Community Starter Kit

Re: GCN - A Community Driven Upgrade to the CSK

pdepaso — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 22:48:33 GMT

I need your help with getting the images that are stored within the "/Communities/Common/...." or "/Admin/.." to show. My website was fully functioning at 1.0 with having .gif, .jpg, and .jpeg mapping in IIS. I upgraded to GCN 1.1 and all my database images are displaying correctly but now all my locally stored images aren't such as discussion images, banner images, navicon, etc.. I double checked and the web.config in the Communities folder does have the remove verb command which I assumed was so that it would ignore the mapping and look for the files locally. Please assist.

Here is a link to my current website to show you the locally stored images not properly displaying: http://www.sandiegosurfladies.com

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated as I can't seem to figure out.

One other thing to note is that I did copy over my modified skin and css but that is it. I couldn't find anything in there that would have made it to break.

Paola

Re: GCN - A Community Driven Upgrade to the CSK

Jiachun — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:04:55 GMT

Hi, David,

I'd like to have your VB.Net version of GCN1.1 with ASP.NET2.0 conversion and bug-fixed.

Thanks,

Jason

jiqiu@hotmail.com

Re: GCN - A Community Driven Upgrade to the CSK

BillKrat — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 01:13:09 GMT

Another Tip Songless...

I didn't know that when I checked something in that the comments would display on the main site's source page! I was doing some preliminary cleanup and moving things where they need to be and was surprised to find everytime I checked something in there was a blank line entry in the source code tab (dough!).

Comment every check-in with the notion that folks will be seeing it ;)

Re: GCN - A Community Driven Upgrade to the CSK

BillKrat — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 23:34:10 GMT

songless:
I am now registered in Codeplex.com and the project site looks very cool, this weekend I'll try the Team Foundation Explorer

Could you please document the process from start to finish (as you do it)? I wish I had thought of it because it will be of great value to those who have not used source control before. We can publish your information in a wiki document.

If you have any problems getting up and running please let me know and we'll get you through it. Some steps that I can remember follow:

Download the "Free" Team System Explorer from referenced link (Discussions | Project Management forum | Team Explorer | provided link)
Download the shareware UltralSO product (link on same thread above) and extract .img file to an applicable folder on your system.
Run the autostart application and install Team Explorer
Run Visual Studio 2005
Click on Tools | Options | Source Control
On the combo dropdown list select "Visual Studio Team Foundation Server"
Click on OK
Click on View
Select Team Explorer
Here is where I can't remember the exact steps to document the process. BUT, I'll take a stab at it.... The sequence may vary
Download the most recent version of code from the Source Code links
If you'll log into the CodePlex site and go to our projects "Source Code" tab you should see the Team Foundation Server Name, Port number, Protocal, and Username that you will require to access the code on the top right hand panel (you have to be logged in; I've added you as a developer). Note: Your password will be your CodePlex password.
Open the solution in Visual Source Safe - if you are not already logged in you will be asked to log in.
Right click on solution and select "Get Latest Version"
STRONG SUGGESTION
- Right click on your Web.Config and remove the Readonly attribute. You can now edit the connection string without it being under source control - for obvious reasons you do not want to check in your SQL Server connection string (this will make it harder to do so).
- I moved my CommunityCSK connectionstring into the Machine.Config file. This way all I have to do is rename CommunityCSK to Community2CSK and the application will always run. If I do another Get Latest version and overwrite my web.config I don't have to keep inputting this string.

If you'll then go to the Releases tab

Click on Planned Releases
Click on 1.0 Beta
Download the CASK Manual Installation steps

You should be able to get the CASK up and running - if you can't following these steps please revise them so I can add this to your wiki setup instructions for developers.

Thanks!

Re: GCN - A Community Driven Upgrade to the CSK

BillKrat — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 22:59:35 GMT

songless:
I am now registered in Codeplex.com and the project site looks very cool, this weekend I'll try the Team Foundation Explorer and take a look to the Tasks and Goals you put in the site.

