Rainbow Portal Community

Visual SVN

ramseur — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 16:32:00 GMT

The cool people over at VisualSVN ( www.visualSVN.com) have given us a free open source license of their product. I must say that its integration is solid and works well with Visual Studio 2005 and 2008. All developers can get a free copy from us provided you do work. Rahul informs me that we begin heavy work on Rainbow 2.1 next week. I have been making a list of bugs that we will begin to attack such that we can get this release out of the door.

Alexey has also committed the updated resource files that Ill be testing. Microsoft changed the framework on us so quickly in this department we had to go one by one and fix each reference. Currently the most updated 2.0 release will install and upgrade but might have issues when the resource list is requested. An example of this would be add user as the country list is asked for. We should fixed this soon and push a new package but at least you can install/sample upgrade and use the portal for a user.

Below our custom license :

Open Source Consulting company with Nice Offerings

anantatman — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:59:00 GMT

Open Source used to be marked with a heavy weight of being hard to use. This company has used open source to build their business and offers a combination of services which use open source software and third party web services from companies like Amazon.

Enomaly has some really nice products and services. One that interested me in the company is their virtual harddrive which sits on top of the Amazon Simple Storage Web Service. It's called ElasticDrive

ASP.NET MVC Implementation

anantatman — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 15:38:00 GMT

Wow. Finally an MVC implentation in ASP.NET which really fits what we're doing in Rainbow. My friend Chris told me about it this morning and I am really stoked about using it.

The ASP.NET MVC Framework - Scott Guthrie's Blog

Visual Studio 2008 & RainbowNext

ramseur — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 18:35:00 GMT

I havent been able to write in my blog for a very long time and I do apologize. Life it seems is hard...who knew? Hopefully 2008 will be an easier life for me. I have been mostly busy with being an Architect ( Im on my second contract where Im an Architect and its proving stressful) for the District of Columbia state gov't. Im working on Web services and have learned some easy tips with security ( mostly with WSE 3.0) and see the advantages of 3.0/3.5.

Where is Rainbow 2.1 you ask? Thats a great question. Currently, Im talking with the italians to see what they would like to do with rainbow. Manu was having mixed thoughts but I got him to come back and commit to the project by Jan 08. Miguel and I have done a lot of work behind the scenes and would hate to push that code only for the project to disband or be sold( I guess as a brand). With Manu's promise, I have promised to bring out a 2.1 version of Rainbow which will specifically target .net 2.0-3.5. Ive outlined this 2.1 version on my blog and between MGF, myself and a few developers, we have a solid version on the brink. Once manu can really commit, we can have his experience in doing releases.

Furthermore, HELLO Visual Studio 2008 came out today. Well it came out to people who MS considers cool. I got lucky and am a MSDN subscriber. I also beta tested 2002/2003 versions of Visual Studio. Ill be using Visual studio 2008 at my current gig to leverage the new framework additions ( mostly linq and updates to WCF/WF) to provide a better connected experience across our applications. Ive provided a screenshot of the install. Perhaps, Ill do a slackers overview for us bottom line developers.

Awesome List of Tools for Windows Developers

anantatman — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 14:33:00 GMT

A friend of mine, Eric M suggested a list of tools by Scott Hanselman. It's a comprehensive list of tools for power users and developers and includes sub lists for regular expressions and xml. Click here to check it out.

Rich ASP.NET 2.0 Ajax Components

anantatman — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 01:23:00 GMT

Folks,

I stumbled upon this set of tools today while browsing the internet for .NET components. (Yeah. Fun!)
I found one called Gaia which has a rich set of components that look really good.

Here are some of my favorite demos that show off the really nice functionality.

1. All Demos
2. Page Flakes (Like Google's but looks better)
3. Windows Vista Skin Window (With Transparancy)

The other interesting part about this company is that they love Mono / Linux and have a sufficient "How to do ASP.NET 2.0 on Mono" Tutorial here.

Enjoy.

