A few weeks ago I did a presentation at Spring Tech 2016, an IT Pro, Developer & Security Conference hosted by the .Net BC & VanTUG user groups in Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada. My presentation was titled "Getting Started With ASP.NET Core 1.0" and it kicked off an entire day of content focused on the next generation web development platform from Microsoft. I only had one hour for my session and that provided barely enough time to scratch the surface of this powerful new technology. The good news however is that if you want to dive deeper, you can go ahead and download the current ASP.NET Core 1.0 distribution for yourself. 

Last week I attended the //build conference in San Francisco. On one of the evenings, Microsoft extended an invitation to user groups around the Bay Area to come to their new open space for developers at 680 Folsom Street known as the Reactor. The party was focused on open source and community engagement and I was privileged to kick off the Lightning Talks with a short presentation about the .NET Foundation. The goal of my presentation was to promote the Foundation and try to clear up any misconceptions which may exist about its purpose or mission. I also used the opportunity to share a story about how a presentation that I did for a Bay Area user group ultimately led to the initial round of funding for DotNetNuke.  To set the stage it was important to note that there would be no need for a .NET Foundation if Microsoft had not created the .NET Framework. Since its release in 2001, the .NET Framework has had tremendous adoption - with current estimates of more than 1.8 billi ...

In January 2004, an interesting dilemma presented itself. I received an email from an external party, a web application security specialist who claimed to have discovered a vulnerability in the DotNetNuke application (version 1.0). Upon further research, I confirmed that the security hole was indeed valid and immediately called an emergency meeting of the more trusted Core Team members to determine the most appropriate course of action. At this point, we were fully focused on the development of DotNetNuke 2.0 but also realized that it was our responsibility to serve and protect the growing DotNetNuke 1.0 user community

In August 2003, I came to an agreement with Microsoft regarding a sponsorship proposal for the DotNetNuke project. In a nutshell, Microsoft wanted DotNetNuke to be enhanced in a number of key areas with the intent being to use the open source project as a means of demonstrating the strengths of the ASP.NET platform. Because these enhancements were completely congruent with the future goals of the project, there was little negative consequence from a technical perspective. In return for implementing the enhancements, Microsoft would provide a number of sponsorship benefits to the project including web hosting for the www.dotnetnuke.com website, weekly meetings with an ASP.NET Team representative (Rob Howard), continued promotion via the www.asp.net website, and more direct access to Microsoft resources for mentoring and guidance. It took five months for this sponsorship proposal to come together, which demonstrates the patience and perseverance required to collaborate with such an influential partner as Microsoft. Nonetheless, this was potentially a one-time offer, and at such a critical stage in the project evolution it seemed too important to ignore.