My Portal Project

Third-party tools, exports to Excel, SVG, VML, and Java applets; these are the tools for the Domino developer who wants to create charts from their Lotus Notes\Domino applications. Wouldn’t be great if you could create chart images dynamically with native code? Probably never going to happen, but you can use .NET to generate the images and have any application refer to the images in a browser.

I recently wrote about dynamic report views with .NET 2.0, which led to the need to read up on dynamic image generation for charting purposes. .NET 2.0 provides the developer with the GDI+ package that allows us to create chart graphics at runtime. For this article I’ll cover a basic bar chart, and a pie chart, but the capabilities of the GDI+ package go far beyond this.

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Not sure if these videos are a testimonial to how much people love Firefox, or a reflection of how much spare time Firefox lovers have on their hands, but some of them are very funny. The winning videos are DareDevil, Wheee!, Fox Fever, This is Hot and Give me the the soap. My favorite is definitely Wheeee!, with Fox Fever a close second.

A simple workflow designer that allows you to drag names from a list of employees, to another list that is your process workflow. Using the Scriptaculous sortable list effect, this tool allows your average user to redesign workflows on the fly in a very intuitive way.

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As of today, Microsoft now has available express editions of Visual Studio .NET. You can download for free any of these lightweight versions of the .NET development tools:

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Scenario: Any Domino application that requires reports.
Typical Solution: Create a different view for each report.
Upside: Extremely easy
Downside: High maintenance, performance hit from excessive indexing, and can easily become a navigational nightmare.
A Better way?: Anything where one can build a view on the fly.

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Hat tip to Jerry Carter and Mark Barton for this excellent find; CodeIgniter MVC application framework for PHP. If you do any PHP development, or would like to see an excellent Model-View-Controller (MVC) tutorial, you owe it to yourself to give this tool a look-see.

First and foremost, CodeIgniter is a pretty kick-ass framework tool that makes PHP as easy as Ruby On Rails. But the best part is that the folks who wrote this open-source tool also created some incredibly useful Quicktime videos to show how it works. These videos not only show how powerful CodeIgniter is, but are an excellent tutorial for those who may not completely grasp the MVC architecture of application design.

edit: This comes at a good time for me as I am putting together a Scriptaculous Workflow Designer soon and I was not looking forward to creating the PHP, Domino, and .NET demos, but we will see if this makes the PHP demo a bit easier.

Well, after 5 months of almost all .NET development, and alot recently with a very complex content management application, I can say without the slightest hestitation, that Domino developers have it easy.

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So how does Open Office.org “Writer” compare against MS Office “Word”? I’ll start this with just some menu comparisons so you can see that the majority of options used in Word are also in Writer. There are definitely some differences in how certain tasks are executed, but I’ll show later how that is just 12 of one and a dozen of the other.

As for the menu comparison, you can see for yourself that the menus and options available are very close, and would make user migration easier.

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Most folks have at least heard of Open Office.org, which is an open source office suite designed to compete directly with Microsoft Office. Previous versions have been intriguing, but OO.o version 2 has now delivered some real competition which I think can compete with the likes of MS Office, and OpenOffice has a USB device portable version!! I hope to do about 3-4 posts about comparing OO.o with MS Office, and the integration possibilities with Notes.

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Those of you who are familiar with NTLM authentication, and who are lovers of FireFox, might be interested to know that you can get NTLM authentication to work in Firefox, with a single setting.

NTLM Authentication allows the login credentials of a Windows user, who is logged into a Windows domain, to be automatically passed to an IIS web server in the same domain. It can be a very handy little feature in a workplace that can easily become over-burdened with usernames and passwords.

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