I'll try to finish my website that is consuming me too much time, Jody I am looking your caching MOD and man, today I was writing a VERY similar one. So I'll try it, thanks ! Your site is full of interesting articles, I used to visit it with frecuence some months ago but lately I forgot about the cool stuff there are.
I read too the pagination problem and your mod.

And about the project name, Community Advanced Starter Kit, don't you think is many responsability to drive a project with the word Advanced on it ? :-)
People will be waiting something really great !

We have the team that won't disappoint them!!!

Re: GCN - A Community Driven Upgrade to the CSK

songless — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 22:50:59 GMT

I am now registered in Codeplex.com and the project site looks very cool, this weekend I'll try the Team Foundation Explorer and take a look to the Tasks and Goals you put in the site.

I'll try to finish my website that is consuming me too much time, Jody I am looking your caching MOD and man, today I was writing a VERY similar one. So I'll try it, thanks ! Your site is full of interesting articles, I used to visit it with frecuence some months ago but lately I forgot about the cool stuff there are.
I read too the pagination problem and your mod.

And about the project name, Community Advanced Starter Kit, don't you think is many responsability to drive a project with the word Advanced on it ? :-)
People will be waiting something really great !

Re: GCN - A Community Driven Upgrade to the CSK

BillKrat — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 18:14:00 GMT

jodywbcb:

I added that forum becuase - developer forum should be about discussing actual code in play. The Goals forum is to establish what needs to be honed in for the criteria of establishing milestones (at least in terms of rock solid fixes, features, etc). Once the list is generated - then that should be upon which people get assigned work items....Kinda like walking into a clients office to discuss a project - you do not walk in immediately discussing coding - more or less the goal is to establish the priorities and expectations. Once the items are 'approved' then the forum becomes locked and no additional features or such are added in ... otherwise this project will take longer than it has for me to finish my Sites-Easy project becuase it will never be done ... and while I personally do not mind it as I am adding stuff all the the time - in a group project where there are many - its not advisable and will wear on morale and effectiveness.

Oooo - I thought they added it by default. Great idea as "scope creep" has been the death of many projects... The problem (with their design) is that you only see approximately 11/12 words of the description; on the surface they appear to be the same.

I primarily went with the headers and "Conversion Tasks and Goals" seemed appropriate to drop our lists into. When done I wondered if I put items in the wrong forum because "Developer Forum" suggest "future designs, new features as well as the current imp...". Do I need to move these items?

When I went [Edit Forum] it was much clearer --- guess I'll have to look for their issue tracker ;)

Developer Forum	For discussing future designs, new features as well as the current implementation approach. Ask design questions and suggest improvements here.
Project Management Forum	For discussing project logistics, operation and the team. Ask questions about the project in general here.
User Forum	For general assistance with the software. Ask questions about using the project here.
Conversion Tasks and Goals	Discussions of the tasks and goals that will define the CASK. Once these have been agreed upon they will be work items that must be completed before officially releasing CASK as a completed project.

The wiki is pretty simple and powerful -> [my new wiki page] is all that is required to create a new wiki page - I saw how other sites where doing their FAQ and did the same (on the home page).

Re: GCN - A Community Driven Upgrade to the CSK

jodywbcb — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 15:58:38 GMT

I added that forum becuase - developer forum should be about discussing actual code in play. The Goals forum is to establish what needs to be honed in for the criteria of establishing milestones (at least in terms of rock solid fixes, features, etc). Once the list is generated - then that should be upon which people get assigned work items....Kinda like walking into a clients office to discuss a project - you do not walk in immediately discussing coding - more or less the goal is to establish the priorities and expectations. Once the items are 'approved' then the forum becomes locked and no additional features or such are added in ... otherwise this project will take longer than it has for me to finish my Sites-Easy project becuase it will never be done ... and while I personally do not mind it as I am adding stuff all the the time - in a group project where there are many - its not advisable and will wear on morale and effectiveness.

