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News related to Mono products, services and latest developments in our community.

denis

New version of MonoX

09/21/2009 By denis 0
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We have just published a new version of the MonoX portal framework. This release was motivated by new features brought by ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 - MVC-style routing and Dynamic Data. Routing is now fully supported, with additional support for QuestyString parameters.

Another new feature introduces support for declarative QueryString and Form parameter binding. This will save you a lot of time that was previously spent on manual parameter retrieval tasks.
denis

ASP.NET MVC

12/19/2008 By denis 0
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There's been a lot of talk about the new ASP.NET MVC (Model View Controller) framework and its interoperability with the "standard" Web form applications like MonoX. MVC approach brings a lot of neat features to ASP.NET developers:
  • it gives you a total control over the rendered HTML (no client-side ID pollution and similar by-products of the Web form approach)
  • it provides clean separation of concerns
  • it enables test driven development (TDD). Web forms and TDD were not a really happy couple, since Web form (aspx) code is running inside the ASP.NET worker process. Your pages need access to the HTTPContext, the Request and Response objects, and everything else that ASP.NET provides them at runtime
  • search engine-friendly URLs (in MVC you don't have to have a physical server file for every URL)
  • easy integration with javascript frameworks
  • absence of ViewState and PostBacks


We are aware that many of ASP.NET developers will not really appreciate the last feature. After all, ViewState and Postback events were at the very centre of the ASP.NET programming model for almost a decade. In my opinion, while it was certainly useful to use the same mental model of development for both Web and desktop environments, this approach was rather clumsy and produced many side-effects. On the other hand, MVC will have its share of problems, especially in this early stage. ASP.NET MVC views are rather hard to read beacuse of the tag soup we thought was left in the good old classic ASP days. While the separation of concerns is a very good thing, the separation of the HTML markup and the inline code cannot be completely disregarded as a non issue. Due to the vast marketplace of powerful ASP.NET controls that are available today, many of the developers we know will have a tough time switching to the "use foreach loop instead of the repeater" mentality. Although this can look rather extreme, there are a few techniques for RAD-style MVC development: using lambdas, MVC UI Helpers, custom view engines,... Additionally, many of the major control development companies already announced MVC versions of their products.

In any case, we love the MVC framework and are starting to use it in our MonoX-based projects. Scott Hanselman recently published an excellent article on using Web Forms and MVC side-by-side in your projects. For those of you that feel that routing rules should never go to the compiled code file, Jonathan Holland built a MVC RouteBuilder HTTP module that allows you to move all routes to the web.config file. We encourage you to give MVC a try - please let us know if you need any additional help with it.
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denis

Mono receives an EU grant

12/10/2008 By denis 0
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We are happy to report that our software development projects were awarded with a grant under the European Union PHARE programme - SME Pilot Grant Scheme "Support for Increasing the Competetiveness and Exports of Croatian SMEs". The funds secured by this grant are used for research and development of several Mono Software's products, including MonoX and eCTD Office.
denis

Integrating your portal with third-party components

11/06/2008 By denis 0
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One of the design decisions we had to make quite early was whether to develop our own blog, forum and similar packages, or to use the existing software from third-party vendors. Integrating the old ASP.NET forums (now Community Server) with the first version of MonoX was quite a challenge, as we had to rewrite the portions of the original code, change SQL stored procedures, introduce triggers to keep portal and forum users in sync, etc. At the end, so much effort was invested during the integration process that writing a new package from scratch seemed much more attractive.

This time we again made a quick overview of the existing third-party packages and soon realized that we will have a much easier job this time. There are a few excellent open source systems - it wouldn't make too much sense to reinvent a wheel with yet another blog or forum or whatever. The key to success in this story is ASP.NET  2.0 provider model. As you probably know, a provider is a software module that provides a uniform interface between a service and a data source. Providers abstract physical storage media, in much the same way that device drivers abstract physical hardware devices. In our case, integrating MonoX with the leading blog, e-commerce and forum engines requires just a few changes in their configuration files. The benefits are huge: you can enable single sign-on feature and have all the user and role information stored in the main portal database. All authorization and authentication tasks will be performed by the main portal, so there will be no multiple login pages that confuse users; moreover, user maintenance tasks will become much easier, as all relevant data are kept in the single location.

Information regarding the integration with BlogEngine.Net and YetAnotherForum can be found in our MonoX support forum.
denis

New MonoX search providers

11/05/2008 By denis 0
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We have just published two new search providers: an Indexing Service search provider and a Lucene provider. You can utilize new providers to bring your portal search functionality to a new level.
denis

MonoX Live Writer support

10/21/2008 By denis 0
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MonoX fully supports Windows Live Writer and other similar editing tools that recognize standard MetaWeblog API, not only for the blog publishing tasks, but also for more general portal editing and configuration actions.
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