Pete Wright's Radio Weblog
Musings on anything and everything, but mainly code!

 

 

15 October 2004
 

My wife Heather is setting up a DotNetNuke site for a bunch of people we mess around with in an online game. BUT, although DotNetNuke looks fantastic (and we defiantely do want a Microsoft based solution, not some icky Linux one), we're having a lot of trouble getting a decent forums plug in. The built in discussions module just seems far too weak and not at all like all the other forums you see around the net.

 

So, any suggestions? What's a really good DotNetNuke plug in for forums ?

 

 

Update : What we're looking for is something that looks and works almost exactly like the ASP.NET forums here http://www.asp.net/Forums/ShowForum.aspx?tabindex=1&;ForumID=90

In fact, I heard on DotNet Rocks something about an ASP.NET Forums starter kit, but I can't find it among the starter kits at www.asp.net. HELP!

 

Update 2:  I'm a dork. Go to www.asp.net and click "Download this application".

So, the question now becomes, has anybody integrated this with DotNetNuke??

 


5:23:52 PM    comment []

I just watched a quite thought provoking video about Visual Basic with Paul Vick, over at Channel 9. In the video Paul talks about Express and how it is a response to Microsoft growing perhaps a little too "professional". With shrink wrapped copies of VB costing hundreds of dollars, and Visual Studio.NET costing even more, Microsoft has forgotten about the hobbyist developer. Visual Basic itself grew so popular in the same way that Apple did back in the early 80s. The success of the Apple II was attributed to people buying a computer for themselves and then realizing that it had  a great role to play at work as well. The same thing applies to Visual Basic. When it first came out, no Fortune 500 company looked at it and said "Hey, we could build our first ever distributed call center management application with this". Instead, hobbyists looked at it as an evolution of BASIC, and a really cool one at that. As they got more familiar with the tool, they introduced it into their businesses.

A comment was made in the video that Linux is how people can get started today, and that's a good point. There is no computer on the market today that I know of that comes with a good environment for learning how to program. Back in the day you'd wake up on Christmas morning and find a nice big boxy lump of wrapping paper and unwrap it eagerly to find inside a Commodore 64, Apple II, or even an Amiga. You'd get it all out, plug it in and start looking at the books that came with it and find one on programming. As soon as you turned those machines on, you had access to a programming environment. In fact, with the likes of the Commdore and Apple at least, as soon as you turned it on you were dropped right into the programming environment.

Today though, if you want to learn to program you either have to shell out a small fortune or go and get Linux, and I don't honestly believe either of those two is a good route to take. I mean, if you go the Linux route, it's hardly intuitive, it certainly doesn't come with well written easy to follow documentation, and the development environment itself is a nightmare to get to grips with. The only company out there at the moment doing anything towards getting people into programming seems to be Apple once again. When you buy a Macintosh with MacOS X you get the development tools right out the box. Granted there's no printed documentation to help you get started, but the PDF's Apple include are quite comprehensive once you get your head around them.

Someone posted a comment on the Channel 9 video saying that Microsoft should release Express for free. I have to completely agree with them. I'd guess that most of the professional developers out there today got started with a free development tool that came with the first computer. Where are we going to be in 20 years time if people need to keep spending cash just to see what programming has to offer? I also believe Microsoft should give Express away, but I'd go one further. Why not a new "edition" of Windows with programming tools built in. You could buy Windows XP Home "Coder Edition", install it and voila you have instant access to VB and C# Express, perhaps even Web Developer Express. Wouldn't that be cool? I'd love to be able to buy my nieces and nephews a cheap notebook for them to share where as soon as they open it up and turn it on they get a cool menu system that asks what they want to do; browse the web, use Windows, watch a movie, LEARN TO PROGRAM.

This is after all how Microsoft got started. Microsoft was formed by a bunch of hobbyists that wanted to make tools for other hobbyists (MSBasic). The company grew from there. I really believe the best thing Microsoft can do today for the computer industry of tomorrow is bundle Express with the operating system and get a whole new generation of geeks exploring the sheer exhilaration and fun that comes from programming the minute they turn on the box.

Come on Bill - you know it makes sense too!

 


12:58:49 PM    comment []


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