It is dinner time on New Years Eve, here on the Wet Coast.  Most of the world is already celebrating the New Year, but as in many things we are a bit late here in North America.

Looking Back

2008 has been a challenging year for many people as the financial crisis struck.  Many retired people or people approaching retirement took a big hit in their income as their savings were decimated.  Thankfully, I still have a few years to go, for my retirement savings to recover.

For me 2008 was quite a good year.  In January, my Microsoft MVP award was renewed for a 2nd year, and a month later I was nominated to the prestigious ASPInsiders group.  Both of these “groups” held summits in Seattle and I met a lot of other ASP.NET developers who I respect. 

In June, my wife Eileen and I celebrated our 25th Wedding Anniversary by travelling to Italy for 17 days.  I have blogged about this in some depth.

The fall was full of speaking engagements.  It began with Open Force Europe in the Netherlands in early October, followed by a trip to England to visit family.  In November I spoke at the .NET BC User Group meeting at BCIT and at Open Force North America/DevConnections in Las Vegas.

Finally, in late November, DotNetNuke Corporation received Series A Venture Financing which hopefully will allow us to grow, both the company and the community.

Looking Forward – 2009

2009 starts tomorrow.  For me, January 1st sees me start a new job as I become a salaried employee of DotNetNuke Corporation (I had previously been working on a personal services contract).  We have already hired a few new developers that will also be starting early in the new year, and in February or March we should be able to open an office, somewhere in the Fraser Valley, just east of Vancouver. 

It will feel strange to go back to commuting to work again – I have worked from home since 1995 – but I am looking forward to working closely with a team of excellent programmers as we grow DotNetNuke.

We don’t have any travel plans (yet) this year, although I expect I will be at one or both Open Force conferences.  I would really like to travel to Australia (hint, hint).

To conclude, I wish everybody a Happy New Year.  If 2008 was bad for you, I hope 2009 will be better.  If 2008 was good for you, I hope 2009 will continue that trend.

It is Christmas Eve on the Wet Coast, and I am sitting in my office looking out on a Winter Wonderland - and to prove it below is a picture taken from the front porch of my house, just a few minutes ago.

As you can surmise we are not going anywhere soon.  Thankfully we finished all our holiday preparations yesterday, so today and tomorrow we can focus on enjoying the holiday spirit (my favourite is GlenMorangie Single Malt Scotch Whiskey).

For those of you who are Christian like us, we wish you a Merry Christmas, and for everyone we wish you the best for the Holiday Season.

In my last blog I criticized the team that released Oxite recently.  My concern was that they were promoting Oxite as a “real-world sample using ASP.NET MVC”, but as many others have said it is a poor example.

Since my earlier blog there have been a few more blogs on the topic.

Casey Charlton -  Oxite - An Example of How Not To Write MVC Applications

Rob Conery - Oxite Refactor, Take 1

Scott Hansleman - ASP.NET MVC Samples, Oxite, and Community

Oren Eini - Oxite: Open eXchangable Informative Troubled Engine

While Rob and Scott take a more conciliatory take – they are now of course Microsoft employees - the comment that for me “hits the nail on the head” is from Glenn Block, who is also an MS employee.

He has a refreshingly honest comment.

There is no excuse for this. There are tons of folks both internal to Microsoft or external that can help people who want to learn good practices for developing software. The fact that the MVC team was not even consulted by the Oxite guys is literally stunning.

It is pretty clear now that releasing this was a marketing blunder.  As I mentioned in my earlier blog, I hope the development team can provide some better examples of how they believe this new “tool” can and should be used.

Last week the team responsible for the MIXOnline site, released on Codeplex a new “Open Source” Blog Engine/CMS called Oxite.  One of its two main goals is stated as follows - “To provide a real-world sample written using ASP.NET MVC”.

Since the release of this sample application, there has been a lot of chatter in the twittersphere and blogosphere about this application.  The general consensus seems to be that, as a sample ASP.NET MVC application, it is a poor example. (See Karl Seguin’s blog and Scott Koon’s blog for more on the issues.)

I haven’t had a chance to do a code-review myself yet, but as an MVC newbie I might not notice anything wrong – and there’s the problem.  If this is being touted by a Microsoft Team as a “real-world sample written using ASP.NET MVC”, then surely it should use best practices for using this new (for ASP.NET developers) pattern.

Some have argued that the Oxite development team seem to be open about accepting contributions and working with the community to fix the many problems, but while this is commendable, I am still of the opinion that this should never have been touted as a “real-world sample” of “ASP.NET MVC”.

I know this wasn’t written by the development team, but anything released from Microsoft carries the perception of a stamp of approval.  I hope that when the 1.0 RTW version of the ASP.NET MVC Framework is released that there will be some “Best Practices” examples included to help us MVC newbies in the right direction.

DotNetNuke allows you to define custom roles to manage your site’s permissions.  Recently users have been reporting an error related to a corrupt cookie that stops them from logging in.  The problem is due to exceeding the number of roles.

Gemini Issue: http://support.dotnetnuke.com/issue/ViewIssue.aspx?id=8797&PROJID=2

Forum Thread: http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Forums/tabid/795/forumid/-1/threadid/234880/scope/posts/Default.aspx

The problem is due to the need for the user’s portal role names to be saved in a cookie.  The list of role names is encrypted and then saved in a cookie called “portalroles”.  Cookies have a physical size limitation (2K to 4K depending on browser), and so there is a physical restriction to the number of roles.

But what is the limit? 

Unfortunately, as it is the names that are saved, which can vary in length, I cannot provide a definitive answer, but it appears to be in the 40-60 range depending on the length of names used for roles.

This is not an easy issue to solve.  If we used role ids then the number of roles could be increased.  However, the problem with this approach is that it means that we will need to do a database call to convert the saved role ids to role names, which is the problem we are solving by saving the names in the cookie in the first place.

However, if a user is being assigned to over 40 roles then there is probably a better role arrangement that can be used.