Windows Web Hosting, Web Technologies, etc
Web Applications
Clustrmaps.com — This seems pretty cool.
Mar 2nd
If it worked there should be a little map up above that displays the geographic locations my visitors come from (so I guess it will just have a big red dot over where my office is since I'm probably the only person that comes here).
LightBox Module
Mar 2nd
There's 20 or so new community server modules that were released recently you can find details about them here: http://developer.communityserver.org/default.aspx/CS.FirstCSModuleContent One of hte modules uses a little piece of javascript called LightBox that just outright rocks. I'm in the process (when I can find the time) of writing a photo gallery based on it in C#. It's pretty easy actually. It seems this module may have a bug in it that keeps the image reloading time and time again but it's pretty cool. Below is an image of hasselhoff (no I'm not a huge knightrider fan or anything like that) but this is a pretty funny picture and well it's great for demoing apps like this so click on it and enjoy the magic that is lightbox. — Jess
ASP.net 2.0 Commerce Starter Kit
Nov 18th
Microsoft is clearly making an attempt at promoting opensource applications that use their tools and run on their platform, CommunityServer, DotNetNuke, and the starter kits are clear examples of this. I stumbled on the ASP.net 2.0 commerce starter kit last night and have to say it’s pretty darn nice. It’s the work of http://www.wekeroad.com and is just in it’s infancy compared to some of the other applications out there. One of the great features of this application is that it’s been backed by Microsoft and PayPal and works with PayPal Pro right out of the gate. For the past 10 years I’ve a great deal of working with e-commerce and in fact wrote my own shopping cart application 10 years ago in Perl and MySQL and can attest to the great joy and pain associated with such a task. Back in 99 when appliedi.net was founded, it was founded to cater to e-commerce based sites and continues to do this today with over 80% of it’s clients being ecommerce based sites. I can honestly say that a decent opensource (read free) ASP.net based shopping cart does not exist, there are a couple outstanding ASP.net based commercial apps (BVcommerce and Storefront) but many clients are put off by these applications because of their cost.
Free VS.net 2005 Books
Oct 18th
Actually they’re Visual Basic 2005 -ebooks, but free is good
Introducing Visual Basic 2005 for Developers:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbrun/staythepath/additionalresources/IntroTo2005/default.aspx
Upgrading Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 to Microsoft Visual Basic .NET: http://msdn.microsoft.com/vbrun/staythepath/additionalresources/UpgradingVB6/default.aspx
Hopefully we’ll see some C# books getting released fairly soon, I’m a big fan of C#.
Web based site builders
Sep 1st
Recently Applied Innovations released their web based site builder, instasite http://instasite.appliedi.net/ . I've been a big fan of templated sitebuilders but until recently they never had all of the features necessary to make them useful and easy enough that you didn't need a degree in computer science to figure one out. The beauty of this application is that if you can use a word processor, you can use it. You don't need to worry about FTP programs, you dont' need to worry about double checking your HTML markup, you just click, type, click, type. That's it. It's that easy. Best of all instasite from Applied Innovations (http://www.appliedi.net/) is totally free and included with every hosting account.
