Very often you can fine tune MonoX functionality without programming, but some solutions do require a lot of background ASP.NET knowledge. To ease the learning curve in this type of scenarios, we have decided to introduce a fully fledged MonoX API that allows developers to easily access and modify MonoX objects and features.

Upgrading an existing MonoX site to the new version can sometimes be a complex task as there are many areas that may been changed or customized between versions. This article presents a handy step-by-step tutorial you can use to upgrade your old site/application to the newest version of MonoX.

In this post we are continuing to search through the Virtual Private Server (VPS) market, trying to find the best and the most affordable services to host MonoX and other similar  ASP.NET applications. Discover why Rackspace may be the right choice if you need the premium performance for your sites.

In the third part of our ASP.NET hosting review series we seeked to avoid the limitations of low end shared hosting environments. If you need much better degree of process isolation and application performance, a Virtual Private Server might be the best choice. Find out where you can have a fully featured virtual server for a very low price.

If a $20 ASP.NET hosting service described last time is still too much for your budget, we made an extra effort to find a super cheap, yet reliable hosting service for every pocket. Does $5 for a full featured service sounds better? It may sound too good to be true, but Arvixe succeeds in redefining the market rules in this segment.

We are proud to announce that MonoX now includes full support for ASP.NET profile infrastructure. All configuration changes are immediatelly visible in the front end profile-related Web parts, making it easy to include unlimited number of custom fields to the user's profile without any programming and without the need to recompile the solution.

MonoX has a preconfigured web.config for .NET 4.0 that needs to be used when you are installing MonoX on the .NET 4.0 platform. It is recommended to use this web.config before you start the MonoX installation. Note that you need to give the worker process account a write permission on the web.config to automatically setup the web application, otherwise you need to do it manually.

A simple solution that allows you to host unlimited number of ASP.NET applications from a single database and virtual directory.

Last month we've published an application optimization package - Web Application Optimizer (WAO) - with features that include HTTP compression, ViewState optimization and CSS/Javascript optimization. WAO significantly increases the response time for Web applications of all sizes, and, most importantly, there is no need to modify the source code of your applications!

The package works in very different application scenarios and we've got plenty of useful feedback from the first group of users. There has been a slight confusion related to the availability of WAO in our MonoX framework. I wanted to formally announce that  WAO is available by default in all versions of MonoX. It is easy to tell if the WAO is active by the absence of big ViewState data chunk from the page source.

You may noticed that we've been quiet for the last couple of months. The vacation season is not the primary reason for the lack of updates - quite contrary, we are adding new features to MonoX on a daily basis. Just to give you a test of things to come, here is a short list of features that will be included in the next version that will be released later this year:

- MonoX is switching to .NET 3.5, allowing us to use LINQ, Dynamic Data, portions of MVC technology and similar stuff in the core libraries
- we have switched to the Web application project model, as it offers way better development experience on larger projects - compilation process is now shortened dramatically
- we have introduced some exciting changes to the licensing scheme - more on that later
- MonoX will include a complete Social Networking module set: friend lists, invitations, messaging, wall, notes, groups, profiles...
Stay tuned for more news and let us know which features do you want to see included in next releases.