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Closed 10 years ago.
I am getting a large website developed. The develop has asked me which do I prefer either sitefinity or umbraco. The site will be similar to wikipedia where users can come and edit pages without having to login. I would like to ask your opionions on these two csm systems and which one would you recommend for content website with a community feel and wiki features. Thanks
I disagree with #IrishChieftain's answer and would most certainly go with Umbraco!
I've built a number of websites in Umbraco (and have got my certification) and I have to say I absolutely love it!
XSLT is very easy to learn unless you come across some really complex functionality. But even then, you can resort to ASP.NET if you don't want to learn XSLT.
If it's a non-commercial (charity?) site, you may be able to obtain the community version of Sitefinity for free if you display their logo in the footer. Sitefinity has a lot to offer, including an ORM.
Umbraco on the other hand has, for me personally, an unhealthy reliance on XSLT to customize the content. That was the main reason I didn't go with it.
I would go for Sitefinity or N2 for this.
Contrary to what others have suggested, I find the use of XSLT in Umbraco advantageous on numerous levels. In particular the time it takes to make changes and see their results is very quick. Just create transform and put a macro in your page and you can see the results. You get access to all the site data as necessary directly in the transform. Also, the fact that you are just working in HTML within the XSL transform means that it would be easy for a non .NET web developer to make changes too. I've found that although this is a .NET based CMS there is little reason to perform anything in code so you only really have to have open the CMS and your favourite text editor (I'd suggest using a text editor and accessing static files this way (through FTP or whatever if you're not logged in to the machine the CMS is on) rather than through the CMS interface.
If you're looking for a CMS for a large website and with wiki features, look at Kentico CMS. It was designed for large number of documents and it's the most advanced .NET CMS I have seen.
It has a built-in user-contribution module that allows public users to create new content items from the live site and you can control who can do that (all/authenticated/selected roles) and what type of content items (news/pages/knowledge base articles) they can create. Kentico has a free version, but for this type of functionality, you would need a paid license. Still, if it meets your needs for user contributed content, it may pay for itself very quickly since AFAIK no other .NET CMS has this built-in.
Umbraco was possibly the worst CMS a few years back when it was in version 2. Things have changed though and, for me, it jumped to the top of the list when it hit version 4. I find Umbraco to be the easiest CMS to manage and develop in. The XSLT is probably the hardest thing to get used to here, but like others mentioned it isn't a show stopper because you can still do everything using Umbraco data access layer. The one thing i absolutely love about it is how easy it is for the end user. The UI is very intuitive and easy to grasp. The only downside i see with Umbraco is bugs and there are a whole lot of them even in version 4 releases. Most of them are UI bugs. However, some do affect advanced features such as packages. I would still go with Umbraco if i had to pick a choose a CMS for a project of any size.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I have to develop an ASP.NET MVC3 application in C# and Razor that has to gather data from a database, elaborate them and, according to the user's preference, display a graph based on user's preferences.
For instance the user might want daily figures or monthly, he wants it in a histogram rather than a cake graph.
I was wondering how can draw a graph in ASP.NET and even decide which kind of graph, etc. I guess they haven't created helpers for these tasks yet.
You have a couple of options:
1. Create your own charting control
Start from scratch or build upon MVC 3's ChartHelper web helper to build your own charts.
2. Use an 'off the shelf' component
Telerik make a great set of controls for ASP.NET MVC, including a chart. Take a look at their demonstrations to see if it fits your needs.
Well, here are a few suggestions for you -
Open flash charts, Google charts, or you can refer to the following question. There are a few suggestions too.
I personally would go for a solution using http://www.jqplot.com/, a jquery plugin that allows you to create all kinds of graph (really, they have lots of them) basing on raw data. Your backend then has to just produce the data, and the drawing is done by the javascript. for examples see http://www.jqplot.com/tests/pie-donut-charts.php
I would take a look at a third party tool to get this done for you. I have used Telerik's MVC extensions in the past and had good luck with them. Depending on your licensing requirements, there is a free or pay version.
There are ChartHelpers in MVC3
Check this:
http://weblogs.asp.net/jalpeshpvadgama/archive/2011/08/30/chart-helpers-in-asp-net-mvc3.aspx
There are many ways to skin this cat, but one good option is using the Telerik MVC Chart extension.
You could try one of the following C# libraries written to make it simpler to integrate Highcharts into ASP .Net
Highcharts.Net (sample project)
DotNet.Highcharts
I've used HighCharts before. This is a javascript charting library, but its easy to configure.
