Under the Hood of .NET Memory Management

Under the Hood of .NET Memory Management by Chris Farrell
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I like the writers and how the cleary explain the more complex topics. However the book is sometimes poorly edited; there are for example pages of intro jammed in the index. In section 2, you also read similar parts as in section 1 although from a slight different angle (my guess is that it is written by the other author there).

Still, considering the first edition, I like the book and it brings clarity which very few people have done before.

HTML Kickstart Orchard Theme

I really like Orchard as a CMS and HTML Kickstart as an HTML/CSS framework, so I figured that I merge the two and contribute this back to the community. You can find the theme here.

The HTML kickstart files and structure are almost intact, the only changes I structurally made are renaming of the folders "css" and "js" to "Style" and "Script" respectively. Orchard "knows" by default the later folders hence the correction.

Template wise there's the additional View folder containing the different views for the page, header, footer etc.

Site wireframe
I stayed with the same structure as the example theme "TheThemeMachine" from Orchard so you get the wireframe as shown here.

This wireframe contains a column based design for the Aside bars and the Triple and Quad sections below. These columns are based on the HML Kickstart grid system. I needed to add some calculation logic as these columns are not always used and therefore the space has to be released.

For example, if no content is provided in the TripleThird zone, then we don't need to render this zone. However, in that case, we'll divide the space not by three using "col_4" classes but rather by two using "col_6" classes.

Kickstart Features
The kickstart framework has a lot of features like tab page and slideshow components. The easiest way for a admin/designer of the Orchard CMS is to get a nice module and UI where files can be selected for the slideshow for example. I haven't done this yet, but that would be an area to make it more user friendly.
Note that you can use all features of HTML Kickstart, you just have to work a bit more in HTML and CSS coding than a nice UI that hides that.

Credits
Just want to mention that credits goes to the open source Orchard CMS team and Joshua Gatcke. My contribution was just to the mash them up :)

DateTimeRange Field for Orchard CMS

I've spent a couple of weeks now on Orchard in the spare time I could find here and there.

To learn the system I decided to dive into some coding again and create myself a module. The module on itself is quite simple and adds a field to Orchard that can be used to enhance your content types.

The field adds two text boxes where you can provide a start and end moment either by date, time or both.

It is build for Orchard CMS 1.4, that was just release earlier. As this is my first module I expect some issues here or there but we'll see how it goes.

The module is hosted on codeplex: http://orcharddatetimerange.codeplex.com/
And available through the public Orchard Gallery: https://gallery.orchardproject.net/List/Modules/Orchard.Module.Line20.DateTimeRangeField/0.7

Rent Intelligence in the future?

I'm taking an online course at the University of California, Berkeley via coursera.org. Just started with the first video series of the SaaS course and already it got me thinking.

In the course they were describing the SaaS infrastructure like Amazon and how you can rent huge computing powers for little money. You can actually rent a lot of power for $ 200/hour which is equal to the bill you get from a lawyer or consultant. So, if we're smart enough to package domain specific intelligence which you can then rent for whatever time you need it, it would change the world substantially.

I remember in my first startup when I needed a NDA document, I went to a lawyer to help me out. Well, in the future I would go to an online Intelligence Service and build up the NDA together with this all knowing AI system, using nothing but my tablet and a credit card. Looing at Watson, the big computer system from IBM that won Jeopardy, the technology is there.

Thinking about it, I wonder if my youngest daugher (4 now) will ever create here own homework...

Catch up on todays web design and development

When baking pancakes for the carnival festive at my daughter's school I had sufficient time to catch up on  my online news.

Basically you create the dough and let it rest for a bit. You heat the pan and poor some pancake mixture and wait for 30 seconds or so, turn it and another 15 seconds.

In between you have a lot of seconds spare so I took a chair and my iPad and started browsing the web news.

One site struck my attention which is designshack.net. Although I'm not a designer, I found some very good articles on that site, especially    these ones:

• Save Loads of Time by Writing Your HTML With Haml
• 5 Online Playgrounds for HTML, CSS and JavaScript Compared
• Jumpstart Your Web Project With HTML KickStart
• Nailing Browser Support in CSS3 and HTML5: Invaluable Resources to Use Today

All credits goes ofc to writers of DesignShack and the original authors, developers. 

 

If you are into web design, development or alike take a couple of minutes to read these articles and you'll be amazed and fresh of new ideas and appetite (although that could also come from the pancakes ofc :D) 

Don't ban your ideas too soon...

In the last year, I had at least 2 ideas worthy of an online company. After a couple of days swirling in my head I usually started to check the competition, see what was out there. In almost all cases I came back with my head down saying others beat me in the idea and were first. 

Looking back to it, I figure that there will always be competition. Sometimes you're the first, or sometimes you join the party late. Even in the latter case, it's all about the execution of your idea. You can still beat those competitors if you offer a better, faster, easier, nicer product. 

Take a look at the success story of pinterest who also came late into the game of image bookmarking: http://designshack.net/articles/business-articles/addictive-ux-why-pinterest-is-so-dang-amazing/#more-28855. Their execution was just technically and conceptually better than the existing.

I will for sure not be scared anymore of the competition when waking up with my next idea; unless of course the competition is called apple or google :D.

Orchard CMS command line tips

When working in Orchard CMS you'll probably come across the Command Line sooner or later. This shell allows you to automate certain tasks for Orchard or execute commands not available in the admin UI.

Here are a few tips to make life easier when working with the command line.

Prepare
When you are running from the downloaded source code you need to prep a bit to make it easier.
If you are running an Orchard from WebMatrix, it is sufficient to navigate to the bin folder and start Orchard.exe in the command line from there.


You want to prepare yourself first to save a lot of typing and directory swapping stuff. We'll use the good old Windows environment variables PATH.


1. In Windows 7; go to Control Panel > System and Security > System and click "Advanced system settings" on the left menu.

2. Open the "Environment Variables" (button at the bottom).

3. On the lower section "System Variables" scroll to the "Path" variables and add the folder where the Orchard.exe file exists. 

Update: tbh, I made a mistake here, so let me correct this. In order to start the Orchard.exe command line it's actually simpler:

• For source code downloads: navigate to the Orchard.Web project folder and type in a command window: "bin\orchard" this will position you on the correct directory (of the web project) to perform command actions
• For the WebMatrix orchard site, just navigate to the site directory and  type in a command window: "bin\orchard" which will position you also on the correct location.

Open the command line

When you start the Orchard Command line, best is that you start it from the location of your website.

So, if your website is located for example at: C:\Users\JohnDoe\Documents\My Web Sites\MyOrchardWebsite, then start a command line from there. The easiest way to do this in Windows 7 is to shift-right click the folder and select "Open command window here".

Now you can type the command Orchard and you'll see your command prompt ready for use

Orchard>

Who wins?

When the website is running locally you won't be able to start the Orchard command line. So you need to stop it first.

• If you started from WebMatrix, then you go to your system tray and find IIS Express to shut down the running Orchard site.
• If you were running from Visual Studio then you just have to stop debugging your website to get it going.

Note that you can also work with IIS Express from Visual Studio instead of the original Casini Web Development Server. In that case you ofc stop IIS Express.