The ALT.NET Podcast is now up and running. Mike Moore did a great job finding great guests and facilitating such a great conversation for the first episode. I really like the conversational tone of the podcast vs. your normal interview format. I think the podcast will also serve as an excellent introduction to the alt.net community for people who are on the sidelines and not sure where to start or what to make of alt.net.

You might also notice that I am handling the sponsorship of the the podcast, this is an area where I hope to grow The Lounge as I believe that podcasts offer a unique opportunity for companies to connect with an engaged audience.

-James

I will be giving a talk about open source tools (and which ones are some of my favorites) at the Triangle .NET User Group tonight. If you want a different look at how to do .NET development then I think you will have a good time. I am covering 10 tools and have demos planned for almost all of them, so it should be an exciting time.

For more information click here.

-James

After a long-time in planning I am thrilled to announce that the Ruby room of the Lounge is now up and running. With the help of Geoffrey Grosenbach we have put together some of the best Ruby and Ruby on Rails blogs around as the starting lineup:

Obie Fernandez is the CTO/Founder of HashRocket, a boutique web consultancy and product shop headquartered in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Obie has a well-read blog and speaks at conferences and technical user groups on a regular basis. He is also a series editor and book author for Addison-Wesley.

Geoffrey Grosenbach has been one of the premiere Rails bloggers since 2005 with articles covering the intersection of graphic design and website development. He co-authored "Deploying Rails Applications" and is the founder of PeepCode Screencasts.

The Softies on Rails are Brian Eng and Jeff Cohen, two former Microsoft Certified Professionals who discovered the joy of developing web applications with Rails in 2005 and have never looked back. Softies on Rails takes a unique look at Ruby and Rails development for those coming from a Microsoft background.

Jamis Buck has been blogging about Ruby and Rails since 2005, focusing on elegance and opinions in software design. He is the author several well-known open-source Ruby libraries and applications, including the popular remote-automation utility, Capistrano.

I look forward to seeing this room grow in terms of advertisers and new publishers.

-James

April was an eventful month for The Lounge. We started by adding a number of new advertisers including CodeSmtih, Data Dynamics and Manning Publications. I am proud that we continue to have top notch advertisers who offer products that we believe in.

I also launched the new front-end for the site completely written in MVC and NHaml, which I blogged about here.

The sites in the .NET room have been on a rampage lately, last month the room hit 1.35 million impressions a 12% growth over last month (adding devlicious contribute to that growth so it wasn't all organic).

The small publishers room continues to grow as well, and this month we are adding four new members to the room:

I have known Josh Holmes for awhile, he is a great guy and I am thrilled to have him on board.

Al Nyveldt is a core member of the BlogEngine.NET team.

Rob Bazinet is one of the .NET and Ruby editors on the excellent InfoQ site.

Nate Kohari is one of the people I met over Twitter and the creator of Ninject, a dependency injection framework that is gaining in popularity.

If you have a blog that you think would be a good fit for The Lounge or would like to advertise in one of our rooms please drop me an email.

In the next month I hope to continue to grow both of these rooms, and we will also be launching the new Ruby Room.

-James

Since taking over The Lounge I have been slowly refactoring it to my liking. Not that there was much wrong with it, but like most developers I am pretty opinionated in how I think something should be built. Most of what I have done has been in an effort to make a total rewrite of the front-end easier. The biggest change was refactoring the front-end and models to move as much logic as possible to the models and wrap tests around those models. I consider this a good practice and since I knew I wanted to re-write the front-end it was doubly important.

When it came time to start the rewrite I decided to go with ASP.NET MVC, even though it's in an early stage I couldn't imagine writing classic ASP.NET if I could do anything to avoid it. I also decided to go with NHaml for the UI to stay away from .aspx completely and because I am a big fan of the original Haml.

The re-write went very smooth and the site is now live, I know I am not the first site to go live with ASP.NET MVC, but it has to be at least one of the first ones. Especially one of the first ones that is an actual business and not just an experiment. I only ran into a couple issues along the way and they were easy to figure out.

The simplicity of these two technologies is a joy, for instance here is the controller action for showing a room:

public void Show(string id)
{
  Room room = Room.GetRoomByCode(id);
  
  room.LoadVIPs();

  RenderView("show", room);
}

Thats about as simple as you get. (next version we will be able to drop the "show" in the RenderView, even better!)

Here is a excerpt from the view:

    -foreach(TheLounge.Model.Vip vip in ViewData.Vips)
      #roomdetail
        %a{href=vip.Url,class="borderit"}      
          %img{src="../Content/images/vip/" + vip.Image, class="left"}
        .viptitle
          %a{href=vip.Url}
            = vip.Title
        .vipdesc
          = vip.Bio
        .clearleft

I love it. No controls, no viewstate, just simple web programming.