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Closed 10 years ago.
Basically I have to choose a project methodology.
The components are not big (we develop components mainly for SAP connecting), however the team is rather big , dislocated and and very unorganized.
Besides how big is the team
which other questions should be taken into consideration?
Thank you
I've made very good experiences with answering these questions first:
How does the team prioritize work?
(I would recommend putting todos into a sequence building a backlog)
How does the team track what needs to be done?
(I would recommend breaking things down step-by-step into User Stories and track them using a tool like PivotalTracker)
How can you make sure the team is self-organizing?
(Let the team pull work from the backlog, run daily status meetings and a retrospective every couple of weeks)
How can you optimize how fast features get delivered in optimal quality? (This way of thinking should replace the idea of maximizing capacity utilization)
How can you make the work visible? (Visibility builds trust and momentum - you can start collecting metrics and putting up a screen showing all kinds of graphs)
One very useful question to assist in choosing any sort of method is "What projects can this not help me with?" It can be very difficult to obtain an answer; the usual way that supporters of a particular method respond is "of course method X can help you with any project." Thus they are saying either that all projects are the same, which is obviously not the case; or that they don't know what are the limitations of their method, and so will not be able to recognise when their method is not appropriate.
You say your teams are fairly unorganised. One of the best ways of introducing any new method is to provide tools - even very basic tools - that make it easier to follow the standards than not. An example of this was trying to improve the quality of development reports in a very large organisation - we provided a number of word processing templates, that made it easier to write a report using the templates (and hence the standards) than to write the report from scratch.
Personal note on my choice of language: I have worked with software development methods for many years, and to me "methodology" is the study and comparison of different methods. A particular way of, for example, managing a project, is a method, not a methodology.
I guess this really depends on a number of factors, for instance some contracts require you to use PRINCE project management which is rather complex.
If you dont have any external factors regarding the methodology you choose I would just do a bit of research and see which you think fits your team best.
I havent had chance to use Agile yet although I took a course on it and I liked what I heard, it seemed fairly straightforward which is a bonus.
One thing to remember though is you dont have to stick to one methodology if you find something isnt working for you then make changes.
Questions I would consider though would be the length of the project, Size of the team, Are the team each working on individual parts of the project or are there multiple people working on the same area, Time it will take to implement a methodology, Any costs involved?, Any training involved?
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Closed 9 years ago.
I came across stateless, a hierarchical state machine framework based on Simple State Machine for Boo, but configured using C# 3.0
It is easy to configure and use, I will probably use it soon.
But I was just wondering if
Anyone used stateless for real projects (If so what is your opinion?)
Are there any other good workflow engines for .NET? (other than WF)
I've been using Stateless and WF for an app that is intended to go into production someday. :) I have detailed my experiences so far on my post here.
Overall, I prefer Stateless because it's simpler for more things that WF. Sure, it's nice to be able to design your workflow graphically, but when you need to implement something more difficult than a sequential workflow (like the state machine workflow), you'll need to work with ExternalDataExchange just to make the right state transitions. It's probably not hard, but considering that and the fact that you need to implement a persistence service to pause a workflow just seemed unappealing to me. I don't have a need to persist a workflow to disk for later execution anyway... so I will be using regular events to deal with this in Stateless. Error handling is easily doable in Stateless (I've been successful with it), but the implementation I've taken is questionable, and is the topic of another discussion (which I'm searching for now on SO!). I might be posting a question regarding this very soon.
Good luck with Stateless. I hope to hear how you've been progressing with it.
For Workflow Foundation, only use it for green project so you can use WF4. Check this out
http://realworldsa.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/goodbyewindowsworkflowfoundationseeyouin2011.htm
WF 1.0 and 1.5 are not compatible with WF4. So it's not a forward solution.
I personally use http://simplestatemachine.codeplex.com as an alternative to WF. I have used it in one full production system (asp.net based) to handle a pretty complex business license issuance system (handling 350+ different government business licenses).
I haven't tried stateless yet but it looks promising.
Late to the party. We've used Stateless in production now for over a year and a half, no issues. It is a very elegant solution for processing workflows and you quickly integrate the states with your data model. We represent our states with and int in SQL, so you can run the state machine in ASP.Net in process. This is true for long running workflows as well.
If your requirements are basic, a very simple StateMachine I wrote may be of interest.
Please be warned that it does not (at the time of writing) support hierarchical states.
You can find it on NuGet:
nuget install nstate
or check it out on GitHub:
https://github.com/benaston/NState
I hope someone finds it useful.
