As of today I'm renaming any of my CTP releases to simply... "releases". That is, my Minima February 2007 CTP is now "Minima - February 2007 Release" and my Data Feed Framework February 2007 CTP is now "Data Feed Framework - February 2007 Release".

The motivation behind these is different for each. With regard to Minima, I knew it wouldn't be a long term or real production project, so announcing it as a CTP was a mistake on my part. Not a big deal. Lesson learned. Furthermore, I knew from the start that it would be more of a training tool than anything else. With regard to my Data Feed Framework (DFF), after using it in various areas I realized that my initial release was sufficient for most scenarios.

As a reminder... what is Minima? Minima is an ASP.NET 2.0 blog engine built using a SQL Server 2005 database and an LLBLGen Pro 2.0 DAL that provides the base functionality that most technical bloggers would need. Since it's initial release I've added some functionality to my own instance of Minima and have used the February 2007 release as a training tool numerous times. Moving forward I want to make it very clear that Minima is primarily a training tool and a such, it's a blog template that people learning ASP.NET can enhance and upgrade to aide in their own personal learning. Having said that, Minima is a full fledged blog engine and it does have features such as labels and the ability to have more than one URL point to the same entry. In any case, if you want something to help you learn the various components of ASP.NET, please feel free to take Minima and use it as you please (see attribution/licensing note below).

By using Minima as a training tool you can learn much about base ASP.NET technology as well as manual Ajax prinicples, CSS theming, HttpWebRequest, proper use of global.asax, framework guidelines, and type organization. Furthermore you can use it to learn WCF, the power of HTTPHandlers, and how to effectively utilize LLBLGen Pro. I will try to release versions of Minima to demonstrate the new technologies of the day. For example, when ASP.NET Ajax matures a bit (I find it slower than a dead turtle right now), I'll be adding portions to demonstrate ASP.NET Ajax. However, I will not be adding new functionality for the sake of functionality. If the functionality can be used as a training tool, then I will add it. Also, Minima is a great way of learning WPF. How so? I deliberately did NOT include a client! Why? Because I would rather you use whatever you want to use to create a simple form to access the API via WCF. The client I use a very basic WPF client that calls the Minima WCF service. So far, Minima has been a very effective learning tool and I hope you will find it useful as well.

As far as my Data Feed Framework (DFF). What is it? It's a self-contained framework that converts SQL statements into RSS feeds. I've used this in a number of places where creating a manual RSS feed and MANAGING the RSS feeds would just be too time consuming. For example, say you have a ASP.NET 2.0 e-commerce website and you have new products released at various intervals. Well, it would be AWESOME if you had an RSS feed to announce new products and sales without having to send out an ethically questionable e-mail blast. With DFF, you simply write something like "select Title=ProductName, Description=ProductDescription from Product where ProductDate > '7/11/07' order by ProductDate desc" and BAM you have an RSS feed. Since an RSS feed is simply a select statement in a column in a row in a SQL Server table, you could also use it to dynamically create a custom feed for each person who wants to monitor the price of a certain product. It's very flexible. RSS feeds are accessible via their name, their ID, or you can use a "secret feed" to force a feed to be accessible via GUID only. DFF also includes some templating abilities to help customize the output of the RSS feed. In addition to the DFF SQL to RSS engine, DFF also includes an ASP.NET 2.0 control called an InfoBlock that allows you to consume any RSS feed and display it as an XHTML list. You can see an example of how to use an InfoBlock my looking at my blog. The boxes on the right are InfoBlocks which allow me to manage my lists using a SQL Server table (the DFF database contains a Snippet and a SnippetGroup table to store autonomous information like the information in these lists--please see the documentation for more information). DFF is creating secret RSS feeds that my own personal version of Minima then consumes. With this as an example, it should be easy to see how DFF can be used in portals. My DFF demonstration video shows a bit more of that.

For more information regarding my Data Feed Framework (DFF), please skim the concise documentation for Data Feed Framework linked below. It would also probably be a good idea for you to watch my short video documentation for DFF as well. Please note that even though DFF is designed to be a production framework, it too can be used as a training tool. The most obvious thing you can learn is how to create data-bound server controls for ASP.NET 2.0 as this is exactly what an InfoBlock is.

You may use either the SQL->RSS engine or the InfoBlock portion or both. It's up to you. Also, as with all my .NET technologies that I create, the source and database files are included for extensibility and so you may use these as training tools (for yourself or for others). Lastly, for both Minima and Data Feed Framework, please remember to keep the license information intact and make it very clear that your work either uses or is based on either whichever product you are using.

Minima - Links

Data Feed Framework - Links

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