Dan Hounshell

Save your Kudos for your Annual Review

2008-10-02T04:04:06Z

Over the last several years I’ve gotten into the habit of saving any “kudos” emails that get sent to me into a folder with the creative name of “Kudos”. I don’t know where I picked up this habit, but from time to time I’ve shared this tip with others. After letting Jose in on my little secret earlier today he suggested that I blog about it and share it with everyone. Good idea, Jose. Hopefully this doesn’t kill my competitive advantage :), but here goes… When the occasional email comes in that says...(read more)

The double dog dare gets me every time!

2008-09-22T18:17:00Z

I wondered when some of these pictures from DevLink would surface. Between the dares and doubts of those who said I couldn't fit into a medium t-shirt - I had to do it. A big "thanks" to Dave Giard for capturing the moment. Check out the guns! I should have flexed for the pics! Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

My cast-offs may be your treasure

2008-09-22T14:08:00Z

As a web developer I like building new web sites, web applications, mashups, widgets, etc. Just like most other men I like shiny new toys and sometimes not-so-shiny older toys tend to become less used, become a little rusty and maybe even feel a little unloved. If I were able to find a way to graph those two statements we'd see that their intersection occurs at about 9-12 months and afterwards usage drops off dramatically. By that time I've moved on to the next shiny new toy - I've already...(read more)

Telligent Wants You!

2008-09-02T18:55:00Z

I joined Telligent nearly two years ago. Over that time we've grown nearly threefold and we're still growing and going strong. Scott W , Rob Howard , Dave Donaldson , the Pentonizer and others have already said it but it bears repeating... We need more great developers! We want to do some really great things in the next version of Community Server, but we need more people to help make them happen. Check out Scott's post for the skills we are looking for . If you fit the bill then we want...(read more)

One Thought: Why Regional Conferences + Open Spaces Rock

2008-08-25T16:09:00Z

I'm still trying to gather my thoughts after attending DevLink this past weekend. One thing that I want to highlight is how great these regional conferences are and how much they are a perfect fit for Open Spaces . [Much props to Alan Stevens for making the DevLink Open Spaces a huge success] One thought defines this for me: How much would you pay to take part in a group discussion with leading-edgers of the .NET TDD movement like Alan Stevens and Steven Harman and ask them anything you want...(read more)

Community Server does "Am I ___ or Not?"

2008-07-29T05:05:37Z

We're always working on something cool at Telligent, whether it be an entirely new product or some type of addition or extension to Community Server . Some good examples are some of the things we came up with in Hackathon II, including the couple of IM clients that work with Community Server messaging. If you haven't already read about some of the thing we came up with you can see them here and here . Recently over a late night IM session with Dave Donaldson , we pondered the benefits of...(read more)

Lan and Deon #3

2008-07-23T19:33:00Z

Lan and Deon go to their local .NET User Group meeting... Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

I like VisualSVN

2008-07-21T21:39:00Z

I'm not a big fan of Source Code Management integration with Visual Studio. I don't know, maybe VSS soured me years ago. When using Vault in the past I installed the Visual Studio integration tools once and uninstalled them a few days later. While using Subversion almost exclusively over the last three years I've been more than happy using TortoiseSVN in an explorer window. The separation of SCM and programming IDE has been refreshing and actually lends itself well to the way Subversion...(read more)

Adding OpenID to your web site in conjunction with ASP.NET Membership

2008-07-19T03:17:00Z

I recently added membership, accounts, login, etc. to the AspDotNetMVC site. While doing so I decided I wanted to support OpenID, too. However, I didn't want to go with only OpenID because I needed ASP.NET Membership in place to work in conjunction with another application, a Kigg site used as a service for rating content on the AspDotNetMVC site. I could have probably converted the Kigg code base to use OpenID but I also wanted to allow people who may not have OpenID to create traditional accounts...(read more)

How to use Kigg as a service from other sites

2008-07-15T07:33:00Z

In yesterday's post I started providing some detail about my use of Kigg to add rating functionality to the AspDotNetMVC site . Because I wanted to integrate the ASP.NET Membership store between the two sites into an external database I started by decoupling the membership data from the Kigg database, model and code. My end goal was to allow visitors to the AspDotNetMVC site to view the number of existing votes for each article (blog post, buzz, news, or video) and to vote for an article if they...(read more)

How I got started in Software Development

2008-07-14T07:34:22Z

I've finally gotten around to answering Michael Eaton's question: How did you get started in software development? How old were you when you started programming? How did you get started in programming? I think that the first time that I got the concept of writing instructions for computers to execute was probably somewhere around 7th or 8th grade - 12 years old I guess. A couple of classmates were playing around on the one Apple IIc (?) in our math classroom and wrote one of the all time...(read more)

How to decouple the ASP.NET Membership database from Kigg

2008-07-14T05:57:00Z

This evening I posted an update to the AspDotNetMVC site that includes allowing voting on the ASP.NET MVC blog posts, buzz, articles and news that the site collects. You can see a page that uses it here: http://aspdotnetmvc.com/blogs . Rather than create my own rating system I decided to leverage Kigg instead. I mentioned in a previous post that I had been looking at Kigg and that I had upgraded it from ASP.NET MVC Preview 2 to Preview 3 . Why not use Kigg? It has nearly everything that I need, it...(read more)

Now with a picture

2008-07-11T07:29:00Z

I finally got around to adding a picture of me to this blog, thanks to some prodding (you know who you are!). After doing so I realized that this theme is getting a little bit crowded and dated. I hate to add to my to-do list but I'm now in search of something else. Move my personal blog to Graffiti . Choose one of the existing out of the box Graffiti themes, choose one of Rich's themes - I really like the PointSpace one, or create a new one. I want something much simpler than this one whatever...(read more)

Lan & Deon #1

2008-07-09T12:59:00Z

Hopefully the first of many... Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | kick it! | live it!...(read more)

AspDotNetMVC.com

2008-07-08T05:32:00Z

I know what you're thinking, "Three posts in one day? This can't be the same blog I've been following for the last month or so. What is wrong with my RSS reader?" As far as I know there is nothing wrong with your RSS reader. This is my third post today. My recent lack of regular blog posts and my sadly unnoticed disappearance from Twitter and the rest of the microblogging universe can simply be explained by the following: Doing some recovering and catching up on delinquent household...(read more)