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...

When I originally created the Composite WPF Shell project on CodePlex, I initially put the project and source code under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). However, after a bit of reflection this week on the proper licensing model for this project another open source project that I’m going to be announcing shortly, I decided that the CDDL was not the correct license to use for the Composite WPF Shell project. More...

About a month ago, David Pallman, the leader of the Custom Application Development Practice Council at Neudesic, issued a call to action for more Neudesic consultants to give back to the community through open source CodePlex projects. So I answered his call, and I seem to be the only one at the moment. Nevertheless, I started the Composite WPF Shell project. Check it out. More...