By now it should be obvious that I am big fan of the open source component NVelocity. Most of the examples of its usage are UI related such as view engines for MonoRail and ASP.Net MVC. We (Telligent) also use it to power the theme engine for Graffiti. While it is great to be able to use it in this way, the are a lot more non-web UI uses for it.

Continue reading "SimpleTemplate"

As I previously wrote, Velocity is Microsoft’s entry into Distributed Caching. It is currently in its first public CTP, so there are certainly going to be some rough spots. The documentation is pretty good, but setting it up and using it the first time required some trial and error. Here is a quick overview on getting it Velocity setup and and using the API.

Continue reading "Setting Up Velocity (Distributed Cache)"

A couple of days ago, I was chatting with David, I have not blogged since 2004, Penton about the lack of a built in distributed caching solution for .NET. There are a couple of really good third party tools available (more posts coming soon) but since caching adds such a huge boost in performance (if used correctly) it is really struck me as odd that the folks in Redmond had not yet addressed this issue on their own (I do not need a Microsoft certified solution to every problem, but since that is their style, it seemed to odd to be missing one here).

Continue reading "Velocity - Microsoft Distributed Cache"

I have been evaluating Linq to SQL and Castle ActiveRecord for a small project I am working on. In end I decided to go with ActiveRecord. As part of my experiment, I did a quick prototype of an ActiveRecord like pattern using Linq to SQL.

Continue reading "ActiveLinq"

I am still digging Castle's ActiveRecord implementation. While the code is "tight" and there is substantial documentation, there are still a couple of things that took me longer to figure out than I had hoped. This is not a knock against Castle, more a testament to the size and scope of the project. Anyway, here are a couple of notes on paging data.

Continue reading "Paging Data In ActiveRecord"

This post initially started as a set of notes related to my own research around NHibernate and Linq to SQL. However, it quickly turned into a very obvious "ah ha" moment.

Continue reading "Developer Choice"

One of the major selling points of ASP.Net MVC is its extensibility options. Almost every piece of it can updated or swapped out. I have been hacking on the bits quite a bit over the last couple of weeks and have been using the MvcContrib to augment some of the built in ASP.Net functionality.

Continue reading "MvcContrib NVelocity Extension"

NVelocity[1] is a .NET port of the Velocity open source template engine. I have used NVelocity quite a few times over the last couple of years.

Continue reading "Simplifying ASP.Net - NVelocity"

We had our second Telligent Hack-A-Thon last week when the product team was in town to celebrate the release of Community Server 2008.

Continue reading "Telligent Hack-A-Thon II"

For the last couple of weeks I have been digging through a bunch of new projects/concepts with the hope of using some new (to me) things in a couple application samples/prototypes I am itching to build. One of the projects I have been spending a lot of time with recently is the Castle Project.

Continue reading "Castle Project"