It's been a long time since I've been able to work on the core of Umbraco version 4 as it's been extremely busy here. I've been meaning to post this document up for some time but just never got around it. Some umbracians were asking about trees in version 4:

http://forum.umbraco.org/yaf_postst5259_Fun-with-Trees--New-patch-released.aspx

I've attached the file that describes the version 4 tree api. This was an initial document created for the Umbraco core team. It is probably close to 100% accurate but i know there's been some minor changes to the tree api since i wrote this.

Hope this helps some of you!

Umbraco_Trees_v1.doc (246.00 kb)

Another great Friday at the Exhibition hotel but something slightly abnormal was on the horizon... Once it was spotted, there was nothing more to do than run up to the  bar to stand next to it, simply to judge the magnitude of what we were dealing with. I may be a pretty short guy to begin with but as the evidence shows, standing next to such a giant makes me appear to be approximately 5 years old. Who the heck is that child at the bar buying beers!!? In the end, nobody was hurt, beers were had and pictures were taken. Good times! 

We recently decided we'd try something new and look at a fresh new way to manage the Data Context object in LINQ.

I've posted an entire article on it at Code Project: http://www.codeproject.com/KB/linq/LinqAndUnity.aspx

Basically this is using Dependency Injection to manage the LINQ Data Context object between business logic classes. I think its a pretty cool idea but all feedback is much appreciated as there could be way cooler ways to use these two technologies together! 

Canada Day is fast approaching so i decided to take the time and show some Canadian pride. Firstly the Hockey Night in Canada theme song debacle was a shame but at least we didn't lose it all together but it does suck that it won't be played every saturday night for the actual Hockey Night in Canada. Secondly I've made a top 10 list of the greatest Molson Canadian ads and lastly have attached one hell of a hockey fight for your enjoyment. OH CANADA! 

The most important song in history:

Molson Canadian Top 10 Ads: 

Greatest hockey fight!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1-25s4uwFQ&feature=related 

HAPPY CANADA DAY EVERYONE! 

I've posted another Umbraco patch here:

http://www.codeplex.com/umbraco/SourceControl/PatchList.aspx

The forum post is here:

http://forum.umbraco.org/yaf_postsm25747_Fun-with-Trees--New-patch-released.aspx 

A breif overview of what new features this adds:

• Allow users to “Browse” nodes without being able to view/edit them so they can edit child nodes of that node. This is set by permissions. Browse will now be the minimum permission that must be set for a node to show up in the content tree.
• Allow developers to put any ITree in any application including their own application. This is done by modifying the umbracoAppTree and umbracoApp table data. Previous to this patch, you could not add trees to the content, media or user applications.
  
• If an application contains only one ITree the system will not encapsulate it with a parent tree.
• Allow any user to have the “Send To Publish” capability
• Allow developers to extend any of the Tree’s which will allow them to modify it’s context menu, amongst other things
• Allow developers to easily create Trees using BaseTree (see example files)
• Increased performance with less overhead when loading ITrees, IActions, IActionHanders, etc… when using reflection.
  
• Increased performance when referencing the built in IActions as they are now all Singletons.
• Removed a lot of hard coded values (the other Trees apart from loadContent still need some updating)
• Ability to put the Recycle Bin for the content node anywhere you want.
  
• Fixed up some of the missing language terms for the English language file

This morning I did a quick presentation about "Live Coding", and more so about Live Coding in regards to music. Its a very cool concept whereas the coder creates music in real time. For example, you could create a small loop that simply plays a kick drum every 600 milliseconds and compile it. While it's compiled and playing you could modify that same loop to play a hi-hat every 300 milliseconds, then compile that on-the-fly which would replace the currently running process on the correct timeframe. (This is a VERY basic example).

So far as I've seen there's not many people trying this and from those that i have seen, there's not many people that are good at it either. Theres a few platforms that are out there to get started:

• ChucK
• SuperCollider
• Impromptu
• Fluxus
• Quoth

I haven't tried them all (only ChucK and SuperCollider) but ChucK is heaps of fun to play around with. Quite a huge learning curve but i think i'll stick with it and see if i can come up with something worthwhile.

Here's some links and examples:

• http://cobb.stanford.edu/courses/cs547/071116/071116-cs547-300.wmv
• http://livecode.access-space.org/
• http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2295676135942462117
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2O5DJTOy6EA
• ttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTt8r3LhCFM

Both Anthony and Myseft went to Remix yesterday. There was quite a few very interesting things the guys from Microsoft had to show off. The main focus of the event was on Silverlight. I was quite impressed with the functionality of Silverlight and how all of the files relate to each other. Definitely will make the workflow between developers and designers easier. On the other hand however, I think we might see a whole bunch of really ugly sites being thrown up on the web when more people start adopting Silverlight. It's a great system to build applications in but i think in the hands of a bunch of developers who think they can design but actually can't, this could become an ugly beast.

The other really cool part of Remix was that all of the presentations were done with a new technology called Deep Zoom. I thought it was great for presentations!

Suppose i'll have to buckle down and start building some apps in Silverlight!

I created a patch for Umbraco that allows for browse-only viewing of content tree nodes so that admins can give other user's access to edit child nodes.  A few other features were added to this patch as well which includes the ability for any user (not just a reader) to have "publish to" permissions and the ability to customise the content tree context menu.

This is the initial bug posted

Here's the entry in the forum about this patch

You can download the patch here

There's more stuff to come!

This is gold... but is it Nick?

More from Idiots of Ants here

It was an all out battle between 2 appointed teams from The Farm. The race was an orienteering treasure hunt around Sydney harbour. The winning team won by a substantial margin, despite being the target of the other teams water bottle canons. Naturally the winning team was blamed for cheating and though this is not true, they didn't actually sail their boat the entire race. The winning team simply realized that by knowing the answers to the orienteering questions, they didn't actually have to race the boat around the harbour!

The losing captain was to wear the captains hat in the office for the next week. Chris did not live up to the challenge!

The Winning Team: CAPTAIN Vanessa Liberiou, FIRST MATE Wade Kuhn, John Guest, Tom Byrne, Shannon Deminick, Nick Fernley, Daniel Holmes, Dillon Liu, Peter Burns

The Runners Up: CAPTAIN Chris Rann, Mark Kemper, Angela Thomas, Hugo Vann, Anthony Dang, Chris Pile, Ken Macleod, Chris Martin, James Heath