Bruce Hopkins's WebLog

DNN Article

bhopkins — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 02:20:00 GMT

Shaun Walker has recently had an article published on DotNetNuke. This is the first of a series of articles on various parts of the DNN framework by core team members. This should prove to be an exciting coming year for DNN as more and more of the industry becomes aquainted with this robust application. Since I fell in love with this framework on day one of the IBuySpy Workshop, its hard to believe just how for the project has came from that humble post by Shaun on December 24, 2002. Now three years later its rapidly becoming the permier platform for developing Asp.Net web applications. I'm sure there is a lot of DNN code in applications all over the web, even in quite a few sites while not totally DNN still posess code that was originally a part of it. I know its been quite a learning experinece for me and I know so much more about .Net than I ever did before it came around.

Well for the article read on ...

http://ca.sys-con.com/read/153974.htm

The open source war heats up

bhopkins — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 03:40:00 GMT

I posted the other day referring to Shaun's blog post on Windows Open Source Developers get no respect. Well the blog post was picked up by slashdot today and has created quite a stir. If you've go a little time then reading the comments are quite amusing. The ones I really enjoyed where the comments comparing VB.Net code to ASP3 and vbscript.

http://developers.slashdot.org/

Interesting Blog post on Open Source and Microsoft

bhopkins — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 00:55:00 GMT

I was catching up on the blogs at http://www.dotnetnuke.com and noticed a really interesting one from Shaun Walker. Shaun talks about some of the mis-conceived notions about Open Source projects in a Microsoft world. To me this was an interesting read and identified some of the problems Microsoft developers need to be aware of. After all, we are just as good as the Linux guys so why do we not get the same respect in the Linux world as many of us give the good Linux apps in the MS world. Anyway here is the link incase you are interested. http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/825/EntryID/207/Default.aspx

Oracle Woes

bhopkins — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 05:14:00 GMT

Been fighting an Oracle Script tonight and its just not cooperating with me. I'm sure its oracle and not my lack of knowledge in this area. I've got this VP who is constantly asking for the same report. I really need to write a DotNetNuke mod to let them run their own reports, but I can't get time to write the mod because I'm always running their reports. Catch 22.

Did find a cool reference website for Oracle functions (http://www.psoug.org/library.html). As I'm oracle challenged, I'm sure I'll be using it alot. Running the script is not hard its all the formatting wanted. I figured I would write a script that would automatically save as a .csv then just email it to him, but the formatting is killing me. I figure once I get it working then I'll set up a cron and email it every two minutes until I hear uncle. One last item has got me stumped and it may just be too late tonight and I need to start again tomorrow. I've got two fields in one table that a VarChar2 that holds start and end times for the class. Currently its in military time like 1300 and I need to convert it to standard time like 1:00PM, just can't seem to locate the proper function to do this. Could do it really easy in Excel all that takes is a simple formula =TimeValue(left(a2,2)&":"&right(a2,2)), but it seems a little harder here. Plus utilizing excel from the server is not an option. Excel does not install on AIX to well, the install keeps failing for some reason ;-) The only other issue I have is the SQL does not seem to want to strip off from the spool file. I'm thinking I need to split it out into two files to take the user and password variables. Maybe I'll go that route tomorrow. </rant>

Well its getting late on the East Coast.

Usability in DNN Part II

bhopkins — Sun, 03 Oct 2004 01:57:00 GMT

Well I was reading an interesting thread tonight mentioning doing a usablity test for DNN. I found this interesting since so much work has been done in this area in preparation for the next release. Anyway it was decided last core team chat that aome of the items in the next release should get put out there. Anyway so heres a taste:

The entire admin UI has been revamped which in my opinion has made it much easier to understand for a new user to the portal. I have not been personally involved in this and was really even suprised when I downloaded the source and saw these great enhancments. The portal settings tab has been divided into logical section which expand to only show the areas you are currently working in. This is really a simple concept, but a very powerful addition as it makes it much easier to perform your portal adminsitrative functions. I've worked with DotNetNuke since inception and I found this a much easier interface to work with. I hope others find it as easy.

In line help has also been added to most of the administrative controls. This gives the user immediate help if they are not sure what action or data belongs in the control. I put a couple of screen shots of the add tab module so you can see a preview of what you will soon see through out the entire portal administrative functions. The screen shots are located at http://www.dynamicvb.net/Default.aspx?tabid=188

I'll post more screen shots later of some of the other enhancements.

Usablity in DotNetNuke

bhopkins — Fri, 16 Jul 2004 03:47:00 GMT

I was cruising around the net looking for sites that spoke of DotNetNuke the other day. I ran accross a post on sitepoint in which some users where complaining about skinning functions and such with DNN. I did not really like what they where saying but they did have a few valid points. One of the things some of the core are going to be working on now is how to improve usablity in the UI. Been a while since I did any sort of usablity tests for a web site, but I can probably come up with a few ideas. So if you use DotNetNuke and there is something about the UI that you just can't stand then how about leave a feedback so they can be addressed. Funny how when you get close to some code its harder to see what may be the short comings. Might be one of those Murphy Law things.

