 R2 Overview

Project Management & Business Intelligence:

· Performance Point Services

· Project Server Overview

· Project Portfolio Server

· Sketch Flow

 

Friday: November 13, 2009: Topic List View

Collaboration:

· Office Communication Server

Infrastructure Optimization:

· SCCM R3: Desktop Power Management

· Server 2008 R2, Hyper V

· Application and Desktop Virtualization

· SMSE Suite: DPM, SCOM, SCCM & VMM

· Windows 7 Lunch & Learn

· MS Support Lifecycle

Application Platform, Cloud Services:

· SilverLight Overview

· F# Overview

· BizTalk 2009 & SOA

· COBOL & mainframe apps on the Windows Platform

· Silverlight, Rich Internet Applications

· Bing Maps

· Windows Azure

Security:

· RSA Data Loss Prevention Suite

· Writing Secure Code

· Forefront Identity Manager

· Forefront Unified Access Gateway

· Forefront Threat Management Gateway

· Forefront Client Security

Application Lifecycle Management

· TFS 2010

· Implementing Scrum with TFS

 

 

Thanks to all the sponsors; Dog Food II would not happen without your support
Cardinal Solutions	Sophic Group	ICC	Quick Solutions	ProSymmetry
KnowledgeLake	HMB	Kizan	Avanade	Dell
Mimosa Systems	Strategic Data Systems, INC.	Sogeti	AgileTech	T3 Technologies
ProSource	SIS	Neudesic	RSA	DeVry University

https://www.clicktoattend.com/invitation.aspx?code=142763
Details on the event is below:
When: December 7, 2009
Location
Microsoft MTC - Aon Center
200 E. Randolph
Suite 200
Chicago, IL 60601
United States

Recommended Audiences: Solution Architects, Software Developers, Developers, Architects
nPlus1.org is hosting its fifth Architecture Summit on December 7th at the Microsoft MTC in Chicago, IL. The topic of this summit will be Patterns and Principles.

Morning Session (Optional): An Introduction to Object Oriented Programming
10:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Are you new to OOP? Do you want a refresher on the benefits of Interfaces and the differences between implements and extends? The morning session is a two hour introductory course of Object Oriented Programming. If you are new to OOP the lessons in this session will prepare you for the more advanced topics in the afternoon.
If you are already well versed in OOP then feel free to come have a refresher, or simply join us for lunch and the advanced sessions in the afternoon. The morning session is completely optional.

Afternoon sessions:
Session One: Software Patterns
Patterns are an important tool to use as architects and developers. They provide a common vocabulary for us to design with, as well as a common approach to a common problem. Come learn about useful patterns, and how to use them in your everyday code.

Session Two: How I Learned To Love Dependency Injection
Dependency Injection is one of those scary topics that most developers avoid. It sounds all ‘high-falootin’ and complex. It’s not. Really. We wouldn’t lie. It’s a great way to manage complexity in your system, and a great way to make your system so much more testable. And isn’t that what we all want?
Each session will be followed by open discussions periods.
A catered lunch will be provided starting at noon. This will divide the morning introductory sessions from the advanced sessions. Register once for all session and choose to attend the morning, the afternoon or both! Lunch is provided for attendees for any of the sessions.

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About nPlus1.org (http://www.nplus1.org)

nPlus1.org is a site dedicated to helping Architects, aspiring Architects and Lead Developers learn, connect and contribute. At nplu1.org you have access to great first party content written by some of the most skilled and experienced Architects working today. You also have access to a nexus of content from around the Internet aimed at keeping Architects up to date on all the new developments in their fields of interest.