Re: GCN - A Community Driven Upgrade to the CSK

BillKrat — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 12:48:51 GMT

songless:
Hey Bill,
take a look to CodePlex ( http://www.codeplex.com/ ) . Many Microsoft projects ( like Atlas ) are being developed through this website and seems like any developer can open his own project.
I suppose it is something similar to SourceForge but done by Microsoft.

Your idea about using CVS through Visual Studio with a C++ wrapper sounds pretty complicated, there are add-ins for that.
And now Subversion is preferred over CVS, in fact SourceForge has updated all the projects to Subversion. So you can open the console, type svn -checkout http://sourceforge.net/anyproject and get all the latest sources.

But take a look to CodePlex, I think is just the solution you are looking for. And your project sounds very sweet :-)

Hmmm, I just noted that when you REPLY to a message thread it doesn't state who you are replying to so the community might not realize I was writing you SongLess - so I'll add this thread to clarify :)

Your tip saved me literally "months" of work - CodePlex uses Team Foundation Server. I downloaded the "free" Visual Studio Team Explorer, Logged into the system, uploaded the code into the VSTS Source control and it magically showed up on the Source Code page!! I had no idea that the preliminary preparations for upload (checking files in and out) would result in transactions on the Source Code page or I would have documented what I was doing :O

Re: GCN - A Community Driven Upgrade to the CSK

BillKrat — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 12:43:50 GMT

[Jody] so ... don't worry about it - no one is going to judge you...

I second that notion Jody :) Sometimes I look back at my old code (some of it not so old) and I cringe; for example we used a standard of Hungarian notation when I worked on a large Foxpro Team years back. I took those prinicpals for naming conventions into .NET (great for intellisence for logical grouping) as I launched my independent contracting career. I've only abandoned hungarian notation in the last few months...

The great thing about large teams is we learn from each other...

On that note - hope to see you come onboard as a developer for the CodePlex project - we're online now!!

If you'll go to Discussions | Project Management Forum | Team Explorer you'll find more details (to include the download link and a tip to extract Team System Explorer from the .img file).

Question for you guys:

There is a Developer Forum and Conversion Tasks and Goals section on the CASK site - not real sure there is a real distinction between the two??? Currently I put the list Jody emailed me and my own list into Conversion Tasks and Goals. I notice another site just had the Developer Forum.

I want to see if they can add an FAQ Section for us (so folks don't have to sift through many threads for answers - some of them perhaps wrong). Do we need a "Conversion Tasks and Goals" goals section - the developer forum notes that it is for "For discussing future designs, new features as well as the current imp... "

Re: GCN - A Community Driven Upgrade to the CSK

jodywbcb — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 03:16:42 GMT

Yes the pagination was an issue - I wrote a fix for it back last summer (somewhere on my site there is an article on it)....I modified how the viewstate was being handled for it.

Caching strategy there are improvements with Asp .Net 2.0 on various caching levels (kernal, page, partial etc) - I opted to write an overall caching module (its on my site as well as an article)... I was not so concerned of caching pages as user level caching would have to be used and that would be way much more in terms of memory (great if you have 16 gig for RAM but when playing with less than 2 gig - benefits of using it or relying on data caching instead easily becomes more adventageous).

I did use IIS caching where most of all the static pages get cached get cached by IIS - it has worked well.

As for your MODs - don't worry about all the if it works or not on a stock system. The point of sharing code is to share the experience. We all start somewhere anyways.... My headlines MOD is a perfect example - it was a major hack job - but ironically was one of the most downloaded MODs I ever wrote... now I know I can create custom controls that I can use in any content page and so forth - so ... don't worry about it - no one is going to judge you...

Anyways...

