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Wouldn’t it be great to sit down next to your client and sketch out ideas?  Now there’s an online, user-friendly tool called Balsamiq Mockups that allows you to do that remotely.

Balsamiq Mockups helps you and your team or clients iterate on wireframes as early in the process as possible, when it’s cheapest to do so.  Not surprisingly, it was developed by a former Macromedia/Adobe software engineer.  

Balsamiq Mockups hits the bulls-eye for firms like DesignMind.  We can use this inexpensive tool to rapidly create mock-ups of both desktop and web applications.  It’s got a lot of power, and is easy to learn.  One of the really great ideas in this tool is that the prototypes look hand-drawn.  This informal appearance makes stakeholders more comfortable about giving the developers early feedback, which is so incredibly valuable.

I learned about Balsamiq Mockups last week when Don Robins spoke to the San Francisco .NET User Group.  (Don, a principal at Outformations, gave a great overview of SQL Server Compact Edition.)   

Software Application Developers have long struggled with ways to help their clients visualize what an application will look like, early in the project.  These days developers communicate their user interface designs in many ways, all the way from whiteboard sketches, Visio diagrams, Excel, and at the high end, complex software visualization systems such as iRise.

If you aren’t doing prototyping, or if you’re using the paper, Visio, or Excel approach, you can elevate your development process easily with this product.  Thanks to Don for spending some of his presentation demonstrating the Balsamiq tool.

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In my recent post on how MySpace is using SQL Server, I mentioned that the original MySpace.com was built with ColdFusion.  Even though MySpace moved to Microsoft .NET, there’s a very active ColdFusion community, fostered by Adobe.

As luck would have it, I had a chance to spend some time this week with ColdFusion guru Raymond Camden.  He’s co-author of the ColdFusion MX Developer’s Handbook, Mastering ColdFusion MX, and the Adobe ColdFusion 8 Web Application Construction Kit.  Along the way Ray has contributed to roughly a dozen other ColdFusion-related books.  He also runs several technical websites, and blogs at ColdFusionJedi.

Ray was here in the San Francisco Bay Area working with Adobe as they prepare for Adobe MAX 2009.  Ray will be a featured speaker at the conference, which will be held from October 4-7 in Los Angeles.

Our time was spent preparing for, and delivering, a presentation on migrating from Oracle Forms to ColdFusion – something we hope to be doing for an upcoming project.  We are also teaming up with Peter Koletzke, co-author of Oracle Developer Advanced Forms & Reports and Oracle JDeveloper 10g for Forms & PL/SQL Developers.  I’m very excited to have Ray and Peter, leading experts in their respective fields, working with the DesignMind team.

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Earlier this month Microsoft released the first beta of a new free tool – the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit – that makes it easy to perform SEO analysis on your site and identify and fix issues within it.

Scott Guthrie’s excellent blog tells all about it.  Thanks to E.R. Gilmore at Travis Medical Software for pointing it out to me.   The new SEO Toolkit looks incredibly useful, and at DesignMind we’re starting to test it out on several client websites.  I’ll report back on its effectiveness.  I’ll also try to arrange a demo of this toolkit at an upcoming meeting of the San Francisco .NET User Group.

Scott Guthrie runs the development teams at Microsoft responsible for ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF, IIS, and various Visual Studio Tools.

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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger touts the MicroFueler

What a week!  Today I had the chance to go to Sacramento to attend the unveiling of the E-Fuel MicroFueler on the steps of the California Capitol Building.  Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Adams, Secretary of the California EPA, were on hand to make the introductions to a crowd of several hundred.  Entrepreneur and E-Fuel founder Thomas Quinn told us how he became interested in home ethanol production, and why he thinks the Organic Fuel Revolution will change the world.

In the morning I’m heading to E-Fuel’s manufacturing facility in Paso Robles, CA.  There’s a two day workshop for the folks forming E-Fuel’s dealer network.  Representatives from all over the world will be on hand to learn how to maintain the MicroFuelers they’ll be selling.

DesignMind has been working with the E-Fuel team to develop the E-Fuel Global Network.  This network allows the company, it’s dealers, and MicroFueler owners to monitor the health, performance, and real-time status, of every MicroFueler on the planet.  Each unit is equipped with internet connectivity (wired, Wi-Fi, cellular, and satellite), a GPS, and all the telemetry needed to monitor the vital signs as well as the amount and quality of ethanol each unit produces.

At the workshop, we’ll be demonstrating the E-Fuel Global Network for the dealers who will be selling and supporting the product.  This is the culmination of a lot of work by several very talented teams.  We’ll get feedback and more good ideas, and continue to make the network even better.

For the engineers in the crowd, the E-Fuel Global Network is built using Microsoft’s .NET 3.5 Framework, and SQL Server 2008.

Here’s a video of the event with Governor Schwarzenegger, as well as a full transcript of the remarks.

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Indian Motorcycle site - created with DNN

A few days ago I met with Nik Kalyani and Shuan Walker, co-founders of the DotNetNuke Corporation, to learn more about where the company and product line are heading. DNN (DotNetNuke) is the most popular open source application framework for the Microsoft .NET platform. The DotNetNuke Corporation was formed in 2006, dedicated the ongoing stewardship and management of the DotNetNuke project. 

The company received Series A funding last Fall.  With the influx of cash, they are hard at work creating a development and support organization.  They have pledged quarterly releases of the Community and Professional Edition.  And now there’s a DotNetNuke Professional Edition version.

DNN (DotNetNuke) is the most popular open source application framework for the Microsoft .NET platform.  They boast about 7 million downloads to date, and 400,000 websites running on DNN so far.  DNN has a big following, and plenty of third party support.   The architecture supports modules and skins, and there are thousands of each available at sites such as www.marketplace.dotnetnuke.com, www.snowcovered.com, and www.codeplex.com.  You can also create your own custom modules and skins.

Among the many terrific sites created with DNN are TV Guide,  Indian Motorcycle, and Chicago 2016.  (Did you know Chicago is bidding for the summer Olympics in 2016?)  I have to say these are among the most visually stunning sites I’ve seen.  Talk about eye candy!

DNN was created in 2002 as an open source project called the IBuySpy portal.  It was used by Microsoft to showcase the capabilities of the newly released ASP.NET 1.0 platform.  Shaun Walker released an enhanced version of the portal later that year.  It drew a large developer following, and in 2003, the open source project was renamed DotNetNuke.

In February of this year, the company released DNN Professional Edition.  This edition has more formalized testing and release standards, and is intended for corporations building mission critical enterprise software.  They provide support, additional documentation, certification, and indemnification.  The pricing for the Professional Edition is $1,995 per year, per production IIS server the system is running on.  You can run multiple portals and hundreds of sites on each IIS server, at no additional charge.

The Community Edition is still free.  We will see differentiation in product features over time, with the Professional Edition gaining more standard modules.  The framework will be the same in both editions, as compatibility is critical to the third party development community.

We had a chance to talk about some of the new features coming in DNN Professional 5.1, due for release by June 1, 2009.  Nik writes about it in the DNN Blog, which I highly recommend. While the details are not yet public, I can tell you that I am impressed by what was shared with me.  These are exciting days for the DNN open source community.

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