Dave Burke : Freelance .NET Web Developer specializing in Online Communities

My wife and daughter are out of town for a week visiting her folks, leaving me "alone with my work."  And I've been banging out a lot of code.  Today's 10 hours were spent working toward the goal of converting dynamically generated ASPX Job Slips in my Community Server-based Jobs Managemen... [More]

Ben Tiedt's Chameleon is one of my favorite aspects of developing in Community Server.  With it's hierarchical contextual awareness and library of smart ASPNET controls, sophisticated UI's can be created in very little time.  Of course, using CodeSmith templates to bang out the underlying ... [More]

I sling a lot of data in and out of my Jobs Management Application and this afternoon's slinging consisted of Job Estimate data from Microsoft Access.  The process occurs through a Community Server background task and consists of three steps.  1) Request the List<Business Object>, 2)... [More]

Another Jobs Management Application lesson for us tonight to demonstrate new and exciting ways to use the Community Server HelpToolTip Popup Control.  In this session we will be using the HelpToolTip Popup Control to provide information to users when input errors occur. Below is a Jobs Manageme... [More]

In my Jobs Management app built on Community Server I needed to display job documents.  Another in-house Document Management application already had a page that displayed documents based on jobs, so instead of designing original Chameleon controls as usual, why not iframe in an existing documen... [More]

I needed to create an Email Alert function the other day to send emails to a designated Community Server Role when a certain background task encountered an error.  Posting an event to the CS Event log wasn't good enough for us this time.  In the process of assemblying the custom email func... [More]

Custom Community Server applications typically extend the out-of-box applications like forums, blogs or the (new in CS2008) media gallery. To reduce development time and original coding, we can treat certain properties of the application's core objects as ready-made multipurpose containers. My Jobs ... [More]

Community Server background tasks are great and I've created a lot of them.  There's one thing about background tasks that can cause problems, however.  When the website process stops so do all of its background tasks. I was designing a task today on my Community Server-based Jobs Manageme... [More]

I always jump at the chance to work with Community Server Chameleon Group controls, as they are powerful, flexible and fun!  An example of a Chameleon Group control out of the box is the display of blogs by blog group as shown here at communityserver.org. Chameleon Group controls provide c... [More]

Developers new to Community Server may rightly view it as a rather odd duck, with the Chameleon control model falling into that realm of feathered obfuscation.  Yet a rather seemingly insignificant control I wrote recently might help explain Chameleon, which when boiled down to the thick duck g... [More]