Community Server on my mind

A GUI for installing CS Modules

I don't know how I managed to miss this Add-in for Community Server. Wyatt Preul created an Community Server Add-in with a management page for installing CS Modules, and released it back in June this year as far as I can see.

Basically it's a page that integrates with your System Administration pages in CS, letting you upload a DLL, and the pages lists all the CS Modules contained within it, and lets you install them on your site. It writes the necessary entries to the communityserver.config. It seems you don't even have to touch the web.config to get the newly installed CS Modules to work, since it also refreshes the CSModules cache if I understand it correctly.

Seems like an excellent tool to me. And would be even better if Wyatt continues to enhance it according to his ideas. I would like to see features for uninstalling CS Modules, handling parameters (if that's possible) for each installed CS Module, duplicate check.

I haven't had the time to test it our yet, but I will. I saw some others saying they've tested it out. The problem they seemed to have was that they tried to install it on an ASP .NET 1.1 site. I believe Wyatt's Add-in is compiled for ASP .NET 2.0, which would be good to know.

(When I Spell checked the text above, the spell checker wanted to replace CSModules with Canoodles (i.e the Canoodles cache). I accidentally pressed change, but managed to notice this before I published this post)

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Another topic for today. I have at last a couple of ideas for my continuing screencast series, and hope to get started doing them pretty soon. The first ones will be targeted for people that are somewhat new to the product, but could also potentially be interesting for people that have some experience with CS too. There's always small parts here and there that's easy to miss in the product.

As you might have seen, I recently installed Vista on my production machine. One of the side effects of that seems to be that my microphone connection on my laptop doesn't work. And I want to have sound on my new screencasts. But I am sure I will be able to fix that somehow pretty soon.

Besides me having sound and talking in those new screencasts, there will be another small surprise for you, which I will not reveal now. In time you'll see!