Google Gears : Architecture for Offline Data

anantatman — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 05:01:00 GMT

Google never ceases to amaze me what they make. Recently they have released the Google Gears framework for offline data storage for online applications. Now we all know from the Microsoft world, that a "Smart" client does exactly that, if you design and develop it as such.

I don't want to compare or contract Google gears with smart client technology, but rather expose how Google explains simply the need for a data access layer in all applications, it goes on to explain how to abstract the data access layers into a Server DAL and a Local DAL and utilizing a background synchronization process to synchronize the Local Database with the Internet Database.

Even if you don't plan to use Google Gears, I suggest reading up on the Google Gears Architecture.

Rainbow 2.0.0.1881e Migration Release

ramseur — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 14:40:00 GMT

Link to download : http://rainbow.googlecode.com/files/rainbow2.0.0.1881e.7z

Install in Detail : http://base.iocluster.com/wiki/index.php?title=How_to_Install_Rainbow

Online demo : http://www.ramseur.net/

I released this 5 days ago and am ready to release this to the public. We had about 1800 downloads before I deprecated the test version. Thanks to all who tried it. This version is officially 2.0.0.1881e and should be the version of choice for rainbow. It allows you to deploy the rainbow base production 1.6 code on the 2.0 framework to take advantage of the new 2.0 features. There are only minor bugs ( mostly in modules as the 2.0 framework has changed a lot ) which should not raise a big issue. We can start to attack these as the public reports them in the issue list. I only found one strong one in XML as 2.0 doesnt like the 1.1 way of how the module use to work. I got this module to work by hacking it and will work on a better fix before I submit it. I updated all the readme and license files. Please read these for information on install. Install can be done with the basic 1.1 way however 2.0 offers some new ways. You can now just open the solution file, set your connection string, and hit control - f5. No more setting up IIS ( unless you want to deploy into production). You can also publish the site to make a pre-compiled version which can perform installs if youd like. And lastly, you have the option of creating an mdf file in the app_data directory thereby creating a pre-installed version of rainbow. You can then customize this version to be however youd like and re-deploy as needed. Works well in a SQL Express environment as Ive found the other versions of 2005 dont like attach files.

In theory an update from 1.6.0.1880x to 2.0.0.1881e: In theory, this version could update your 1.6 databases. You would simply have to download the code, extract it, point it to our db and it "should" update your db to 2.0.0.1881 . I have done major test on fresh install and need help on the update efforts.

Special thanks goes to Jose as he helped me with some issues.

RB 2.0.0.1881 Release Soon

ramseur — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 19:57:00 GMT

This is the same version that runs www.iocluster.com and source.iocluster.com. Well we have decided to give this ( thats right straight to the google svn) to the community. This is a production copy of rainbow 2.0 ( i repeat ..PRODUCTION) and has never had a major problem or gone down since I deployed it over a year ago....(read more)

SELECT * FROM INTERNET

anantatman — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 22:51:00 GMT

The history of the public internet started when a young Congressman by the name of Al Gore started pushing towards the development of a high speed internet for the future technological and economic development of the United States of America. (Read further here)

The publication of the TCP/IP protocol allowed organizations to transfer information between computers. Since then, the world has become a different place altogether. (Read further here) The internet is no longer a network of computers that share information on a shared, standard protocol. It is a platform for Education and Trade, the building blocks of society at any level.

It took the invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners Lee for the world to realize the internet wasn't just for getting information from one place to another, but also to link and share information that could exist in different places on the internet.

The internet boom was a direct result of the public consumer acceptance of the World Wide Web. After the consumers picked up the internet for knowledge and communications, Business took interest in utilizing the web for various types of products and services, of which a few still exist from the "old days" of the internet such as Yahoo and Amazon. Now with the birth of Web 2.0, Business is taking a strong look at how to use the real estate of the browser screen to impact consumers. (eGovernment, is another topic altogether for another article.)

