As you may know from my previous post, I am actively working on an ASP.Net MVC web site for the Ronald McDonald House of Iowa. I just wrote a helper function that turned out to be very useful for me.

ASP.Net MVC has some great helper functions for building forms, input elements, and links. Here is an example of the helper function that creates a hyperlink to the Index action on the Guest controller.

KeePass, what is it? KeePass is allows you to store all your passwords in an easy to find and use an encryption database. What I like about this software, besides that it's free to download (http://keepass.info/index.html ), is that you can set it up to auto fill in your user name and password, store your site URLS, make notes about the site, and you can even store the database to a URL.

Well it was bound to happen, my web site was hacked. There was good news and bad news about this happening. The good news is that it was an easy fix, the bad news it was by a rank amature. I guess I should really call that the good news since it was a very simple fix.The hacker's name is Nobody Coder and what he does is he hacks into the admin portion of the server. Once there he installs a malware that changes the PHP files and adds some HTML coding to point your site to his site.

Just recently I found out about a neat little piece of software from Microsoft called Live Mesh, (www.mesh.com ). The best way to describe Live Mesh would be to compare it with free online server. With Mesh you can link up your desktop, laptop, and Blackberry all from one location. Of course you have to download and install the software on each device but, since it's free what do you have to lose. Right now it's still in the beta version so some things may not be in effect just yet but they're working on it.

Well it's over and it was a great success. What am I talking about, Jacksonville's Code Camp 2009. This past Saturday I had the chance to volunteer at Code Camp. If you missed out well let's just say you missed one of the greatest events of the year. First of all I would like to thank UNF for playing host to this year's Jax Code Camp. They were gracious to let us have use of their facilities and equipment. Next I want to thank all those who came out to volunteer at the event, without you this event would not have been possible.

I'm working on my first real client access project and I see the real value in Scrum. One of the first things to do in any software project is to do mock ups. Making a mockup of what each screen is to look like is great for brain storming and visualization. There are many was to make the mockups but there is no substitution for good old fashioned pencil and paper.

So you want to learn Drupal and Joomla on your local machine but, WAMP only recognizes one localhost at a time. How do you set it up for two, easy.

First, you have to make sure you have both Drupal and Joomla down loaded. Your next course of action is to create two folders in the WAMP directory, name one www-d (for Drupal) and the other www-J. After making these directories copy all of the Drupal files into the folder you made for Drupal and to the same for Joomla. Since you have these two files there is no need for the www folder so delete it.

Now that we have installed and set up our SQL server it's time to install Drupal. Start your WampServer, click on the the icon in your task bar, then choose Localhost. This is where the Drupal Install happens.

It's here that all you will need to do is answer a few questions and you'll be on your way. Just rember that you're setting this up on a localhost. So when it ask you about your database you will need to tell it that it's local and don't forget your user name and password for the database. Other than that you should be fine.

Now that we have all the necessary downloads, now it's time to start the install. The first thing you want to do is unzip the Drupal program, remember when doing this it's best to unzip it to a file that is related to the program. The next thing on our list is to unzip copy over some files into the WAMP folder. The folder you will want to paste the files is in the www folder. Now it's time to run WAMP.