Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : .NET Development, jcannon

Mindtouch: Deki, OSS and Windows

jcannon — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:59:00 GMT

Our community knows that open source businesses are important to Microsoft. Nothing demonstrates this better than the fact that open source was a key theme in the recent Windows Server 2008 Launch. You can read more about that here.

One of the individuals we highlighted was Steve Bjorg, Founder and CTO at Mindtouch. Mindtouch develops an open source collaboration platform. Today, I'm excited to have Robert Mason, Mindtouch Platform Engineer, update us on the progress Mindtouch has made in delivering a first class open source experience on Windows. Take it away Bob....

Short Demo Video: MindTouch Deki 8.05.2

This demo video goes through a lot of information quickly. It shows the basics of collaboration in MindTouch Deki and then demonstrates a mashup with a Microsoft Silverlight charting package. NOTE: With MindTouch Deki creating mashups, dynamic reports and dashboards does not require programming ability.

Hello! It’s great to be asked to guest blog here at Port 25. Last you had heard from us, we had written about MindTouch Deki from the start being written in C#, but running solely on Mono inside of a Linux environment. Well, that’s all about to change… I’m happy announce that for the first time, MindTouch is releasing an official Windows-based beta version of MindTouch Deki. Specifically, you may now install using a MindTouch-created Microsoft Windows MSI!

MindTouch Deki is an open source collective intelligence platform. In other words, it is an enterprise wiki that sits atop a web-services framework and enables mashups, dashboards, and dynamic reporting from disparate systems and databases. MindTouch Deki provides a unique collaboration tool for enterprises and workgroups. Rather than taking the less useful approach of other collaborative and Enterprise 2.0 applications by providing a simple walled-garden / point application, MindTouch has developed Deki with the collaborative intuition of a highly polished and robust enterprise wiki, but is also able to federate and mashup application and data silos. It was developed on Microsoft .NET using C#, and, until today, has only officially supported installations on Linux using Mono.

Although this is a beta release, the MindTouch team has worked hard to include all major features and functionality currently available to Deki users on Linux-based operating systems. Please report any problems or issues that you may discover either at our forums or by filing a bug. This new MindTouch Deki MSI beta supports IIS 7 on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft Vista only. However, the final release of the MSI will also support IIS 6 on Microsoft Windows Server 2003. Download the MindTouch Deki MSI today. We're very excited to at last be offering support for Microsoft IIS 6 and 7 on Vista, Windows Server 2003, and 2008. MindTouch Deki has enjoyed a groundswell of adoption with daily downloads in the thousands; by (finally) introducing an easy and officially supported means of installing on Windows Server and Windows Vista we are expecting great things! Now, Systems Integrators and .NET developers can return to their existing customer base (and find new customers) to deliver more value by "adding the 2.0" to the enterprise infrastructure in the form of a collaborative surface atop the existing infrastructure that they've already deployed.

Write MindTouch for more information about our web-oriented architecture or for a high level explanation read about our technologies at the website. Finally, expect to see more Microsoft-related updates from MindTouch in the coming months… Subscribe to our monthly eNewsletter at www.MindTouch.com to stay up to date on new Microsoft related products and offerings.

Thanks,
Bob Mason

Win a copy of the .NET/J2EE Interoperability Toolkit

jcannon — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:22:00 GMT

It's been awhile since we've featured any books or authors on Port 25 - you may remember Jeremy Moskowitz on Windows/Linux Integration, and then Linux in a Windows World with Rod Smith. That doesn't mean our library shelves have gone empty though ~ so today we're going to run a small giveaway of some extra copies of .NET and J2EE Interoperability Toolkit we came across. It's a great book on how to open .NET to work with Java and comes with some useful tools on CD - including the The Mind Electric GLUE web services. GLUE provides developers that want to build Java Web services with an easy-to-use, compact implementation of all of the core Web services standards, including XML, SOAP, WSDL and UDDI. It allows any Java object to be instantly published as a Web service and third-party Web services to be consumed as if they are local Java objects.

To Win: All we ask is that you submit the best example of open source interoperability on Windows. It can be a project running on Windows (like Apache), a language (like PHP or Java), or a commerical application - like MySQL. Send them directly to port25@microsoft.com and we'll pick the best 6 stories. We'll close the competition next Friday, November 9th at 12 noon EST. Good luck!

About the book:
Discover how to build applications that run on both the Microsoft .NET Framework and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE)—and extend your customer reach and system shelf life. Whether your background is in .NET or J2EE, you’ll learn to implement many of the interoperability technologies available today, including Microsoft, Sun, and third-party compatibility tools. Interoperability expert Simon Guest takes a balanced look at the pros and cons of each cross-platform technology presented, including best practices, workarounds, and examples of interoperability solutions in action. You also get interoperability software on CD—plus a wealth of code you can use in your own solutions.

Discover how to:

Use .NET Remoting to enable interplatform connectivity
Write interoperable Web service solutions that show interoperability in a production environment, handle exceptions, and use UDDI
Employ Microsoft SQL Server 2000 to create a shared database between .NET and J2EE
Enable cross-platform asynchronous calling with Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) and WebSphere MQ from IBM
Implement a bridge between .NET and J2EE queues using Microsoft Host Information Server and Microsoft BizTalk Server
Deliver a consistent user interface across platforms through shared session state and shared authentication
Build complex interoperability solutions using Web services specifications for security, binary data exchange, and routing

Releasing the Source Code for the .NET Framework Libraries

jcannon — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 21:47:00 GMT

Some news from Scott Guthrie's blog this morning - we'll get more from the .NET and Shared Source team over the next few months:

"One of the things my team has been working to enable has been the ability for .NET developers to download and browse the source code of the .NET Framework libraries, and to easily enable debugging support in them.

Today I'm excited to announce that we'll be providing this with the .NET 3.5 and VS 2008 release later this year.

We'll begin by offering the source code (with source file comments included) for the .NET Base Class Libraries (System, System.IO, System.Collections, System.Configuration, System.Threading, System.Net, System.Security, System.Runtime, System.Text, etc), ASP.NET (System.Web), Windows Forms (System.Windows.Forms), ADO.NET (System.Data), XML (System.Xml), and WPF (System.Windows). We'll then be adding more libraries in the months ahead (including WCF, Workflow, and LINQ). The source code will be released under the Microsoft Reference License (MS-RL).

You'll be able to download the .NET Framework source libraries via a standalone install (allowing you to use any text editor to browse it locally). We will also provide integrated debugging support of it within VS 2008.

Integrated Visual Studio 2008 Debugging Support

The final release of VS 2008 will support the ability to configure the debugger to dynamically download the .NET Framework debugger symbols (and corresponding source code) from a web server hosted by Microsoft. You'll be able to configure the .NET Framework symbols to be downloaded all in one shot, or manually retrieved on demand:

Read the rest of the post at Scott Guthrie's Blog....