Re: GCN - A Community Driven Upgrade to the CSK

songless — Wed, 21 Jun 2006 22:28:09 GMT

Wow great news !!! Congrats !!!! :-)

I have read in other post Community ADVANCED Starter Kit. Man, that sounds frightening.
Or not, after trying to understand the Community Server code there is nothing more frightening

So well done guys, this shows that the project is solid and has future.

Jody> I think too that CSK is not a good soft for applying ajax effects, probably only for search and pagination in the ContentList control ( that by the way I'm having many problems to do it, CSK uses a custom control that implements IPostbackEventHandler. Weird... I'd like to use the querystring, but the communitiesmodule uses rewritepath to communitydefault and destroy the querystring ).
Anyway, in my personal web site I'm using ajax around all the web because I find it funny and hey, I don't pretend my site to be the more accessible or standard looking :-)
I understand perfectly you about Cavalia and the deviation for the original CSK, in my case I think the business and data layers are not very changed, but the presentation stuff...
I would be glad to post mods in your site, but I haven't tested my changes against a fresh CSK installation and currently have not many time to do it, I prefer by the moment to post them as suggestions for people with advice for how to implement it.

And one thing, I'm having a terrible time trying to implement a more aggressive caching strategy. CSK caches sections, topics and communities but each time the user clicks a section menu a database connection is established and recovers the 10 or more items depending the pagination.

Have you tried to use output caching ? What's the consequences of using it knowing the redirection and virtual paths that are used in every request ?

Cheers.

Re: GCN - A Community Driven Upgrade to the CSK

BillKrat — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 17:22:36 GMT

Thanks Songless - looks like you got the CSK Community an official home for CSK 2.0!! An added and very special thanks to Jody who endorsed my work (me) with the Visual Studio Team - he had me walking on water ;) I kept him in the loop the entire process.

The Microsoft team reviewed the project as it currently exist so I'll set it up to be consistent with my request - however I need to emphasize that this is no longer "Bill's CSK" but the communities CSK. The following is the information they require from me - in the absence of any inputs I will submit the following:

Project Title: CSK20
Project Name: Community Starter Kit
Project Coordinator: Jody and myself (if we can convince him to be one)

Brief Description: I'll steal it from the CSK 1.1 version

Email requirements from George Bullock (CodePlex)

Bill, we'd love to have your project on CodePlex! Here is a list of information we need to get started. Once you have that we'll get the project created and you'll be ready to go. Let me know if you have any questions:

1 - Project Title: This is the name of your project as it appears on the CodePlex Web site, but not in TFS (this name can be changed at any time by the project Coordinator).

2 - Project Name: This is the name which will appear in the short name URL for your project.
Also it will be the name as it appears in the CodePlex Team Foundation Server, the Web site, on the other hand, uses just the Project Title described above (the Project Name cannot be changed later).
The Project Name must be only alphanumeric characters / no spaces / 20 characters max.

3 - CodePlex Account Name for the Project Coordinator:
(The person who will be running the show – i.e. the project administrator).
Register for a CodePlex user account at http://codeplex (upper right nav).
We need this so the account can be added to the Coordinators group of the newly created project to allow the Coordinator to begin working with it.
Note: You can have multiple people in the Coordinator role.

4 - Brief Description of the project: 50 words or less / can be edited later at any time by the project Coordinator.

5 - Commitment to Provide Open Source: CodePlex is an open source site, so please indicate that you intend to post all source related to your project as open source. There are currently no private projects on CodePlex, and public binary only projects are not being considered at this time. Some info about open source software:
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/Government/opensource.mspx

6 - Open source license: Please prepare a copy of the license you intend to use for your project on the CodePlex site. The CodePlex team cannot itself offer legal advice regarding the software you wish to make publicly available, only your own legal contacts are the appropriate advisers for that, but we can point out that there are many choices available on the Internet for licensing. Some of the more popular licenses are the following:

