.Net News & Articles

Maybe it just seems like it, but there is sneaking suspicion that you can’t set foot outside the door at the moment without tripping over another buddying-up between Digital Reef (news, site) and a new friend.

This time it's with EntropySoft (news, site) the enterprise content integration specialist. The purpose? To provide more out-of-the-box connectivity to more enterprise content management systems.

Microsoft made its first ever keynote at the JavaOne Conference last week reports eWeek, touting their desire for increased interoperability between .NET and Java.

In an interview with eWEEK, Steven Martin, senior director of development platform products at Microsoft said interoperability is important to him, "[Seventy-three] percent of professional developers rely on .NET or a combination of .NET and Java.  In that sense, both Java and .NET have won in the enterprise and it is incumbent on both Microsoft and Sun to ensure that interoperability for the platforms is real, available and as easy to implement as possible."

We've seen and heard many times that many organizations, particularly the larger ones, don't have a single technology stack in-house and there's often a mix of .NET and Java solutions to support. Microsoft knows that and have for the last five years been working closely with Sun on interoperability projects like Web Single Sign On, the Interop Vendor Alliance and virtualization.

Although they have been involved in the JavaOne conferences for a few years, this is the first time they have keynoted. It would have been interesting to see how the Java audience responded to their keynote.

The keynote, conducted by Martin and Dan'l Lewin, Corporate Vice President, Strategic and Emerging Business Development, discussed what is happening today in regards to interoperability between .NET and Java and where it is headed in the future.

Interested in hearing exactly what they said? Watch the keynote.

If the success of a content management system is directly related to how much its creators talk it up, then IDConstructor v4.1 is going to be a real winner.

While the hosted version is already commercially available, beta-testing on the downloadable version is almost complete and it should be ready soon.

Designed to be entirely scalable, this web content management system (Web CMS) enables users to build websites that are dynamic and full-featured with the ease-of-use of Microsoft Word.

In fact, IDConstructor says that if you can manipulate Word, you can build websites using v4.1. But it's never quite that simple, now is it.

Seeing as how SharePoint (news, site) is so widely used within the enterprise today, it's not a stretch to think that employees would want to access their SharePoint sites and content from their mobile devices. But out of the box, mobile functionality isn't all the great.

To the rescue comes Mobile Entrée, a server side plug-in for SharePoint that will let you access your SharePoint data from your iPhone, Blackberry or Windows Mobile.

We are all interested to see how SharePoint will implement CMIS - Content Management Interoperability Specification (news, site). We got a bit of feel for how it could speak to a CMIS compliant repository earlier this year.

But it's not just SharePoint that we want to know about when it comes to Microsoft and CMIS. We also want to know how any .NET based content management system can implement CMIS. And we'd like to see it in a similar fashion as the work that's happening now with Chemistry, the proposed Apache Incubator Project whose goal is to create a generic, open source Java-language implementation of CMIS.

We may have the start of the happening now with a new CodePlex project in the works. Called the NCMIS: .NET Content Management Interoperability Services, this project has been created to develop a DotNet library that implements the core requirements of the CMIS spec and a toolbox to help you build your own implementation.

It's still in the planning stages, but the CodePlex site outlines a number of items that could be put into the toolbox including things like Business Classes and related enums for all CMIS entities, Protocol handlers, Sample Producer, .NET CMIS Explorer and more.

This project is just getting off the ground and they are looking for volunteers to contribute to the project. If you are dying to get your hands dirty with CMIS and .Net, head over the CodePlex project site and let them know you want to help.

Step by step, from version 5.0 to now 5.1 -- while still embracing all things SharePoint -- Clearview (news, site) announced updates to its enterprise CMS.

They include a new Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services-based API, Business Process Management (or Workflow in Clearview's terminology) module and a number of less substantial (yet important) enhancements.

CMS Watch (news, site) has just released the 17th edition of their independent research report on Web Content Management: Web CMS Report 2009.

In this latest release, CMS Watch notes that there is another wave of web content management vendors from Europe entering the North America market. These vendors are offering a greater variety of options especially in the areas of .NET and open source. And these are not new vendors, many have been around awhile, just focused on the European market.

According to Tony Byrne, CMS Watch founder, European and UK-based Web CMS vendors have been trying to break into the US market for over a decade. There are been two previous waves: successful in wave 1: RedDot and Day Software, successful in wave 2: Sitecore and Tridion.

This "third wave" includes some well-known vendors:

• Telerik and EpiServer: Offering solutions to the SMB market and challenging existing vendors like Ektron and Sitecore
• eZ Publish, TYPO3 and Drupal: All three are developing strong partner relationships in North America

And while they think this is a good thing, CMS Watch is advising caution and due diligence. “Crossing the Atlantic in either direction is very hard for a Web CMS vendor,” adds Byrne.  “Building effective support structures is a process that takes years, so North American customers should carefully weigh any newcomer’s current abilities as well as long-term staying power.”