I am going to post a number of posts on things I learned about MVC and nHaml, especially about some best practices I learned in rails that I think apply very well to MVC.

-James

I just pushed out a new release of Graffiti.Redirect with a couple minor fixes and one big fix.

A couple weeks ago I was talking with Rob Bazinet about moving his blog to Graffiti and I told him he should use my plugin to redirect his old blog to his new blog. He tried it out and ran into a couple problems so he checked out the code and found a huge block of ugly code I had written to append default.aspx to requests, he tried deleting that entire piece of code and just using the simple redirect and everything still worked. On top of everything still working it fixed a couple of annoying bugs.

It turns out that code is only needed for IIS5 and not needed for IIS6+, it has to do with how wild-card request handling is done. I was doing my testing on XP with IIS 5 so I had to write the code to get it working, but since I am deploying on IIS6 I don't need it either. So I decided to keep Rob's change and drop IIS 5 support from the plugin, I doubt many people are using IIS5 and if they are they can still download the old version and fix the bugs themselves.

I am thrilled to have a leaner code base and even more thrilled to have a couple annoying bugs fixed, I love open source.

-James

My guest post over on 47hats is now live. I wanted to detail some of the recent things I have been doing to help me focus better, and Bob was gracious enough to let me do a guest post over on his site.

Let me know what you think.

-James

I saw this over on the Applied Innovations blog (who happens to be a Lounge advertiser) and it looks pretty cool:

"Today, we announced a partnership with Kentico, makers of the Kentico CMS to bring their CMS solution to Dot Net User Groups for free. This partnership will provide a free copy of Kentico CMS Enterprise ($1500 value) to .NET user groups with a custom website template built for .NET user groups combined with a Free, full-featured hosting account from Applied Innovations to host their portal. "

I hadn't heard of Kentico CMS before, but the demo user group site they have setup looks pretty freaking nice. I have seen some pretty crappy user group sites in my day (and built at least one crappy user group site) but now there really is no excuse.

-James

I took over The Lounge back in December and it has been growing quickly since then. One of the key ideas of the Lounge is that we only run ads for respectable companies and quality products, I am thrilled that we have found a number of new advertisers in the last month that really illustrate this idea. Applied Innovations and SlickEdit have been advertising with The Lounge since I took it over and just in the last month RedGate has started a campaign for their ANTS Profiler, TechSmith is running a campaign for SnagIt, and Typemock started a campaign for Typemock Isolator.

I am also happy to announce that we have added a number of new publishers to The Lounge starting in April.

In the .NET room we have added devlicio.us, an excellent community style blog site similar to codebetter.com.

In the small publishers room we have added 3 great new publishers:

Dave Donaldson is a good friend of mine and great developer. I am excited to have his blog in The Lounge.

Simone Chiaretta is one of the developers of SubText and a great blogger, I think I have the entire SubText team on The Lounge now.

Joel Ross is another great developer who I have gotten to know much better through twitter. I also have a chance of finishing in the top 3 of his bracket group if UNC makes it all the way.

If you have a blog that you think would be a good fit for The Lounge or would like to advertise in one of our rooms please drop me an email.

I am also working on a re-design of the site as well as a couple new rooms which I will hopefully launch in the next month.

-James

Back when I wrote Visual Studio Hacks the book I also started the companion site, I kept up for awhile and then it gradually got swept to the sideline. When I was getting ready to work on the second edition of the book (which O'reilly decided not to do) I revived the site and started posting to it again, I also got Jim Holmes and Mike Wood to write some articles. Then it went back into hibernation. The other day I was thinking about the site and figured I either need to kill it off, or try and revive it.

Well, I decided to revive it. I threw out all the old custom code (I love deleting code!) and converted the site to Graffiti, tweaked the design a little bit, and re-launched it. Now comes the difficult part, actually getting some fresh content on it. Another thing I decided is to make the focus of the site more of a blog. It will still feature articles, and I am working on a couple of screencasts, but the blog will be the most active part of the site.

Because I know that I don't have a ton of time, between consulting and other projects, I decided to look for someone to help out with the site. The other day I ran across Darren Stokes who was writing some excellent Visual Studio posts over on his blog and have convinced him to join forces and write for Visual Studio Hacks instead. I am thrilled to have him on board and I think between the two of us we will be able to turn Visual Studio Hacks into the premier Visual Studio focused site. His first Visual Studio Links post is already up.

From a business perspective my main goal with the site is to help increase the visibility of The Lounge, and in particular the .NET Small Publishers Room of The Lounge. You will notice I nixed all the google ads and am only running The Lounge ad.

Third time is a charm they say, let's hope that turns out to be true for this site. Check it out, subscribe to the feed, let me know what you think.

-James