Let’s set the stage for this post. It is late May, 2009. The .com bubble has come and gone. The promise of Java driving the Internet never really materialized. It’s out there, but in its own little niche area. But there are two major players in the server-side web market: Microsoft’s ASP.NET and PHP.

I’m a Windows developer. I jump on the Microsoft bandwagon for almost everything and herald their technologies, because that’s where I’ve chosen to throw my alliances. Then one day Microsoft goes out and does something strange. IIS has been the main host for ASP.NET since ASP.NET was introduced. Everything else was supported to some extent, but not as fully as ASP.NET. Then Microsoft releases Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 with IIS 7 in all of it’s shining glory. (Pause for dramatic effect.) But on the same day that they release Windows Server 2008, what do they also release for IIS 7 in both Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista? Microsoft released an upgrade with this shiny little technology called FastCGI. And why is FastCGI important? Because Microsoft has been working with the PHP community to develop this little technology that will result in far superior performance for the PHP platform than has been achievable in the past. Fast forward a few months and what else do we see? Microsoft’s new jewel on the horizon, Windows Azure, the Microsoft cloud computing initiative, adds support for PHP in Microsoft’s cloud!!! What does this mean to the Microsoft ASP.NET world? More...

When I initially started hosting my own web site, I had a single domain name: www.imaginaryrealities.com. Since then, I’ve taken advantage of the subdomain support of my hosting provider, WebHost4Life, and I’ve added additional subdomains to my collection such as services.imaginaryrealities.com, downloads.imaginaryrealities.com, media.imaginaryrealities.com, and others. In addition, I’ve started other web sites for other purposes. For example, I host my wife’s classroom website on my account at http://www.mrscollinsclassroom.net. The end result, is that while I started with a single web site, over time I’ve added more.

The traditional model for hosting multiple web sites is that I register the domains or subdomains with the hosting provider, and then I point the domain to a directory on my hosting account where the files for the web site will be hosted from. In the majority of cases, each web site points to a different directory, and a different application. For example, both my blog and my wife’s web site are built using BlogEngine.NET. To accomplish this, I have two copies of BlogEngine.NET installed in two different directories of my hosting account. Twice the space for two web sites. It would be great if, with my new web site engine that I’m building, I could consolidate all of these web sites to a single application installation. This post will show you how I’m thinking of doing this. More...

It’s the weekend, it’s my birthday, and I’m taking time away from all of my various client and company projects and working on my things for the day. Yesterday, the Umbraco 4 was released. Great job Umbraco team and congratulations. Maybe one day I’ll be as lucky with one of the side projects that I’m working on. I spent a few minutes last night downloading the release, importing it into my Subversion repository, and then merging it with the web site that I had started. The merge went pretty smoothly. Now it’s time to go back to exploring what I perceive my needs to be and learning how to further extend Umbraco.

The first thing that comes to mind is that if I want to use Umbraco to support a commercial web site, there are parts of Umbraco that I want to be secured via SSL. For example, a payment screen for a product, the user registration screen, or the user login screen could all be protected using SSL. Is it possible to have a mixed HTTP/HTTPS site using Umbraco? Absolutely. I actually set up the infrastructure for supporting this in an earlier post, which I suggest that you read in case you haven’t. More...

While searching for other sample ExpressionBuilder classes in the theme of my last post, I came across this neat little expression builder for inserting code into an ASP.NET page. Check out the CodeExpressionBuilder class.

It’s been a crazy week, and I am very much looking forward to the week ending. I read a quote from Colin Farrell in one of those tabloid magazines that my wife buys: “I was burning the candle at both ends, and the flames were meeting in the middle.” (Or something approximately close to that.) But that’s basically how I feel. Just way too much going on. But in the middle of all of that chaos, I’ve managed to find some time to do pleasant stuff like continue to explore Umbraco.

I came up with my latest extension while playing with templates. I’m still planning some posts hopefully this weekend to describe my document types and templates that I am building. Basically, document types are containers that have properties that contain data. Data can be images, files, text, other things. Templates describe where in the web page that the property data is inserted. Umbraco provides an ASP.NET server control that allows you to insert data into a page using the control, but sometimes you need data in a place where you can’t use a server control. To get around this problem, I created the <%$ Item:xxx $> expression. More...

Continuing on my previous posts, I’ve been looking into Umbraco more. I’m really liking the new features for version 4.0. My main complaint about it in previous versions when I looked at Umbraco were the proprietary membership database, and the difficulty of doing ASP.NET things with it. All of that seems to have been fixed with the upcoming 4.0 release. Umbraco now uses the ASP.NET membership and role providers, and templates have been replaced with ASP.NET master pages. In addition, direct support now exists for ASP.NET controls within pages. All-in-all, Umbraco 4.0 is shaping up to be a great release, in my opinion, and looks like it will be a great CMS for all purposes.

The one feature that is missing from Umbraco v4 is built-in support for ASP.NET themes. Umbraco supports CSS style sheets, but there are key uses for themes to control and customize the look-and-feel of web sites that is very special in ASP.NET, and a necessity for ASP.NET-based web sites. Umbraco would be killer if it supports that feature. Fortunately, as I discovered, it’s not that hard to add support for ASP.NET themes, and it’s even possible to let different parts of your web site use different themes. More...

I’ve been looking through the Umbraco web site all day, and doing some web searches on various topics of interest that interested me before. While the documentation is still a little sparse, I really do like a lot of the improvements that they’ve made in version 4.0. I installed and downloaded the release candidate from CodePlex. More...

Umbraco is a free, open source CMS written for ASP.NET. I looked at it a while ago, but for a couple of reasons I stopped working with it. Now, they’re at release candidate stage for version 4 and it has a bunch of new features including finally switching from their proprietary membership system to supporting the ASP.NET membership and role providers.

I might give it another look to see if it’s worth using. What was very cool about it from the standpoint of developing a web site, was that it provided all of the functionality for data storage and content management, and as the web site developer you only needed to really focus on the UI aspects of the site. One of the downsides, in my opinion, was that all of the content remained in memory in XML storage, which means that as you get more content your memory usage is going to increase. I was concerned about this at a shared hosting level, but then again, I guess it would require a lot of content before that became a problem.

I’ll probably start playing with it again and seeing what I can do with it, and will blog about the results for anyone else that’s interested.

I’ve been holding off until recently on looking at the ASP.NET MVC framework. It’s not that I was against the MVC approach, I prefer it and understand how useful it is. The problem is that I’ve invested so much time and money into the older web forms approach. For example, I have a complete set of ASP.NET controls that I’ve created, and I’m a subscriber to the Infragistics control set and I like to use them in web pages. They’re not perfect, but I have a lot invested in building great UIs using controls that I can purchase, and there’s no equivalent controls for the MVC framework because the web forms controls are for all intents and purposes incompatible with MVC. But as I look at MVC more as I have during my week off between Christmas and the New Year holiday, I’m finding that my perceptions about MVC were wrong. More...

In this post, I'll continue my discussion of the construction of a new web site for ImaginaryRealities.com by discussing how I'm going to use ASP.NET themes to style and configure the "look" for my new web site. ASP.NET 2.0 introduced a new feature called themes which allows responsibilities on a web site to be truly separated between a developer that implements functionality and a designer that implements style. Using themes, the same web site can take on several different looks through a simple modification of the Web.config or application setting in a production environment. New looks can also be easily developed and deployed without making modifications to the existing web site. This post will discuss what ASP.NET themes are, how they work, and how they can be used in an ASP.NET web site or application. More...