One of my favorite features in SharePoint is the ability to edit a web part page in a draft version, design the page layout and properties conveniently and finally publish all the changes. In ASP.NET web parts, this feature is not coming out of the box - when a content author commits any change to the page – the change propagates immediately and can be seen by all users. The drawback here is that designers/content authors are unable to complete a complete page design before making the changes visible. In this article I will show how to extend the Web Parts framework and create a Publishing Control that will add Draft & Publish functionality.

This is a sample application i've created for a presentation about ASP.NET personalization in a big Israeli financial institute. The application (click here to download) emphasizes how to build customized and personalized portal using ASP.NET web parts framework, inside you'll find example for a web parts page (IGoogle style) with different types of web parts including Asynchronous web parts (using ASP.NET AJAX 3.5), cached web parts, web parts skinning, web parts verbs and all the other neratives and building blocks of the web parts world.

Last week, I had the chance to present and introduce SOA (Service oriented architecture) in some Israeli company. The presentation is about SOA fundamentals: The Motif, Principles, building blocks, the architectural style, layers and a comparison with N-Tiers. The Power Point file (which is available for download) is informative and suitable to act as stand-alone SOA tutorial, click here to download.
 

Many time I've been asked in the DotNetNuke Hebrew forums -  "why isn't there  C# version for DotNetNuke?". This question is posted by C# developers who are disappointed to discover that DotNetNuke is written with VB.Net.  (DotNetNuke is an open-source,  .Net framework to create web applications and portals). This question popularity leads the DNN (DotNetNuke) crew to pin it the top of the forums application (8280 views for a single post). Developers who ask that question, usually being motivated   by one of the two:  (1) they want to change some DNN behavior, so they must write VB.Net code (2) they want to extend DNN functionality and believe they must do it with VB.net. Neither of these statements is true or relevant. In most cases you won't care about the language a framework was written with. Here's why:

Many developers' knowledge about passing object as parameters can be summed up with the following "In c# object parameters are always being passed by reference, if i will pass some object to another code, the same object will be in context". While this knowledge is sufficient for most of the cases, it might cause bugs in a few. Lets take a look at some code snippet:

//some mediator code, WIN forms code behind
tennisCourt availableCourt = getAvailableCourt();
someGUIControl.showTennisCourt(availableCourt)

//now some event raised, other court is available
tennisCourt availableCourt = getAlternateCourt();
updateGUI()

Will the GUI present the new available court? NO. Why is that? After all we have passed the availableCourt variable "by reference" so why will the GUI component not have the updated tennisCourt?