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Eric Smith has just released CodeSmith 3.0 Release Candidate 1 for testing and preview! You can learn more at: http://www.codesmithtools.com/

We use CodeSmith extensively here at Telligent and it’s just a phenomenal tool. One of my favorite new features with this release is statement completion (aka, IntelliSense) in the CodeSmith Studio. It make writing and working with templates super easy.

CodeSmith is one of those tools that once you start using it … you can’t work without it.

CodeSmith 3.0 is also being offered under a special, but not heavily advertised promotion too: if you purchase CodeSmith Professional version 2.6 within the past 90 days (once version 3.0 goes gold) you get the 3.0 upgrade (a $399 value) for FREE!!!

Quoted from a check-in email by Scott Watermasysk after tracking down a nasty bug in Community Server: “The willingness to torture yourself before others is what makes a developer truly a unique breed.”

Some context… Alex, Scott, and I had been staring at this bug for several weeks. Scott, subjected himself to the fun job of tracking it down before trying to make us help him 🙂

It was a really exciting morning here at Telligent, we just found out that Community Server 1.0 was selected as the Best Forum Application receiving an asp.netPRO Reader’s Choice Award:

Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote and voted for Community Server! We’re putting the finishing touches on version 1.1 now (after many performance enhancements for forums.asp.net and blogs.msdn.com).

David Chappell will be presenting at the North Dallas User’s Group this Thursday (April 21st). David is an entertaining and insightful presenter and always has a few new ‘industry’ quips to share on industry trends and directions. Hope to see you there!

Stuart put together a series of articles on how to skin Community Server blogs:

http://cs.ferncrk.com/blogs/stuart/archive/2005/03/21/blogskintutorial0.aspx

http://www.crossfader.com/

Just launched in Beta and built with Community Server — very cool 🙂

Are you using Community Server? We’ve been nominated for an ASP.NET Pro Reader’s Choice award:

http://www.aspnetpro.com/ReadersChoice/

Community Server is listed on the third page under ‘Forums’. Of course it’s much more than a forums system, but we’ll take what we can get! You can also submit us for Product of the Year too!

Check it out — and more importantly vote for Community Server 🙂

Filed in the interesting, but probably won’t use category…

http://www.php-compiler.net/ – some people have written a PHP implementation built on top of the .NET platform. What’s more shocking? Some initial benchmarks have it out-performing PHP on Apache. The developers said they are not Mono compatible yet, but something they’ll be looking at.

What I’d be most interested in finding out is did they build on top of the HttpRuntime? I wrote a light-weight Cold Fusion implementation on top of the HttpRuntime a long time ago, so I know something like this would be possible – or did they write all the plumbing themselves. If the core is built on top of the HttpRuntime it would make integration of PHP and ASP.NET applications together on IIS amazingly easy.

rant of the day…

I was about to start up Steam for a little Half-Life 2 break and noticed that I’ve got some major tray creep. Hmm… maybe I need a sub-tray for my tray 🙂

Now if I could just figure out how to get those Java icons off of there…

Mark Lucovsky, previously employed by Microsoft as a distinguished engineer and the brains behind Hailstorm (which to my knowledge never shipped) shares he insights on how Microsoft no longer knows how to ship software:

http://mark-lucovsky.blogspot.com/2005/02/shipping-software.html

I had the opportunity to meet and work with Mark on several occasions while at Micrsosoft. He is a smart guy – Anders Hejlsberg is also a DE at Microsoft and it’s a prestige shared by a select few – but I’m not completely bought in to the idea that hosted software by Application Service Providers (Amazon.com and SalesForce.com to name a few) is the nirvana it’s made out to be.

Web based software definitely has its place – heck it’s what we do at Telligent. But to discount the power of PCs is ridiculous. For me the power of web based software is the ease of creation and maintenance, but looking at technologies like Avalon it brings a lot of the same benefits with fewer of the headaches.

Take SalesForce.com – the much touted ‘No Software’ company. We bought licenses only to find out some of the built in features of Outlook (sans SalesForce.com software) worked better for the types of tasks we did. Personally I think SalesForce.com’s success is due largely to the lack of better tools, ACT! and similar products just feel clunky. 

I definitely agree that Microsoft could be more agile about releasing software (and I personally know they do too), but unless I missed a valuable piece of insignt isn’t Amazon.com a web application? That’s just a tad bit different then shipping the software that makes writing and running web applications possible 🙂