We know have what I believe a standard as potent and with as much or more potential as TCP/IP. It is XML. XML in the last 10 years has exploded beyond recognition with hundreds of specialized uses for the technology from Presentation Markup (XHTML, XAML, XUL, Flex), to Content Markup (RSS, OpenDoc), to Business Integration Markup (ebXML) , to The Next Big Thing. Where XML is going to go is unknown, but what I do know is what where we can make it go.

I see an immediate shift from current status of the internet to coalesce three basic needs for any Organizations that have a presense on the internet for the purpose of Business. It's not that these technologies already exist, it's how they will become as popular as Database technology in Information Technology teams.

Portals

Portals will fill the need for Interfaces for people. The table computer and the iPhone will change our industry. It will endanger our current skill set, however, we can utilize our development capabilities to provide portals and portal implementation and customization. Portals provide frameworks on top of standard HTML generation strategies which standardizes user systems, security, and templating. As portal technology progresses, we will be able to translate applications we build for today's portals into dynamically graphic applications using technologies such as WPF.

Services

Services, spefically XML Web Services will fill the need for data integration on a standard XML platform, whether it's built on a "message oriented" or "service oriented" architecture. The construction of web services will have to be done for Businesses that wish to expose their information in the form of procedures that can give and take information. There are special cases where information transfer will be required in bulk, in which standardized Queue processing can be utilized.

Integration

Integration of Services. Services from Business to Business will differ. Implementing a Web Service is half the battle. The other half is integrating services that are already built. Web Service Producers need to have Web Service Consumers, both of which are equally important to the internet ecosystem. As we integrate services, we will begin to see patterns in the information structures and come up with standards. Web Service like services such as RSS and SiteMap XML will are already at the forefront of integrating information

Web Service production and consumption together with Portals, provides all parties, complete end-to-end information exchange needs. Organizations on the internet will linked at both the physical network level and the information level allowing Information of the World at Your Fingertips. Hence the title of this article: "SELECT * FROM INTERNET"

Rainbow 1.6: permanent checkout link for initial stable version

moudrick — Wed, 09 May 2007 16:29:00 GMT

The code for stable version of RainbowPortal 1.6 for .Net Framework 1.1 can be checked out by the following link.

http://rainbow.googlecode.com/svn/NET_1_1/tags/1.6.initial/

This stable version is initial for Google Code project hosting after migation from both sourceforge.net and forge.novell.com.

Also, this link can be branched in developers (do not forget that developers work with https protocol)

The tag was made to continue futher work on Rainbow 1.6 code in code trunk simultaneously saving opportunity to access initial stable code without revision reference.

FCKEditor 2.4.2 in Next Beta

ramseur — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 16:39:00 GMT

I figure Id end the FTB issues ( that DNN is also having and replaced their control also) in rainbow and add a solid version of FCK. The coolest thing is now you get all the benifits of the new version. ...(read more)

Masterpages then Skins so shall it be written

ramseur — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:23:00 GMT

I hope to use this info to apply to adding a menu control ( and maybe a trial telerik menu hint hint) and master pages to rainbow. My plan is simple. Support master pages AND the two current schemes ( which hopefully we can get rid of in the future due to this upgrade) of design in Rainbow ( classic and Zen). Im starting with a copy of the default folder in DesktopLayouts. ...(read more)

A Quiet Release...

ramseur — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 20:20:00 GMT

Man you rainbow users are fast. Google gave us more space so I uploaded the novell release of the .NET 1.1 ( 1.0.6.1880F ) Rainbow 2006 to google code organizing us more on only one svn. Before I knew it, it had already been downloaded over 1000 times....(read more)

Our Google Wiki is up!

ramseur — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 19:24:00 GMT

I have now followed suit and started to make wiki pages for the common questions I get by email ( dont hesistate to email me) and in the forums. This wiki will always be up seeing how its hosted on Google and will be a lot more friendly to read/up to date then the old wiki system. ...(read more)

Repository structure and access at Google Code

moudrick — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 11:33:00 GMT

Cross-posted with the wiki here.

Structure is set in accordance to the following recommendations here in Rahul's blog.

