As many of you may know already, we had a Hackathon in Seattle last week focused on Microsoft Razor (check the link for full details) which was held in Seattle. After one week of time (and lots of effort from the participants) we now have all entries posted and voting is underway until December 17th at 12:00 AM EST. Like all Hackathons, all submissions are available in our Forge for download. After spending time reviewing all the entries and working on my own (more on that in a minute), I think we had some pretty cool entries submitted. So, because there is only a brief period of time for voting, I encourage you to vote now (FYI: You also get community recognition points if you vote!).
As for my entry, I didn’t find this as visually appealing as many of the others (way to talk everyone out of voting for me!). I did, however, find it a useful exercise to see a great way to utilize the DotNetNuke Razor Host module. For my entry I worked on displaying core Forum information on a user’s core profile page. Having attended the live event, I was able to get a solid understand from Andrew and Charles Nurse (who both presented at the event) on how to utilize Razor in DotNetNuke. If you didn’t attend the event, however, you can watch a video of Charles’ presentation here. Loaded with that knowledge and being rather familiar with the DotNetNuke API (and core forum module), I was able to create my entry in roughly 2-3 hours. For those who may not be familiar with DotNetNuke module development, I think that is pretty quick. This quickness (and the fact that you don’t always need a full blown module) is one of the reasons Razor can really have an impact on our community and seems like a no brainer for some simple module needs. Below, I have included a screenshot of my entry which can also be viewed here.
Besides the Hackathon event last week in Seattle, I also spent the remainder of the week with Scott Willhite discussing all things community for DotNetNuke (before we traveled to San Francisco on Friday). One thing we really got to focus on during our time together was our integration with CodePlex via the Extension Forge. During the week we had a meeting with Jonathan Wanagel and a couple others from the CodePlex team where we discussed multiple things that can really help our Extension Forge grow in 2011, so look out for changes in that area early 2011. While we discussed many other things, like additions to the community recognition system, I think this will have the biggest impact next year so I am excited to see that coming soon.
One final note before I finish up this blog, I have been working on a couple different small modules in my spare time so stay tuned for a couple end of the year releases. If you follow me on Twitter, you may have already seen a preview (and my traveling rants!) but if not I will post a blog with each release.