If you haven't looked at the Windows Workflow Foundation it's probably at least worth doing a bit of reading about it.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I need a tool that handle both on-screen and printed reports, via my C# application.
I'm looking for simple, standard and powerful.
I need to be able to give the user the ability to select which columns to display, formatting, etc... with my own GUI and dynamically build the report based upon their choices. Crystal does not fit the bill here because the columns cannot be added on the fly (and the column widths can not be adjusted on the fly).
I'm thinking of using HTML with the WebBrowser control in my app, but I will have very little control over printing and print preview.
Another option is go to .NET 3.5 (I'm using 2.0) and use XAML with Flow Documents.
What would you use?
We use SQL reporting services. HTML reports have their place but you dont get very much controlling over formatting.
SQL reporting services summary:
Advantages:
Basic version is free
Included with SQL express
Many exporting options pdf, html, csv etc
Can use many different datasources
Webservice which exposes various methods
SQL standard editon includes a report builder component to allow users create and share their own reports
Lots of features for querying formatting etc
Scheduling options
Extensibility import .net framework dlls for custom functionality
Familiar microsoft environment
Disadvantages:
An extra thing to setup
Seemless authentication between application and report server can be a pain depending on your setup
A little bit of a learning curve although its not too hard to pick up
Report model creator needs some work and doesnt automatically a-z fields
I have heard good things about DevXpress so may be worth looking into.
I used Crystal about 5 years ago and remember it being a pain to setup and was costly licence wise.
Check out the Report Viewer stuff in studio 2008 / .NET 3.5
This amazing site has the full scoop:
GotReportViewer
It's a nice build in reporting system that will show a report and print. It's not full blown like Crystal or SQL Reporting Services. If all you need is some lightweight reporting you can't beat the price.
Crystal = Big footprint, huge deployment, fast, good designer and support
MS ReportViewer = small footprint, slow, bad designer, support.. well, not so damn easy to search after reportviewer, a name all uses.. sigh.
We use ActiveReports.net here. They're OK and tend to get the job done pretty well, but I'm not sure if they would fit your definition of "Dynamic". But you can pretty much make them do anything though code.
I'm currently considering DevXpress XtraReports as a replacement for CR. So far I like what I see.
SQL Reporting Services probably aren't flexible enough for what you want as you don't really get a deep level of code manipulation.
Active reports let you get into the binding events and pretty much do whatever you want, however there are a couple of small bugs with active reports (like not being able to bind to a defaultview of a datatable) which make it a pain. Apart from that, it's highly flexible.
XtraReports are awesome but they're a lot pricier than Active Reports. Having said that, their support is fantastic and the reporting package is rock solid. I'd look at forking out the cash for them if possible.
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Closed 11 years ago.
I'm looking to create a dashboard type gui for a web application. I'm looking for the user to be able to drag and drop different elements (probably either image buttons, anchor tags, or maybe just divs) to different (defined) places and be able to save their setup (in a cookie or on the server). I'm working with c# in the .Net 2.0 framework. I've tried using mootools but their recent update has left their drag/drop capabilities un-useful for me. I'm looking for a bit of direction because I know there is something out there that is just what I'm looking for so I wont have to build from scratch.
Thanks.
I have been looking at this kind of functionality myself recently and have decided on using jQuery with the help of jQuery UI. I came across a large amount of information that also suggested Yahoo UI (YUI), I had already started learning jQuery due to the AJAX support that it offers, so I stuck with it.
jQuery UI Site
jQuery UI Documentation
Example of a drag and drop screen layout with jQuery UI
Introduction to jQuery UI
If you decide to use the YUI javascript library, here is a link to a vast amount of videos to help get you started.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/theater/
If you still want to give MooTools a second chance, I'd recommend taking a look at Mocha UI.
I prefer using jQuery for AJAXy stuff like that. It also has a lot of very good plugins that make writing client-side code very easy.
Here is the plugin page specifically for Drag-n-Drop.
http://plugins.jquery.com/project/Plugins/category/45
Ajax callback are also very easy so saving the setup should be fairly easy as well.
I used the Microsoft ASP.Net Ajax and AjaxControlToolkit to do something like this. They have a ResizeableControl and a DragPanel. I used these, then hosted an IFrame inside the panel to display the content.
Worked pretty well.
This site:
http://www.asp.net/learn/videos/default.aspx?tabid=63#ajax
Has lots of tutorial videos that show you how to get started using the controls.
You might want to look at DropThings on Codeplex.