Author: Mark

Telligent is iterating– I say iterating since it seems we’re updating the site daily — the Mix06.com site on Communtiy Server 2.0.

We rolled out a really, really cool new feature on the site yesterday for a contest called Remix. There are some great prizes in the contest and the top 3 designs receive:

• Free admission to MIX, airfare, and lodging at the Venetian
• A custom designed, MIX-inspired remixed Xbox 360

You may have noticed I said, “designs”. The whole idea behind Remix is that, similar to CSS Zen Garden, a progessive CSS driven site that accepts submissions to re-theme the site, you can submit different “remixes” of the Mix06.com site.

Below is a design one of our developers put together:

http://mix06.com/default.aspx?css=4b795b3

Click on the “Remix” logo to see other designs or visit the gallery. There are only a couple right now (there is an approval process before a “remix” goes live) but get the word out. And more importantly, submit your own entry!

I picked up a Sony PSP thanks to Scott during the last MVP summit in Redmond.

What an amazing little device: amazing resolution, great games, great movies (and great marketing) and also built-in 802.11 support. What’s really smart is the device auto-updates when new versions of its core software gets released. The latest release installed ‘RSS Channels’.

So now for my first gripe/disappointment with my Sony PSP: RSS Channels are used only for MP3 or AAC file downloading. What was I hoping for? I’d like to grab any RSS content, such as feeds from communityserver.org and weblogs.asp.net, be able to read those offline. Sorry Sony, you’ve got a lot of work to do if you want to unseat the Apple iPod — I have yet to put a single audio file on my PSP.

Oh well, I’m still a ‘happy camper’. I can take those Tech-Ed videos and convert them to PSP videos and watch them on the plane and rumor has it that we’ll soon be able to easily copy TiVo media to the PSP (at which point I fully intent to trade in my current Dish DVR(s) for TiVo units).

As Scott Watermasysk’s IM title says, “I’ve created a monster”. Scott introduced me to Camtasia and I’ve already created 4 videos and we’ve created a new video blog at CommunityServer.org.  There are two videos that cover installation: Web Installer and Windows Installer and a couple other overview videos.

We also enabled the email blogging feature for our Annoucements forums which is cool because my new blogging tool is Outlook! Just open Outlook, author an email, done — even with attachment support. I just posted a screen-shot from our coverage on Digg.com.

This sounds like it’s going to be a great conference! We’re building the Mix06.com site — just did a big re-launch last night and there are some other really great features coming online in the next week. It’s really amazing how easy ASP.NET 2.0 makes writing interesting applications.

Just a few more notable points about the Beta 3 release of Community Server 2.0:

Here is list the covers the majority of the check-ins during the Beta 3 milestone

Trust me this list is worth seeing — it’s pretty amazing, there were over 3,700 files touched between our beta 2 and beta 3 releases (December 16 – January 23) approximately ~99 files touched per-day (and that was over the holidays).

Another cool feature that we haven’t really publicized a lot is the email integration with Microsoft’s Exchange server. We have it tied in to our hosted Exchange server (with no software on the Exchange Server) and for specific lists the emails are posted into communityserver.org — which is great since you can now use built-in search tools to search for check-ins, etc. We haven’t made those private forums available to everyone yet, but I’m sure we will soon.

You can also expect to see more videos of Community Server at www.communityserver.org over the coming weeks too. And yes, we do plan on upgrading weblogs.asp.net to Community Server when we release.

P.S, Digg us!

Today we released the final beta of Community Server 2.0!

• Download here (MSI or SDK version)
• Watch a Flash moview overview here (video also published at www.communityserver.org)
• Review Documentation here (preview/not-complete version)

Community Server 2.0 has a ton of great new features in, one of my personal favorites is blogging by email and email integration with forums. Both make for a great offline story!

Over the coming weeks we’re going to publish more videos & tutorials!

cross posted from CommunityServer.org

The Communtiy Server team is pleased to announce the availability of Community Server 2.0, beta 2. Community Server 2.0 beta 2 is already running www.hive.net and forums.asp.net. Beta 2 addresses many UI, bugs, and other issues found with the Beta 1 version.

We’re also thrilled to announce that Beta 2 also includes a new Windows Installer (MSI). Using the MSI package Community Server is installed as a Windows Program (shows up under Add/Remove Programs). The MSI also launches a customer Community Server Windows Installer that walks you through configuration of Internet Information Services, SQL Server, and standard Community Server settings. Using the Windows installer you can have Community Server up-and-running in less than a minute!

Download now: Community Server 2.0 Beta 2 (Web Installer)
Use if you are installing Community Server on a remote server

Download now: Community Server 2.0 Beta 2 (Windows Installer)
Use if you are installing Community Server locally or have direct access to the server

Please provide your feedback on Community Server 2.0 Beta 2 here

From everyone at Telligent — thanks for your patience and we hope you enjoy Community Server beta 2 (and we’re excited to hear your feedback)!

Eric, just added in a new ‘just for fun’ feature for CodeSmith 3.1. Below is a screen shot:

The fun part is:

• Lines Generated – how many lines of code CodeSmith has generated for you.
• Hours Saved –  Shows how much time you’ve saved (assumes 50 lines of code/hour)
• Money Saved – Shows how much money CodeSmith has saved you (assumes $60/hour)

This is a fun feature — CodeSmith not only helps write your code faster, but also now has a way to measure its own value! The measurements are for total use too, not just per-session.

First person to hit $1,000,000 of savings with CodeSmith and we’ll mail you an official CodeSmith t-shirt

Rocky shared his thoughts on this. Personally I use C# as my primary development language, but I thought this statement by Rocky made a lot of sense:

“Second, Basic was designed specifically to cater to the way people think. C-style languages were designed specifically to cater to the way machines work.”

Good stuff! I’ll be borrowing that statement for future debates 🙂

(snowing here in Dallas — it was 80 degress not 4 days ago)

If you haven’t noticed yet, there is a great new feature for forums.asp.net: personalization. It’s a new feature of Community Server 2.0.

forums.asp.net has 85+ forums associated with it. This is great because there is an area for just about any aspect of ASP.NET. However, most people don’t care about all 85 forums. With the new personalization feature (which is using AJAX) you can easily select which forums you want to ignore:

Ignore simply means it doesn’t show up on the main page. You can still get to these forums through search, links, and so on. But it means you can make that 85+ forum list much, much smaller.