Porting the Suteki Shop to OpenRasta

Mike Hadlow has just announced the commercial release of Jump the Gun, an online shop based on his Suteki Shop cms. Mike is an extremely bright guy that I’ve met quite a few times at various conferences, and he’s built it all on asp.net MVC.

Because OpenRasta doesn’t have much of a documentation at the moment, and because it would be nice to have a comparison between the two systems, I’ve offered Mike to start porting Suteki to OpenRasta sometime over the weekend. The good news is that it will live side-by-side with the existing Suteki Shop. I’m leaning towards calling it Sutekool :) . And then we’ll be able to compare the performance and flexibility of both frameworks. I’ll porbably learn a lot in the process,

Thanks Mike for the great work and for the opportunity of having the first side-by-side comparison of asp.net MVC and OpenRasta! Now if we had someone porting it to monorail, we could have a real overview of what the .net MVC world has to offer.

Building a new server at RapidSwitch

I’ve been on the lookout for a windows server 2008 server for quite a while, and have now selected one. The thing that surprised me in my search has been the complete lack of professionalism exhibited by some hosts on their websites.

• If you don’t tell me where your datacenters are, you probably don’t have datacenters and are just reselling.
• If you don’t provide your company details on every single of your pages (hint: uk limited companies *must* provide their company number, vat registration number, registered office and full name, including “limited” or “ltd”. copyright midnight software is *not* enough), I don’t know who you are and for all I know you don’t actually have a company.
• If you don’t provide an SLA, I do not trust you will apply it.

So with all those, 90% of the hosts I found selling Server 2008 hosting were out. RapidSwitch seems to have had good reviews, so I just created an account, and have had two tickets in the last few hours telling me my server was now racked and the OS is installing, from a gent called Kyle. Although I am pretty sure Kyle is a bot, it’s still very nice to know what is going on.

I’m going to keep this post open to give my feedback on their service as I use them. They are confident enough in their service to not tie you to a 12-month contract. Depending on how things go in the next couple of weeks, they'll probably sign me for 12 months or loose me. Kudos for leaving the customer in control.

Roll Server 2008!

The content of the presentation at VBUG Brighton tonight

As last time I got completely overloaded with work and forgot to post the content of the demo, this time I’m doing it the other way around. Code is available on my public mug (get it? caffeine-it, mug, public? Funny? No? Oh well). Point your favourite svn tool to

http://svn.caffeine-it.com/mug/bingo

From the command line

C:\> svn co http://svn.caffeine-it.com/mug/bingo bingo

Will add the updates I’ll tweak till then and the powerpoint slide sometimes tomorrow at the same place.

See you all tonight in Brighton, or over the next two days at Mix!

Alt.net London Beers #3 – 14th October 2008

Following on the success of the previous events,I am happy to announce the next alt.net London Beers event.

The format is going to be different from the previous event, as it will be a sort of mini openconf-style session. Here are the rules

• Arrivals, discussion and socializing between 18:00 and 19:00, with one necessity: find the topic of the day and find the questions that we will try to answer. We may provide post-its, white boards or body painting equipment to help people focus.
• At 19:00 the big clock will start ticking for a time-boxed 60 minutes workshop on the subject. The goal is simple: can we as a group get insight and progress our understanding of the problem. The specifics of the format will probably change when we get there, but I’d like us to focus on up to 4 questions.
• At 20:00 the clock will ring and that will be it of the conversation. Everyone will be invited to fill-in a wiki with a one or two line answer for each of those questions. The goal is to capture a snapshot of the state of mind at the event, and to be able to compare those with the result of our reflections that, I’m sure, will be extensively shared on blogs, mailing lists, twitter, etc.
• One this is all written down, everybody will be able to continue the discussion in the pub or wherever they see fit.

Please leave comments here and everywhere you feel relevant, or hit me on twitter, to suggest topic ideas or to provide criticism of the whole concept. Without feedback one cannot separate success from failure, and recognizing those are necessary to progress and improve.

If your company wants to invest a bit of money behind the bar for food and drinks, don’t hesitate to let me know.

And of course, the location is the same as the previous event, and I have been told the kitchen staff will stay a bit longer for us this time.

The Blue Posts
18, Kingly Street
London W1B 5PX

View Larger Map

Technorati Tags: altdotnet,altnetuk,alt.net,altnetbeers

Developing .net code since 2000?

Over the years, I’ve had a couple of people in interviews being surprised at my assertion that I started development on .net in 2000. As I go through yet another cleanup of my email archives (I’m an archival freak) that are reaching around 15GB of data, I found this email.

From: DeveloperStoreAdministrator@developerstore.com [mailto:DeveloperStoreAdministrator@developerstore.com]
Sent: 14 November 2000 03:09
To: …
Subject: Thank you for your recent Microsoft purchase

Thank you for visiting our store, Sebastien P. Lambla.

Your order has been entered into our ordering system, and will be delivered to you soon. At that time, the charge of $15.99 will be charged to your credit card.

This is an unmonitored email alias. Please do not reply directly to this email alias as the messages will not be answered. If you have questions or would like to check on the status of your order, please email us at mstoolbox@interactservices.com.

Refer to order number MSDSTB129915 when contacting us.

Thank You,

Microsoft Developer Tools

This was the first beta of visual studio. 8 years of C#, how time flies!

Kaizenconf is open

For those that were waiting for the kaizenconf registration to be open, it now is. But it’s not really a registration, it’s a request for a registration. So if I understand that correctly, I still don’t know if I’ll be there or not.

If you come from good old Great Britain, I’d recommend booking anyway. With the sterling going down, cancellation fees will probably be cheaper than waiting and see your money be half what it was.

Work availability

If you’re looking for help with your project and need a consultant, I’m available for the first two weeks of October. And if you’re looking for a developer / lead developer, I’ll be available from mid-November!

So don’t hesitate to contact me at seb@serialseb.com and cut some of those agencies cost!

Vote now for DDD!

Quite many very interesting session proposed for the next DDD.

Go and vote now for your favorite sessions (and if you don’t like any, you can always vote for mine!)