IMPORTANT! To anonymously checkout or export use http protocol. Otherwise if you have been granted with commit rights use https protocol to authorized export, checkout, switch, commit, other repository operations.

The root of the repository is http://rainbow.googlecode.com/svn/* (https://rainbow.googlecode.com/svn/*) Do not checkout or export this url directly, you have to add a relative path to a structure unit for best result. Please remember that the relative paths are case sensitive.

WARNING! There is no http://rainbow.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ as it shown at standard Google Code page of the Rainbow project

We use our own structure instead of initially precreated structure. It is described below more detailed. You who has rights to commit please follow this structure and never make commits outside your sandbox.



Relative paths for substructure units	Short description

/wiki/	standard google code wiki for the whole repository, can be edited from here

/sandboxes/	devepolers' sandboxes with their personal trunks/tags/branches and other required personal structure

/NET_1_1/	latest code of rainbow portal for .Net 1.1

/NET_1_1/branches/
/NET_1_1/tags/

/NET_1_1/trunk/	latest trunk with its own substructure

/NET_1_1/trunk/ECommerce/	ECommerce module
/NET_1_1/trunk/Extensions/	extensioins necessary
/NET_1_1/trunk/Rainbow/	site root


/NET_2_0/	unfolded comprehensive structure for working on rainbow for .Net 2.0 version

/NET_2_0/devint/	development & integration folder

/NET_2_0/devint/branches/
/NET_2_0/devint/tags/

/NET_2_0/devint/trunk/	latest devint trunk with its own substructure

/NET_2_0/devint/trunk/Libs	binary libraries references in Projects and WebSites
/NET_2_0/devint/trunk/PrecompiledWeb/	precreated empty folder for precompiled web sites
/NET_2_0/devint/trunk/Projects/	subproject such as Core, Providers etc (see detailed structure at NET_2_0_FoldersStructure)
/NET_2_0/devint/trunk/WebSites/	folder containing all web sites in use
/NET_2_0/devint/trunk/WebSites/Rainbow/	the web site (see detailed structure at NET_2_0_FoldersStructure)

/NET_2_0/stage/	stage environment with its own separate structure

/NET_2_0/stage/branches/
/NET_2_0/stage/tags/
/NET_2_0/stage/trunk/


/NET_2_0/prod/	production environment with its own separate structure

/NET_2_0/prod/branches/
/NET_2_0/prod/tags/
/NET_2_0/prod/trunk/

Telerik Html Editor

ramseur — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 23:05:00 GMT

Ive started my first implementation of Telerik inside of rainbow. I have easily added the Telerik RadEditor as an editor for Rainbow. This means that any module that uses an editor can use the Telerik Rad Editor instead....(read more)

ASP.NET Ajax Final issue with Rainbow Beta 1

ramseur — Fri, 09 Mar 2007 21:23:00 GMT

This issue actually affects anyone using validators in their applications that went from RC to the final. With rainbow, thats exactly what we did and a user left a message in the forum that he would get errors trying to install rainbow....(read more)

ASP.NET 2.0 URL Rewrite

ramseur — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 15:07:00 GMT

Now that we finally have some breathing room on a release, Rainbow admins/developers are discussing ways to improve Beta 2. Beta 2 is another blog discussion so Ill focus on Rewrite....(read more)

Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar

Jonathan — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 06:00:00 GMT

I recomend the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar to everyone, it's quite pleasant to use. http://channel9.msdn.com/wiki/default.aspx/Channel9.InternetExplorerDevToolbar The Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar provides several features for exploring and understanding Web pages. These features enable you to: Explore and modify the document object model (DOM) of a Web page. Locate and select specific elements on a Web page through a variety of techniques. Selectively disable Internet Explorer settings....(read more)

Rainbow 2.0 Beta and Zen Engine

Jonathan — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 05:47:00 GMT

Ok, So it is almost 1 am, and i have to stop for the nite, but I thought I would update my findings. I made some changes to the zen engine, and got it to render: http://www.jonavi.com/site/1/Default.aspx it currently renders a standard asp.net menu control, using cssfrendier rendering in keeping with zen, i borrowed some of the css adapter code, and injected into zen navigation. it can render horizontal and vertical. I need to work on the css a bit, and a missing js file, but in principle it works,...(read more)

Uh is this thing on? Rainbow Portal 2.0 Beta 1 Release

ramseur — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 19:35:00 GMT

Download the release from Google code: http://code.google.com/p/rainbow/

You can click on the featured download from the main page or click to the download page by the Downloads tab.

