MSDN Magazine - July 2008 - (Page 11)

Scott MitcHEll Toolbox Easy Wiki Hosting, Scott Hanselman’s Blog, And Snagging Screens Hosting a Wiki A wiki is a Web application whose content is collaboratively added, updated, and organized by its users. As is the case with blogs and other content management systems, a wiki’s content is editable through a Web page interface. What separates wikis from blogs and traditional content management systems is that wikis are inherently amorphous. The site’s users create the content, define the relationships, and establish the links between the site’s Web pages. Perhaps the most well-known wiki is Wikipedia.org. Wikis are especially useful for creating knowledge management portals. Within a company, a team of developers may maintain a wiki that includes information about ongoing development projects and their status, coding conventions, and tutorials for new hires on how to set up a baseline development environment. A customer-facing support site could include a wiki allowing trusted support staff to proactively create and manage answers to commonly asked questions. And many community-oriented sites include wikis to allow members to update the site or contribute to the knowledge base. For instance, the open-source code projects hosted at CodePlex.com are managed as a wiki. There are a variety of commercial and open-source wiki platforms available. One open-source wiki created with ASP.NET and C# is ScrewTurn Wiki version 2.0. By default, ScrewTurn Wiki’s pages, modification history, and user accounts are saved on the Web server’s file system, meaning the wiki does not require a database. Consequently, deploying ScrewTurn Wiki to a Web server is as simple as copy and paste. But the wiki’s storage system is built atop the provider model, so you can plug Open-Source ScrewTurn Wiki in an alternative provider to persist system information elsewhere. You’ll find SQL Server and MySQL storage providers at the ScrewTurn Wiki Web site. When it is first installed, ScrewTurn Wiki allows anyone to create an account and any authenticated user to create, edit, or delete content. These access levels can be restricted through the wiki’s administration pages. Visitors may be barred from registering, or may require the approval of an administrator before being able to log in. And administrators can limit what user actions are allowable; for instance, the site can be configured to allow users to create and edit pages but not delete them. Of course, ® like other wikis, ScrewTurn Wiki maintains a complete history of every page modification with tools to compare different versions. And administrators can roll back a page to a previous version. ScrewTurn Wiki enables content to be created and displayed in multiple languages, with support for English, French, Spanish, and German, among others. Price: Free, open source. screwturn.eu Blogs of Note Reading other developers’ source code is a great way to hone your own programming skills, as it introduces you to different techniques for accomplishing common tasks. Send your questions and comments for Scott to toolsmm@microsoft.com. All prices confirmed at press time and are subject to change. The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions at Microsoft. July 2008 11 http://Wikipedia.org http://CodePlex.com http://screwturn.eu

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of MSDN Magazine - July 2008

MSDN Magazine - July 2008 Contents Toolbox CLR Inside Out Flex Your Data Data Points Advanced Basics Office Space Cutting Edge Data Services ADO.NET Data and WPF Transactions WCF P2P Test Run Security Briefs Foundations .NET Matters {End Bracket}

MSDN Magazine - July 2008

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