Microsoft Shared Source Licenses

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/sharedsource/default.mspx

Microsoft Permissive License (MS-PL)

Microsoft Community License (MS-CL)

Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL)

The following sites provide some other possibilities:

http://creativecommons.org/license/ à Provides a wizard to help you choose which license is appropriate for your project.

http://www.opensource.org/licenses/

Re: GCN - A Community Driven Upgrade to the CSK

BillKrat — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 17:04:51 GMT

songless:
Great Bill,
anyway after reading the CodeFlex FAQ probably the project is not going to be accepted during next months, they are in beta phase and things will go slowly. I hope people at Microsoft will be glad about a CSK 2.0 project.

And no, I have not many experience with Source Control soft but I use subversion to get latest snapshot of some free software I use in my projects and occasionally with my code. About your initiative to get a server, I think it's not necessary because many .net heroes like Scott Hanselman use SourceForge to host their projects ( dasBlog ).

But whatever decision you take, I would be glad to help ( with my limitations, I'm spanish and my English is poor ).

I'm finishing and near to publish my personal web site builded upon CSK, so after some months of work I think I know pretty well the CSK inner workings and my next goal is to develop a decent forum and blog engine, like in the cool frameworks for PHP out there. I think Jody is working too about this for Cavalia.

So with luck next week I'll be posting some stuff I have developed for CSK with hope that it will be useful to someone:
- Integrate Scott Mitchell's rating control that looks like the MSDN one.
- My way of publishing and suscribing Rss feeds.
- Using Anthem.net for Ajax stuff in CSK.
- Search function using Full-Text indexes in Sql Server.

I'm following with MANY interest the migration of the security infrastructure to new Membership/Role model you are working in, so thanks for the effort and illusion you guys put in and hoping to collaborate in the near future.

Please provide us a link to your site/code when you publish it! I'm particularly interested in your RSS feed and search function using Full-Text indexes.

I'm glad to hear that I can achieve my source control goals without having to get a server - I'm doing a wait-n-see with CodePlex to see if it will provide capabilities for this.

But whatever decision you take, I would be glad to help ( with my limitations, I'm spanish and my English is poor ).

GREAT! If/when CodePlex, or Jody's suggestion for Stephen's GCN space, is approved and we have a new official home for the CSK 2.0 I really want to pull out as it being "Bills" CSK and have it be a "Community CSK" - even if this means we all start from CSK 1.1 and build from there. If we could get Jody, you, myself (and others) focusing our attention on one CSK - it could be the best thing around!

Re: GCN - A Community Driven Upgrade to the CSK

BillKrat — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 16:51:19 GMT

jodywbcb:
BTW - Bill - you may want to ping Stephen Redd for the access to the GotDotNet workspace for the GCN... at least in this case he could give you access to a codestore on the workspaces there... its essestially no defunct but the space is still there - you'll just need to clear out the cobwebs...He's a very likeable fellow justb his time is absorbed by his real job now...Him and StarPilot where the ones who had the real initiative for the GCN version (and at the time I was merely a nubie)...

My concern would be that Stephen would sign off on your suggestion and then Microsoft will sign off on my request and then I will have bitten off more than I can chew... I'll wait to see what George replies with and, if the CSKDotNet20 does not qualify, I'll see if Stephen would be willing to open the doors for a conversion team - not necessarily with my code.

I know you are aware of this email but I'm providing it for others reference:

From: George Bullock [mailto:George.Bullock@microsoft.com]
Sent: Friday, June 16, 2006 12:02 AM
To: Bill Kratochvil
Cc: CodeStudio Core Team
Subject: RE: Community Starter kit ASP.NET 2.0 project request

Bill, thanks for you interest in CodePlex. You project definitely sounds interesting. I will put it up for review with our team. If you have any questions in the meantime don't hesitate to write. I will get back to you ASAP on the project.

Thanks,
George Bullock
Program Manager
Microsoft CodePlex
http://www.codeplex.com