We have received a lot of feedback during the past couple of days since the newest release of MonoX was made public. Here are a few tips on how to start working with the sample project and produce a working custom solution in a matter of minutes.

We have just published a new, completely redesigned release of MonoX ASP.NET CMS with full support for Social Networking features. MonoX is now completely free and comes with everything you need to build fully-featured social environments, including: user profiles, OpenID support, friendship modules, scalable multi-user blog engine with automatic anti-spam protection, photo albums, customizable group architecture with support for public and private groups, discussion boards, file galleries, support for activity streams (event logs), messaging, video conversion and sharing, wall and comments.

• Full support for Swiss Module 1 Specification for eCTD, Version 1.1.
• eCTD Envelope Explorer.
• Templated Compiler.
• Various enhancements and new features to make your esubmission publishing more user friendly, easier and faster.

eCTD Office from Mono Software LTD is a suite of integrated NeeS / VNeeS / eCTD software products for the creation, validation, viewing, manipulation and archiving of NeeS / eCTD submissions. eCTD Office applications are being used by pharma companies and pharmaceutical consultancy companies all over Europe (France, The Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Czech Republic, Germany, UK, Bulgaria, Ireland, Norway, Cyprus, Malta, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden, Austria, Finland, Poland, Greece, Estonia ...)

With global workforces and customers spread across the globe, organizations need to provide scalable tools for providing massive amounts of information easily, quickly and securely. However, most of our partners can't afford, or simply don't want, to build huge data centers across the world to support this requirement.
This is where Amazon S3 steps in: it provides a simple Web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the Web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, and relatively inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of Web sites.
MonoX now includes a data provider that hooks into Amazon S3, allowing users to store their data in the cloud and not on a database or file server somewhere in house. Best of all, this functionality is totally transparent to the end user, and site admins can access it via the familiar file explorer interface that is identical to the standard GUI. Additionally, power users can develop their own file providers for other storage services by extending the FileBrowserContentProvider class and implementing the IFileContentProvider interface.

Blog comment spam has been a massive frustration for our users over the last few months. Although the original release of MonoX blog subsystem followed the Google recommendations for preventing comment spam, the guys behind this obviously lucrative business don't really care about "nofollow" tags - they are submitting non-relevant comments agresivelly. On a side note, there are several companies that allow you to buy spam comments in batches of 100 or 1000, as described in this article. It's no wonder that some of our users got more than 20k spam comments submitted in less than six months to only a dozen blog posts.

This is going to change with the new, "social networking" release of MonoX later this month. We provide a pluggable, provider-based architecture that enables users to pick one or more public antispam services or develop their own solutions. Akismet and Defensio are suported out-of-the-box; if you want to develop your own filter we recommend starting with the article on Bayesian spam filter on CodeProject.

You may choose manual or automatic comment approval modes - in any case, if the comment is considered to be spam, it will not show in the comment list without your approval and your resident spammer will have to search for his next victim somewhere else.

We have just published a new version of the MonoX portal framework. This release was motivated by new features brought by ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 - MVC-style routing and Dynamic Data. Routing is now fully supported, with additional support for QuestyString parameters.

Another new feature introduces support for declarative QueryString and Form parameter binding. This will save you a lot of time that was previously spent on manual parameter retrieval tasks.

You may noticed that we've been quiet for the last couple of months. The vacation season is not the primary reason for the lack of updates - quite contrary, we are adding new features to MonoX on a daily basis. Just to give you a test of things to come, here is a short list of features that will be included in the next version that will be released later this year:

- MonoX is switching to .NET 3.5, allowing us to use LINQ, Dynamic Data, portions of MVC technology and similar stuff in the core libraries
- we have switched to the Web application project model, as it offers way better development experience on larger projects - compilation process is now shortened dramatically
- we have introduced some exciting changes to the licensing scheme - more on that later
- MonoX will include a complete Social Networking module set: friend lists, invitations, messaging, wall, notes, groups, profiles...
Stay tuned for more news and let us know which features do you want to see included in next releases.

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