Developers.ie and ComputerJobs.ie are partners in one exciting event coming up soon.
Dino Esposito is joining us for a full training day on the 27th of May. This is a unique opportunity to get some training for a tenth of the cost for a course day.
Check www.developers.ie for more details and how to register.
SubText is the blog engine we use in Developers.ie to power our blogs.
I am happy to announce that we upgraded SubText to the latest version (1.9.5.176) without any glitch.
Everything works fine but let me know if you find something strange!
New features are:
Content Tagging and Tag Cloud - for more details, refere to this post.
Identicon Support - Uses the Identicon Handler project on CodePlex.
MyBrand Feedburner Support - Updated our FeedBurner implementation to support custom feedburner URLs
Upgrade to LightBox 2.0 - If you referenced the default lightbox skin in your custom skin, please reference this post by Simone to understand how to update the skin.
Author CSS Class - The CSS class of "author" is added to comments left by the owner of a blog (must be logged in when leaving comment for this to work). This allows custom skin authors to highlight comments by authors.
Credits Page - In the Admin section, we give credit where credit is due, displaying a list of the open source products we make use of in building Subtext.
And of course few bugs removed, check this post for more details
OK this is cool. I finally get my hands on a very good version of SubText, the blog engine developed as an open source project to take off after .Text demise.
Why SubText? Well, a great support and an already large community, it's much much more simple to install and maintain than Community Server, and very important for Developers.ie three years content, I was able to import all the previosu .Text data.
Now that this blog engine is running Developers.ie has definitely the first stone of our new content building, the blogs.
So from today 15th of January 2007, I declare the competition opened !
The basic rules are simple:
- Request (for free) a blog in Developers.ie
- Write regularly on Microsoft technologies (like Microsoft.Net, SQL Server, WCF, etc...) as long as it is relevant to the community.
- Then get a chance to win a Portable Media Player in the next three months thanks to Professionals.ie
plus some books and goodies for the ten first contributors.
- Or you can be part of a draw to win in one year an Xbox 360 or a MSDN Premium subscription thanks to Microsoft
Anyone can request for a blog, but you need to reside in Ireland or Northern Ireland to enter the competition.
Use the contact page from the home page to request for your blog.
Following Clare Dillon post, I would like also to add that Developers.ie has also a feed for the Jobs section.
Check www.developers.ie to subscribe to the Events and Jobs feeds.
Less than a year ago, when Marcus and I were discussing about a blog aggregator for the user group, I was excited by the idea because it's really a community tool, having all the bloggers locally talking about their passion.
To be honest, one thing I was not sure about was the real commitment by local developers to post on a regular basis their own experience.
This is why I always liked to include in the feeds international bloggers too. After all this is how Brian has his moment of fame few months with some cool tool, and this is truely amazing to see the power of blogs.
Now I am please to see that today, if you look at this page, 100% of the posts are written by people living in Ireland. And I just added to the gig our new INDA speaker Mark Andrews, so don't forget if you too you want to blog, contact me at webmaster@developers.ie for your chance to express yourself.
This is really exciting time, so much in one go, Atlas, Vista, C# 3.0, LINQ, etc...
So overwhelmed by so many announcements.
Just one kudos to Eamon, becuase he was the one to have demonstrate the LINQ bits (and C# 3.0) to our user group last June (check the archives to see the demos and slides).
Engadget never cease to amaze me regarding everything about gizmos. But I love this way to send you back to 1985 where cellphones were the size of 2 bricks!
Yes I used in my job at the time and in my personal life almost everything on this page. I feel so old now :-)
I received an interested suggestion yesterday from Clint Stotesbery.
Clint invited me to vote for a request ( I don't really like the word petition) he posted on the MSDN Feedback Center, the place where usually you submit the bugs you can found in Microsoft products.
This time it's about Visual Studio 2005. More we are clode to the deadline for the final release, more developers are starting to use the Beta 2 provided with a Go Live license.
But the issue now is the product is still far away from being acceptable in a production environment. Don't misundersatnd me I love the new stuff, they are really cool. But I am a web developer and I found too many hurdles in the migration of my existing projects.
Like many, I don't have the time to transform my projects (which are running perfectly as they are) to be acceptable by VS 2005 just to play with some cool new stuff. A lot of things have been done in the new version to please the beginners, but what's about the .Net veterans?
Microsoft communication is quite active, they are really addressing some of the issues. But what they give sounds more like patches done at the last minute to keep their troops happy. No what we want is not a release date its the confirmation that the product will be release without major bugs and no outstanding issues or missing features.
So yes I voted for this request because I know that I will use VS 2005 for the next 3 to 4 years and I know that sadly only a couple of patches have been released by Microsoft for .Net v1 bugs and I don't want the same story happening again.
So if you are planning to use Visual Studio 2005 tomorrow or in the next year, this is probably your last chance to get your voice heard.
Go to this site, read the comment, have an opinion and hopefully vote. We need an important number of votes to be on top of the requests, and believe me Microsoft is listening.
A "bug" in the migration of Developers.ie to a new server has prevented some bloggers to have their blog homepage visible (even if the backend DotText engine is working well).
Of course this happened when I was on holidays in the most remote and exotic place in the world (no it's not a tropical island but West Cork indeed where they just invented the phone).
Anyway things are working back now !
At last I found some time to upload the content of our last week session with Daniel Moth on Compact Framework 2.0
Check here for the audio and the slides
Kenny Young shows here how to manipulate the columns in a Datagrid by the name you get from the header.
Read here on CodeProject
Well it's almost done, we have now a new home for Developers.ie, and I want to say thanks to Marcus for his help on the aggregator migration.
Also a special thanks to our sponsor Hosting365.ie for their help and their support for this user group. The site is running now on a dedicated server, which will provide more flexibility and you can also feel the speed increase!
Those guys at the support they really rocks! It's probably the first time I found a very responsive technical support in Ireland.
Now the last part of the site in progress should be the forums (I hope to have up and running in the next hours).
If you find any issues with the new site please send your feedback at webmaster@developers.ie
Thanks to 
If you are interested by the PDC and wish to go there, contact me before tomorrow to get a special discount price, thanks to our sponsor INETA.
$1395 before the 15th of July, $1695 after.
Check here some pictures of the RSS platform announced by Microsoft.
I don't look the stats page everyday but hey Developers.ie has just break its own record: more than 35 000 unique visitors this month !!
Thanks all for your interest in this site and believe I will make sure to keep you in the stats.
Of course the Blogs are the most visited section, followed by the Forums, and Cathal DotNetNuke blog is coming on the 4th position! Another proof that blogging is important if you have any project to share.