In less than 3 months after the release of the first beta, the Sense/Net 6.0 Beta 2 is available for download.

Sense/Net 6.0 Beta 2 comes with new features like:

• New Portal Explorer based on ExtJS 2.2
• WebDAV support for the Sense/Net content repository (PFS)
• Import & Export form content repository
• Document Library portlet added
• Improvement is other portlets
• Content Store REST service and CMIS service prototype
• A ton of bug fixes and optimizations

Please register at our website for beta test and/or download the latest release.

Happy holidays.

The original Portal Explorer has been the administrative interface for Sense/Net 6.0 since the beginning of development - that means almost a year and half. It was well constructed but not really lightweight - neither on client side nor on server side.

We decided that it was time to radically change the workings of it and with the lead of Attila we are proud to introduce a faster and better administrative interface - Portal Explorer 2.0.

The first and most important difference that you will notice that Portal Explorer 2.0 is much faster than its ancestor when it comes to refreshing panels. This is mainly because it uses services to communicate with the server and uses client side controls instead of server side ones. We've migrated from the Ext JS 1.1 JavaScript framework to Ext JS 2.2 which also gave a performance boost. 

What you will probably admire at least as much - if not more - is new functionality added: multiple contents can be selected at once in the list pane, quick search in the grid have been introduced and some minor features tweaked to make everyday work more efficient in Portal Explorer. More...

We have developed a CMIS draft implementation in Sense/Net 6.0 Beta 2, soon to be released. It is possibly the first .NET implementation, as all supporting companies except from Microsoft are JAVA based. It is surely the first open source implementation on the .Net platform.

What is CMIS? Quoting WikiPedia: “Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is a proposed standard consisting of a set of Web services for sharing information among disparate content repositories that seeks to ensure interoperability for people and applications using multiple content repositories. EMC, IBM, Microsoft, Alfresco, Open Text, SAP and Oracle have joined forces to propose CMIS, the first Web services technical specification for exchanging content with and between Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems. The proposed standard has been registered for public comment with OASIS. More specifically, Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) is a technical specification domain model (data and services) for interacting with an ECM repository via Web Services. It provides a content management domain-specific data model, a set of generic services that act on that data model and several protocol bindings for these services, including: SOAP and Representational State Transfer (REST)/(Atom).”

Since Sense/Net 6.0 is both an Enterprise Portal and an Enterprise Content Management System, with its own Content Repository, we wanted to showcase how easy it is to use the .NET platform, WCF and Sense/Net 6.0 to implement the standard.

Our demo is a two way implementation, because our content repository has a CMIS service interface and our portal has a CMIS client Webpart (portlet). So other CMIS clients can access our contents, but our portal can aggregate content from other CMIS compliant systems, such as next generation SharePoint, Alfresco and others.

We are also building an online CMIS demo, which is accessible from our website, but is under construction, so it might not work all the time. The demo features two CMIS webparts. One is able to navigate the content repository; the other is able to aggregate content from two sources that you can enter. The screenshot above is the CMIS test webpart, showing the PFS root contents. The services can also be accessed, just copy the URI-s from the input boxes. It even works with a simple browser, showing XML. There is no authentication, so no login is required. 

The source code will be available within a few days, please stay tuned. is available for download from http://www.sensenet.hu/download 

Read more about the proposed CMIS standard at OASIS: http://xml.coverpages.org/cmis.html#biro; http://xml.coverpages.org/ni2008-09-10-a.html

I am happy to announce that we will publish Sense/Net 6.0 source code on a regular basis, weekly or daily - we haven't decided that yet. This serves multiple purposes: we publish bugfixes for issues that are brought to us, and to enable individual or modular features appear before Beta milestones. Every check in will of course include a summary of changes: new features and fixes, changes to the API, etc.

It's been a long way. It started with the Sense/Net Portal Engine 1.0 back in 1998. From this construction evolved the 2.0 and upcoming versions all the way up to the Sense/Net Portal Engine 5.5 Release 2 released in 2006. This was a truly enterprise CMS but with the source closed. Two years ago we decided to start from scratch and develop a radically new concept under an open source lincense. And today we've come to the point when all of the Sense/Net team is happy to announce that 

Sense/Net 6.0 Beta 1 has been released!

This is the end of a long road, and the beginning of an even longer one. By opening up the project and the source we want you to use, spread and help the develop a project truly unique.

Join us on this journey 

And harvest the most of SenseNet 6.0.

I am happy to announce that Sense/Net 6.0 (codenamed Sense/Net Portal Engine TNG) will be released later today under GPL. Those who registered for beta testing will receive an e-mail alert as soon as the code is available on CodePlex. This might happen quite late, but definitely today! ;-)

Huhh, quite a time since the last post, so many things to care about as the planned release commences. Last week we've finalized the cache implementation of the Sense/Net Portal Engine TNG so I decided to share some of its more important or interesting aspects. More...

I am happy to announce the final release roadmap for Sense/Net Portal Engine TNG.

1. Tomorrow, the first TNG based site goes live.
2. In a few days, we prepare the code of that site and make it available for download for selected beta testers.
3. In August and September there will be a closed beta test, and we will work on the portal of another major client. We also plan to finish missing parts, especially portlets.
4. Sense/Net Portal Engine TNG Beta 1 will be publicly released on the 30th of September.

One thing I was really seduced by getting a member of the TNG dev team was the totally cool and enterprise level way the product is created.

Unit tests are crucial. And not just by the corporate quality rulebook: developers have adopted the concept of only treating a code ready when sufficient tests are also created. So we have tests, lots of tests covering as much of the source and the functionality as possible. Today Gyeby - the TNG dev lead - revealed that for the PortalFileSystem we have the 74% of source covered by tests, and for the PortalEngine this is 45%. And of course - we will release the test projects together with the Portal Engine TNG source - so everyone can rely on it. This is pretty cool I guess.

Our source management is based on Team Foundation Server and check in time automated test runs provide us continuous integration features. No source can get in the system unless it is proved itself correct and GREEN. This saves us from regular homicide situations when let's say his or her loosely tested and failing interface implementation would ruin my silverlight prototype application or vice versa.

Plus source code related events from our TFS are routed to the company quality management framework - required by the ISO9000. This puts the question of the source code quality management to overall company focus.

We are building an enterprise portal engine not only in the means of product functionality.

I was quite busy recently, no time for blogging. The reason is that we were working on the acquisition of a competing company. IVY Ltd is a development firm with 12 people and 3 products, one of which is a .Net based EPS/ECMS. Sense/Net acquired 100% of IVY and it will be merged into Sense/Net, we are already in the same office, just started our first project together.

With the acquisition of IVY, the new 12 members of our staff bring new competencies into our portfolio, such as LAMP (linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), Silverlight and SOA. Zentai Péter Áron "Zpace", the former CEO of IVY became our new CTO. He has also joined the TNG team as chief architect. 

The previous post in the Devblog about queries is his. Péter is a fan of the latest, cutting edge technologies, such as Linq, Silverlight and SOA in general. The coolest features of IVY's products will be built into Sense/Net Portal Engine, so the development will be accelerated a little bit.