You can get the full report here.

If you are hanging out at the AIIM Conference the next few days, you are going to hear some interesting news and announcements from EMC (news, site). Along with some revealing research conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit, sponsored by EMC, on the impact and importance of organizational agility, EMC is also announcing some new solutions designed to help customers work smarter.

MIX09 is now over, but many of the sessions are still available to view. Of particular note are the ASP.NET MVC tutorials that will help you better understand this new development framework.

Phil Haack, a Senior Program Manager with the ASP.NET team who has been an integral part of the ASP.NET MVC Framework, did two of these sessions:

• ASP.NET MVC: America’s Next Top Model View Controller Framework: The building of a simple application that demonstrates some of the key capabilities of the MVC framework. You'll also see some new tooling features that should help you develop apps based on the MVC framework more easily.
• ASP.NET MVC Ninjas on Fire Black Belt Tips: Get some good tips and tricks on making the most of the MVC framework.

Phil indicates on his blog that he intends to offer these demos in blog format in the near future, so keep an eye out for those.

In addition to these sessions, Jared Eischen and John Stockton of Ascentium did a session on using MVC to build mobile device views of your website. And you'll find some sessions covering the future of ASP.NET. All sessions are available on a special website that contains many of MIX09 sessions.

Sessions are downloadable as PPT, Zune Video or Windows Media Video.

You can get ASP.NET MVC 1.0 using the Web Platform Installer, download a free eBook covering the first chapter of the Wrox book on the subject and find a newly updated MSDN section telling you everything you need to know about ASP.NET MVC.

It is clear that Microsoft is excited about this new framework and wants to ensure you have everything you need to get up to speed quickly.

No doubt you’ve heard of, and even anticipated, the release of Microsoft Silverlight 3. The third version of the runtime comes a mere eighteen months after the initial launch in 2007.

Such a quick turnover has understandably made a few folks skeptical, as has the rumor that this will be the only beta before the official Silverlight 3 ships later this year. But so far positive reviews are coming in by the truckload, securing Silverlight in the ring with Adobe Flash for what will likely be a pretty good fight.

On the move again, EntropySoft, an enterprise content integration specialist, is demonstrating their ability to provide interoperability between content management systems. EntropySoft creates connectors to various content management and portal systems, including SharePoint, Documentum, Oracle UCM, HP Trim and IBM WebSphere. 

Currently, their connectors are available written in Java, Flex and web services. Today they announce even greater interoperability by making all their connectors .Net compliant.

Though we haven’t covered them in quite a while, Asbru has been nothing short of ridiculously active in their endeavors. The company released a grand total of nineteen updated versions of their content management system in 2008 alone. This year they’re already at number two.

The most recent version, Asbru Web Content Management  v7.0, keeps with the company’s aim to be simple and easy enough for anyone with web browsing and word processing skills to use.

Kentico Software, a Czech Web CMS vendor, released a new version of Kentico CMS for ASP.NET. The 4.0 version, out of beta announced in December of last year, brings to the table Web content management packaged with social networking.
 
The majority of new Kentico CMS 4.0 features are revolving around the oh-so-popular social networking, online communities and Web 2.0 technologies.

It's official. Just as they promised, Umbraco has released version 4.0 of their ASP.NET Web Content Management System.

After 18 months of hard work, here's the highlights you can expect from v4:

• Developers: Support for ASP.NET Master Pages, Membership & Role Providers, AJAX, any .NET language. Event Model, Documented API and full source code available
• Designers: Built on W3C Standards, Accessibility Section  508 compliant, a template engine yet complete design freedom and support for RIA-powered websites based on Flash or Silverlight.
• End Users: New, easy to use interface, MS Word integration, Media Library, Content Versioning and Scheduling, Notifications and Tracking, built-in translation management, multi-lingual and supports all major browsers.

Remember, the upgrade is supposed to be painless, unless you have a few features implemented such as the XSLT helper method RenderTemplate(), UltraSimpleMailer / Newsletter and 3rd party datatypes.

And for those German-speaking fans, there is now a sister site to Umbraco.org: Umbraco.de which contains a mirror of the important parts of the Umbraco.org site.

You can get the new release on codeplex now.

Recently, open source Sense/Net 6.0 Content Management System has gotten an upgrade targeted towards making the system more developer-friendly.

If you’re a .NET developer wanting to get more love from Sense/Net 6.0, your time is now. Let’s check out the new WebDAV support and upgraded interface in Sense/Net 6.0 Beta2.