I'll even leave the link of the bashers if you want to read before the postback.

http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=173967

Bruce

Whidbey Beta 1

bhopkins — Sun, 04 Jul 2004 23:39:00 GMT

Been playing around with the beta since I got it downloaded yesterday and it is a lot more stable then the last bits that were dropped. I finally got it to install side by side with ASP.Net 1.1 so this makes it a little easier to play with it. I've been putting it on another machine besides my production box. Since I am always at work I very rarely open it up because I have to get on the other box and stop working. The laptop I have now is not really strong enough to run Virtual PC or VmWare so I have not installed one of those to put up a virtual machine. Well now that I have it running on the machine where I spend my life, I guess I need to start looking again at what its going to take to get DotNetNuke running on the next version.

I've attempted a conversion on the bits but it kept blowing up on the multiple projects in the dotnetnuke solution file. I'm not sure yet if conversion to 2.0 is going to take some re-thinking of the way DNN is structured or not, but I have a feeling we are going to need to change the project a good bit to accommodate. Of course 2.0 still has to be a quite a ways away so there's probably not much I need to worry about with this yet.

DNN 2 Beta 2

bhopkins — Thu, 11 Mar 2004 03:02:00 GMT

Haven't posted any thing here in a little while. Job has been killer as of late. Well DNN B2 is out the door and the initial repsonse seems to be good. There are still a few bugs to work out but they will get worked out in time. I'm looking forward to seeing this one released so we can get to working on the ML solution and the intergration with AspNet forums 2.0 once its released. These two additions will push DNN into a class by its self as if it was not already there. Well this is going to be a short post, because its getting late here and I need to look for some more bugs in 2.0.2, so back to work.

Bruce

DNN Core Team Chat

bhopkins — Tue, 03 Feb 2004 04:05:00 GMT

The DNN core team had our weekly chat tonight and it was very fruitful. We finally nailed down a date for Beta I release. We are shooting for 2/14/2004 for the release and since a lot fo us have wives, we probably should get it out early to avoid sleeping outside. ;-) This is going to be a beta release and it will likely still have several bugs, but we are going to try and get the major Show Stoppers out before this date. The major show stoppers right now is a little problem with skins. If you have an error in a skin or maybe even a container and you apply it to the portal then chances are the only way right now to get your portal back is to go into the DB and delete the record in the Skins table. There is also an issue with the encryption settings that will not encrypt the host user's password, which effectively locks out the host user, but still allows all others to log in normally. There are a few more bugs that have been identified since my last post thanks to Josh who worked hard while everyone else was watching Janet's exposure Sunday night. Thanks Josh.

If you have not had a chance to visit http://www.dotnetnuke.com lately, you should swing by and check out the new showcase thanks to Lorraine Young there are some really great sites showing what you can do with DNN.

We also decided to invite some select individuals for some more intensive community testing. Keep in mind we are not asking for volunteers and most of the selections have already been made. Individuals were chosen based on their technical expertise and dedication to DNN. I really don't feel much like typing tonight so I'll let this end here. For a full update on the chat highlights check out http://www.asp.net/Forums/ShowPost.aspx?tabindex=1&PostID=462399

Bruce

DotNetNuke 2.0 Status

bhopkins — Mon, 02 Feb 2004 03:25:00 GMT

What is going on with the release if DNN 2.0. I don't know how many times I've heard that question in the forums over the last couple of months. Basically its just been an entire app re-design and we under estimated some of the problems we would encounter with the redesign. Quite a few ugly little bugs put their heads up and there was not a clear way to solve them. Shaun put together a cool little solution to handle multiple DBs using the Application Data Blocks we decided we wanted to incorporate a nice little Business Logic Layer to further abstract the solution and make it easier to customize and exte3nd in the future. Well that was when we started to realize some basic flaws in the over all design of the application, Most of these flaws were left over from the IBuySpy days and the way it dealt with null values. Shaun documented a lot of these problems on http://www.dotnetnuke.com so I will not go into them again here.

I just synced up with the latest version of the code and it appears to be getting fairly stable there are still a few issues to iron out. Currently there are 28 open issues to resolve, most of them are fairly minor, but there are a couple with Skinning and user management that may be a little complicated. I would not worry about getting these few taken care of, Scott Willhite is really cracking the whip so they should be cleared up soon. So you are probably asking about a date, well we have one, but it is not for public consumption yet. Maybe more will come out of the core chat Monday night and I will be able to offer a little more information. I wound up missing the last one because of the myDoom virus, so I have a little catching up to do my self.

Bruce