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This is part seven of a series on Merlin. I recommend you read from the beginning. So, when we left off it was time to start parsing and creating object representations of our cleanly configured xml. But first, I couldn't handle my simple definition of a rule not supporting multiple conditions or actions. I needed some collections or I ...

This is part six of a series on Merlin. I recommend you read from the beginning. So after all this thinking, planning, and testing, I was finally going to get my hands dirty! Recalling the pseudo-code that I'd written just a couple of nights earlier, I decided to flush out some of the remaining objects. That said, I did choose to skip the ...

This is part five of a series on Merlin. I recommend you read from the beginning. Since testing my integration strategy would require a bit more code than I was ready (or willing) to write, I was determined to bite off the smallest chunk possible and verify things along the way. (Remember, this was just a personal project, not ...

This is part four of a series on Merlin. I recommend you read from the beginning. Answering the "how" would come later. For now I decided that my focus should be on the "what". Again, pulling from the concepts of Outlook's Rules Wizard, I determined that a rule is run in some context. Keeping it simple (and singular...for ...

This is part three of a series on Merlin. I recommend you read from the beginning. So I knew I was going to build an Outlook style Rules Wizard, but how should it work? I figured there were two general approaches I could take.Write/compile code on the fly using the CodeDOM APICreate some kind of "processing engine" and drive it with ...

This is part two of a series on Merlin. I recommend you read from the beginning. With only an idea, I still needed to figure out what form it would take. After all, what I was proposing was a no-code approach to radical customization. What kind of customizations were folks really looking for? How could I keep the UI relatively clean and not ...

This is part one of a series on Merlin.  A couple of months ago, Scott announced a new internal contest. The goal was to build a Control Panel add-on for Community Server. For a couple of days I wrestled with a handful of ideas (an email/template/message editor, avatar/signature/video approval screens, badges, a multi-role assignment page, ...

If you recall, I blogged about our first contest, back in late January, which produced twenty free CSModules, all coded in a single weekend. While I didn't win any of the top three prizes, not even sure I got a single vote, I did submit five entries. (Yeah, I know what you're thinking, with five entries out of twenty, I should ...