ThinkEdge

Earlier today, NASA successfully landed the Phoenix spacecraft on the planet Mars!  That is an amazing accomplishment. Mars is roughly 90 million miles from Earth. That's like making a hole-in-one on another golf course on the other side of the planet. Kudos to NASA and their expert teams of engineers and scientists!

Photo: Phoenix footpad on Mars!

I was so impressed with the iTheme theme that Nick La created for WordPress that I decided to port it to BlogEngine.NET.  So if you have an iPod, iPhone, iTouch, or even an iMac, this theme is designed for you (even if BlogEngine.NET currently only runs on Windows and Linux platforms).

The only feature not ported yet over is the drag and drop side bar feature - however, it will be coming once the BlogEngine.NET new Widget support is completed.

Nick has release the theme to the public under a very generous license, please check his blog for details.

Download: iTheme.zip (143.78 kb) Updated: 5/23/08

This is an updated to the "NGif, animated GIF Encoder for .NET" article on the The Code Project web site. NGif is a set of C# classes which can create animated GIF images. Microsoft's native GDI library does not support the creation of animated GIFs.

My update supports returning the animated GIF as a MemoryStream object instead of a file. This is helpful on webservers where saving temporary files are not allowed.

Download: NGif_src2.zip (361.62 kb)

Update: If you are looking for more information on animated GIFs using C#, check out HOWTO: create an animated GIF using .Net (C#) by Rick van den Bosch.

It's been over a month since my last project update and we are due to give out another update.

First, we are slightly behind on the release. We have been trying to coordinating with the core BlogEngine.NET team regarding some changes we would like to see in the core, so we could release the Photo Gallery Project as more of an extension rather than a whole new project. Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond our control, this has been slower than what we had originally anticipated.

Some of the design challenges of implementing a Photo Gallery within BlogEngine.NET is re-using the existing code base as much as possible. The good thing is BlogEngine.NET is very well written and can easily be extended and re-factored to fit other, similar purposes, like re-using the Comments implementation for Albums and Photos. The bad thing is if we extend or re-factor code within any of the core classes, the core BlogEngine.NET teams needs to incorporate and merge them into main source code tree.

And sometimes even a small re-factoring change can have a large impact on the code base in terms of the number of files affected. This leads to increased dependency and communications with the core team, and they have their own priorities and vet process prior to incorporating it. All this, unfortunately, slows down the overall process.

In the mean time, we have not stopped working. In fact, we have been looking ahead and trying to determine how we want to installation and deploy the Photo Gallery Extension.  We would like to make this as simple as possible. So we have decided to go ahead and add one additional item to our to-do list prior to our first release - we are going to separate Photo Gallery business logic into it's own .NET assembly. Basically from an end user perspective that means we will wrap up most of the core functionality (excluding web pages) into a dedicated DLL. Then end-users would have the option to download and deploy just the DLL and not the full source code, similar to how BlogEngine.NET is distributed today.

Since the PhotoGallery project adds several new web pages for the Photos, Albums, and the Gallery, and associated administration pages, the process would involve copying those files to their appropriate directories within the BlogEngine.NET virtual directory. We are still working on a way to makes this as easy and seamless. We are very open to guidance and suggestions in this area.

Those of you checking out the new Cosmos (C# Open Source Managed Operating System) project for the first time, you may noticed that User Kit does not properly detect or install with any of the free Visual Studio Express editions. The fix has been check-in at CodePlex, but the team has not updated the User Kit yet.

However, you can download the updated executable from below. Simply replace the existing setup.exe file with this one and execute it. If you encounter any problems or issues, please let me know.

Download: setup.exe (61.00 kb) 

- Update: This has been corrected in the latest starter kit.

One of the new exciting features of the next version of BlogEngine.NET 1.4 is the widget framework. Widgets are similar to existing components, except that widgets can be dynamically added, configured and positioned on blog pages. And unlike components, widgets can be added without modifying the existing theme!

This means that users can download and install new widgets simply by copying them to the widgets sub-directory. And once installed, widgets can then be added and configured from the blog web page. Widgets can also be arranged on the web page simply by dragging and-dropping them to their new location.

Mads Kristensen released "proof-of-concept" code and a video earlier this month and I decided to learn how to write my own widget by putting one together that can display a configurable list of current stock quotes.

For this widget, the Yahoo! Financial quote service is used to pull 15 to 20 minute delayed stock quote information. As far as I understand, this is a free service that anyone can use. However, use at your own risk.

To use this widget you must first download and install the latest BlogEngine.NET source code from CodePlex. After which, download the zip file below and unzip it into the widgets directory.

Next, open the web site and sign in as the administrator. Find the widget control that allows you to add widgets to the page. From there, select "StockQuotes" and click the "Add" button.

This will add a new widget called "New Widget" to the web page. Find it and click on the "Edit" link. This will bring up the configuration page for the widget. Hopefully in the future, new widgets will be intelligently named.

From here you can add new stock quotes to the widgets simply by entering their stock symbol and clicking the "Add stock quote" button. Stock quotes can also be removed by clicking the "Delete" link next to the stock symbol.

To save all the additions and deletions, if any, click the "Save" button.

That's it! Go ahead and try it yourself. If you encounter any problems or issues, please let me know.

Download: StockQuotesWidget.zip (4.28 kb)

The latest release of the BlogEngine.NET Extension Pack has just been released on CodePlex. The pack includes a total of eight extensions, including three new ones:

• FeedFlare
• Mp3Player
• Odiogo
• PostTemplate
• QuickLinks
• QuickerLinks
• SnapShots
• YouTube

Check it out.

Joe Kaiser, the project coordinator for the BlogEngine.NET Extensions project hosted at CodePlex, asked me if I would like to take over as the new project coordinator. Joe no longer had the time to maintain the project. I have been excited about the BlogEngine.NET project for quite a while now, and so I was delighted to accept the position and responsibility.

With the recent release of BlogEngine.NET 1.3 and with it the new Extension Manager, it's time for a new extension pack release. So in the next few days, I will be creating a new extension pack for the BE 1.3. The release will contain a few new extensions: SnapShots and Odiogo, in addition to updated extensions: Mp3Player by Ruslan Tur and QuickLinks by Clarence Klopfstein.

If you wish to make any contributions to this project, please feel free to upload your extensions as patches to CodePlex or e-mail them directly to me. I will incorporate them into the pack.

The Photo Gallery addition for BlogEngine.NET is moving forward. We are in the final stages of wrapping up the first release and hope to release it in early January 2008. Here is our list of remaining items:

1. Move all photo settings to the Photo Gallery Control Panel.

2. Write web interface for the Photo Effect extensions.

3. Add option to delete a photo album.

4. Document the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

5. Add photo gallery web pages to the themes that ship with BlogEngine.NET.

6. Create new theme to highlight the features of the Photo Gallery.

7. Invalid the photo cache when Photo Effects are added or changed.

8. And finally, find and fix any remaining bugs.

If you wish to help out, download the latest source code from CodePlex and try it out. The more developers and testers that participate, the better the release will be.

This is one of my favorite little video clips.

Did you know this video clip was commissioned by Microsoft? Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla wrote via e-mail, "It was an internal-only video clip commissioned by our packaging [team] to humorously highlight the challenges we have faced RE: packaging and to educate marketers here about the pitfalls of packaging/branding."

"While MS did not release the video, it's natural to share funny things with friends. So while we didn't publicly share the video, it was shared with appropriate teams internally. We're happy to see others enjoy the laugh as well."

So enjoy the video at Microsoft's expense!