Hello my fellow Rainbow community users. Last night I put the final touches on a beta 1 release that I was working on with QA. I finally believe that I’ve reached a point where the code is in a position to at least function like a beta. The Beta was released under the Apache 2.0 license to ease license info with other third party components and because it plain rocks.

This release owes a great debt to the MGF team. Jose did a great job and went out of his way to fix things and fine tune some of the most important parts of rainbow. ASPNETDB is now fully integrated. There are still some open issues that are documented in the README file along with a list of changes.

I invite you to test this release and report issues to: http://community.rainbowportal.net/forums/thread/13720.aspx

If you have a Google account, you can report issues directly to us on Google. However, I ask that you use this with caution and make sure your issue is not already listed. I don’t even have to tell you how easy it is to search issues on Google. You can test this out here: http://code.google.com/p/rainbow/issues/list

Cheers,

Ramseur

Internet Explorer 7 and CSS

uanmi — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 01:09:00 GMT

IE7 is now CSS 2.1 compliant, well nearly.

We have been struggling with Rainbow themes and CSS compliance for quite a while and it appears there is a way forward. I happened to find this article whilst looking to fix the new IE7 CSS problems on the Rainbow website

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2005/10/13/microsoft-says-de-hack-your-css/

I'm going to look to see if we can put a separate CSS file for IE5, IE6 and IE7. Then changes that are needed can be separated logically. This is certainly something we need to do to fix the Rainbow theme issues in the older versions of Rainbow.

I do not know if the Microsoft themes and skins will be similarly affected in the new Rainbow 2, but I will look into this soon.

I recommend that everyone use IE7 to view the website as it is the closest Microsoft has come to producing something that is CSS 2.1 compliant.

regards, Mark

Unit tests are included to standard build process

moudrick — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 09:50:00 GMT

svn revisions 55 - 58

Unit tests from the project Rainbow.Tests are now included into community build process.
It can be found by trunk relative path Projects\Rainbow.Tests\Rainbow.Tests.csproj

You can see them at http://source.iocluster.com/site/ccnet_servers/295/ccnet_servers.aspx:

click there to iocluster - Rainbow devint-trunk link;
choose the build (it is usually the latest build, but Nunit details and timing are included starting from 283 build);
click NUnit Details or NUnit Timings links at the right box of build info screen;
enjoy :-)

Build target are called this.tests.prepare and this.tests.run in the repo root nant.build file

this.tests.prepare target performs the following actions:

recreates separate database for tests purposes (called by the template rbtests_${this.databaseName}, where ${this.databaseName}='NET_2_0$devint$trunk' for the devint trunk);
adjusts App.config to set this database in correspondent parameters using App.config.standard as a template (by the trunk relative path Projects\Rainbow.Tests)

this.tests.run target performs the following actions:

runs the nunit2 task of nant on the Projects\Rainbow.Tests\bin\dll
saves the test results in Rainbow.Tests.dll-results.xml file of the trunk root to be merged with ither CCNet stuff and be shown by the links described above;
fails if at least one test failed.

Google Inline Video/Bar w/Ajax - List your fav videos in Rainbow

ramseur — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 18:51:00 GMT

I saw this being done with wordpress so I decided to test a sample with rainbow. I copy/pasted the sample code [ according to the videos I liked] in Rainbow component modules and produced the Google Ajax functionality in Rainbow. Instead of installing an addon [ like you must do for wordpress], rainbow usres may just copy/paste their code into Component modules to product a video bar of their favorite videos.

Link to my samples.