dashCommerce

dashCommerce: State of the Union Address 2009

Chris Cyvas — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 08:00:00 GMT

It’s been almost a year since the last dashCommerce State of the Union address, so I guess it is time to evaluate where we are, what’s happened over the last year, and get a feel for what could happen in the future. We just pushed the dashCommerce 3.2 RC this past weekend, which has a lot [...]...(read more)

The Beauty of Fluent NHibernate Automapping

Chris Cyvas — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

For the next rev of dashCommerce, we are going to be using NHibernate and so I have been exploring ways to both: 1.) get up to speed with NHibernate and 2.) the fastest way to get started working with NHibernate. I had seen all of the articles on Fluent NHibernate, but to me it just [...]...(read more)

Getting Mono and Visual Studio to play nice together :: Part 2

Chris Cyvas — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 11:37:10 GMT

In my last post, I profiled what you would need to do to get Visual Studio to use the Mono compiler for compiling your Mono projects. I also created 3 basic Mono project templates that are available for download. Apparently, they have some appeal as they have been downloaded a couple of hundred times, so that’s [...]...(read more)

Getting Mono and Visual Studio to play nice together

Chris Cyvas — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

As it stands, Visual Studio does not allow you to explicitly target a framework other than the .NET framework. I cover that in this post, so if you are curious about that, then you may want to go read that first to understand where this post is coming from. But thankfully, Jason left me a [...]...(read more)

A Failure in Microsoft’s Open Source Strategy

Chris Cyvas — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

Open source in the Microsoft ecosystem is a new thing, and to be frank, it’s only gaining ground in some areas of Microsoft. We’ve all heard the news reports of Steve Ballmer saying Open Source is Microsoft’s primary threat, among other things. I’m not here to re-hash all that. You either side with Microsoft, Open [...]...(read more)

The Development Stack for Mono

Chris Cyvas — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

In my planning to get ready for Mono development, I’ve been looking at different ways to get up and running. I’ll be putting together a screen cast of this work, all distilled down so hopefully you will be able to avoid some of the pain, musings, and cursing that occur during this process. Although, I [...]...(read more)

An Impressive Interview

Chris Cyvas — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 08:15:00 GMT

I’ve never met Miguel de Icaza, but I found this interview and it is quite possibly the most intelligent interview I have listened to in the last few years. He’s an extremely “balanced” individual, fair and accurate. I like that. No, I don’t like it, let me re-phrase: It’s important to me. [...]...(read more)

The Plan for 2009 - Onward and Upward!

Chris Cyvas — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 08:00:00 GMT

In an nutshell the plan is to do 1 or 2 releases that tighten up the existing code base in 2009. We won’t do too many drastic things as there doesn’t appear to be a need based on the community feedback. There are some things here and there, but overall the feedback has been overwhelmingly [...]...(read more)

Mono 2.4 Preview 1 Released

Chris Cyvas — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Here you go. Considering they just released 2.2 not too long ago, and judging by the commit rate, they seem to be moving along quite well. Now if only I can get into the mix a bit . . . ...(read more)

Digging into Mono

Chris Cyvas — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:00:00 GMT

I’ve been digging into Mono a bit. The thing that is taking most of my time right now is looking at the libraries I would like to use for dashCommerce v.Next to see if they might work on Mono, using the Mono Migration Analyzer. So far, things are looking ok, but there are definitely some [...]...(read more)

1.5 hours to openSUSE 11.1, Mono, and MonoDevelop

Chris Cyvas — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 12:10:06 GMT

Yep, that’s all it took. Installed as a VM. openSUSE is very nice so far. ...(read more)

Finishing the last few courses of a geek buffet

Chris Cyvas — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 13:00:00 GMT

I’ve been in mad scientist mode for a few months now and especially over the last few weeks, feeding off of every interesting thing I could find / read. It’s the binge. You know it. You know how it usually ends up – a million ideas, too much to do, and not enough time in [...]...(read more)

MEF – Baby Steps

Chris Cyvas — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 02:29:28 GMT

MEF is the Managed Extensibility Framework, which is a project out on CodePlex. The aim of the project is to allow greater reuse of applications and components. Microsoft has said that they will be using it in the next rev of Visual Studio – so there’s some buy-in there. In dashCommerce we allow you [...]...(read more)

Gleaning some inspiration from a friend

Chris Cyvas — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:17:02 GMT

My friend Corey Haines recently embarked on an interesting experience. He has spent the last three weeks traveling around the central midwest pair programming with people that would put him up for a few days. I’ve been watching the videos and the twitter traffic on the experience with real admiration. This apparently has caught the [...]...(read more)

Microsoft’s BizSpark – Well Done!!

Chris Cyvas — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 14:00:00 GMT

For those of you out there looking to free yourself from The Cubicle Nation, you should definitely check out the Microsoft BizSpark program. This is an enormous package for basement startups and I wish, oh do I wish, something like this would have been available years ago. Well done Microsoft, you definitely go this one [...]...(read more)

Documentation Suggestions ??

Chris Cyvas — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 13:00:00 GMT

There are some things that I WANT desperately to get right before we start on dC v.Next and one of those is documentation. I am talking about conceptual, code examples and and API documentation. The API documentation is pretty well taken care of with some xml comments and some discipline, but the code examples and [...]...(read more)

Programming Tip – Icon Handler

Chris Cyvas — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 13:05:00 GMT

I stumbled on this tool and the accompanying utility the other day and thought is particularly handy. The IconHandler will pull from the OS the appropriate icon for a file given it’s extension. In the case of servers that may not have the associated software and icons installed, you can use the IconGen.exe utility to [...]...(read more)

New Stuff at dashCommerce.com

Chris Cyvas — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 13:00:00 GMT

I wanted to mention that there are some new tools and utilities over at dashCommerce.com. There is the new YocuTeem Per Order Shipping Charge provider written by forum member YocuTeem. I know he’s got a bunch of other stuff cooking, so keep your eye on YocuTeem. YocuTeem Per Order Shipping Charge Provider This shipping provider, brought to [...]...(read more)

ISV Tip – Subversion Source Control Hosting

Chris Cyvas — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 13:00:00 GMT

For an small ISV, the trouble you frequently encounter is managing all of the systems, environments, and tools you need to run your business. One of the fundamental things is source control. I have always been a bit of a source control nut – openly scoffing at people that have asked me to “just develop on [...]...(read more)

Toward a More Dynamic Security Model

Chris Cyvas — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 14:00:00 GMT

I’ve been thinking about the dashCommerce security model – or lack thereof. Sure there is standard security, but what I want to be able to do is identify certain course grained operations and apply an authorization rule to it. That rule can then be configured and assigned to a role during application configuration and [...]...(read more)

Programming Tip – Complimentary Database Tools

Chris Cyvas — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 13:00:00 GMT

I use the Database Publishing Tool a lot. For some reason the version in Visual Studio didn’t work as well for me, so I have stuck with the free standing version of it. Not sure if there is a version that works with Sql Server 2008 yet, but this one works well for 2000 and [...]...(read more)

What Unit Test Framework Should I Use?

Chris Cyvas — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

I have a lot of experience with NUnit, so it is very familiar to me. I did some work with MbUnit a while back and I liked some of the features of it. But, I know there are a bunch more out there now and I am looking for some feedback on what unit testing [...]...(read more)

Programming Tip – PowerCommands for Visual Studio 2008

Chris Cyvas — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 13:00:00 GMT

These have proven to be an excellent help. Check them out here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/PowerCommands While writing this, I was listening to "Beautiful Day" by U2 ...(read more)

dashCommerce V.Next Part II

Chris Cyvas — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:00:00 GMT

I am struggling with some things for the next rev of dC. Part of me wants to really geek out with it and do some neat stuff . . ....(read more)

LINQ-ify Anything

Chris Cyvas — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 12:24:04 GMT

When I set out to write my ORM, I had two guiding principles: 1.) Loose Coupling was key. I wanted the result of the ORM to be loosely coupled, and I wanted any dependencies the ORM had to be loosely coupled as well. 2.) I wanted 1 and only 1 query language – and that was LINQ. Now, [...]...(read more)