Archives
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When to upgrade your DotNetNuke website!
Well, the 4.8.0 release of DotNetNuke came out today, and some people are having some problems, so I figured I'd take the time to put together what I hope will be a short post with my professional opinion of how you should handle DNN upgrades. Here are some questions and thoughts you should have before you upgrade. Does the new release offer you features that you absolutely need? If you answer NO to this question, then step away, go work on something else.
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DotNetNuke 4.8.0 Released, Change log inside
DotNetNuke 4.8.0 dropped today! Get it now from the Downloads page.
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Engage Publish 4.4.4 Released
Tonight we released the latest version of Engage Publish, 4.4.4 (12/9/2007). This release has a few minor bug fixes, a few UI improvements, and some enhanced features!
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DNN 4.X development in Windows Vista, issues with ASP.NET Ajax
While working on the Engage: Publish module's latest round of enhancements I started having problems working with my development machine at home. The machine here is a Vista Ultimate machine that I've blogged about getting configured in the past. The issue I had been stumbling over for a few weeks, though only researched solutions last night, had to do with ASP.NET Ajax. DNN ships with an older version of the System.Web.Extensions DLL. Which appears to work fine on my machine at work (in which I probably also had the AJAX framework installed). At home though on Vista whenever I tried to go to one of my test pages that had Publish installed I would get an error about the Scriptmanager must come before the Updatepanel control.
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Export Photos from CommunityServer 2.*
I've started working on a quick application to export Photos from a CommunityServer website. If there's any interest I'll post up the code for this later in the week. I'm working to get http://chrishammond.com off of CommunityServer and setup on DotNetNuke. Considering I'm a DNN Core team member and my fulltime job is dealing with DNN every day it was about time to do so.
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OpenForce07: Collection of Posts
Here's the collection of posts I've been making about OpenForce07 here in Las Vegas. I'll update the list on Thursday as well
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OpenForce07 Tuesday Afternoon
Well it's Tuesday afternoon, nearing 3 O'clock and coming up on the end of the first day of sessions for OpenForce07. I don't think this will be my last post, but I am taking a short break and sitting in the speaker room to type this up.
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OpenForce Tuesday Morning: Scott Guthrie's keynote
We're sitting here at Scott Guthrie's keynote this morning as he starts to discuss Visual Studio 2008 and development on the platform. Scott reiterated the announcement from last night that Visual Studio 2008 will be released later this month, available to MSDN subscribers and they will also be sending out copies to the attendees of DevConnections.
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Viva Las Vegas! OpenForce07 is almost here
Well it's Sunday the 4th of November, my wife's birthday. Where are we spending it? In Las Vegas! The DotNetNuke Conference, OpenForce07 starts on Tuesday here at the Mandalay Bay so we came out to Vegas a few days early. Last night we went to see KA at the MGM, it was awesome. Not quite as good as La Reve that we saw at the Wynn two years ago, but still a great show.
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A new tip from Scott Guthrie
Scott has posted an excellent read on machine performance and development over on his blog. When I get back from OpenForce07 I'm going to be looking at upgrading my home machine and will definitely take his notes into consideration as I build/buy whatever it is I decide to get.
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DotNetNuke Tip - Module Development with Edit/View Mode
In our Engage: Publish module we load quite a few different user controls depending on who you are, and what you have access to.
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DotNetNuke Tip: How to modify the page title with your module
This is actually a very simple trick to do inside of your modules, though you might need to setup an option to allow this to be turned on or off depending on what the site administrator wants the page title to be.
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Atlanta Cosmetic Dentists
The other day I was looking for a Cosmetic Dentist in Atlanta, without any luck though!
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DotNetNuke 4.6.2
DotNetNuke 4.6.2 was released today! You can get it from www.dotnetnuke.com
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Engage: Publish 4.3.6 Released
We've been working on Publish for the past few months squashing bugs and adding some very cool new features including improved administration interfaces, new display options, better performance and many more!
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DotNetNuke 4.6.0 Released
DotNetNuke 4.6.0 released today, just in time for OpenForce Europe!
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Upcoming Speaking Engagements
Well it's been a busy summer for me and it looks like it isn't slowing down just yet. Earlier this month I spent a week in the Washington DC area conducting some advanced DotNetNuke Module Development Training for a new client. In just over a week I'll be in Topeka Kansas for the SCCA Solo Nationals, I'm definitely looking forward to getting away from computers for a week and just enjoying racing a car or two!
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Project Announcement: The Ticket Guys
Engage Software has just launched another website. The new site is a portal for The Ticket Guys (www.theticketguys.com). It is built using the DotNetNuke portal framework, though we had to develop new modules and enhance existing modules to get all of the desired functionality on the site. So if you're looking for St. Louis Cardinals, St. Louis Rams, or Boston Red Sox tickets be sure to check The Ticket Guys.
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DotNetNuke Beta Testing Program
DotNetNuke.com has launched a new Beta Testing program for the 4.6 release of DNN. If you've got an account on DotNetNuke.com head to this Beta Testing Program page, if you don't, head on over and register!
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Why you should go to OpenForce07
Here's a quick list of why you should go to the OpenForce07 conference in Las Vegas in November 2007! Feel free to copy the list and create your own.
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I will not IPhone
I will not buy an IPhone! I don't care how many people in my office buy one. I will not IPhone, even though my blackjack sucks lately and drops calls like a Yankees outfielder.
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More DotNetNuke Training
Well, I was going to do a quick post about my trip, though I can't say who I was training I did have a good time up here in Chicago!
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DotNetNuke Jobs!
Nik made a post about a new program over on DotNetNuke.com today, DotNetNuke Careers. Currently there are a bunch of jobs from Robert Half listed, not to sound too cynical, but I hope it turns out to be something other than just a place for recruiting companies to post their billions of available positions. Personally, I'd much rather see single jobs available from individual companies, rather than recruiters looking to fill a million bland positions. I'm not looking, I love my work at Engage Software, but it is interesting to see who is hiring for cool positions and to see what DotNetNuke jobs are available.
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Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Vista Freezes up
Sometime last month I reinstalled Windows Vista. I put Vista on my machine (after removing it for XP in early spring) because I wanted to be able to edit HD video in Windows Movie Maker.
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Resharper, what do you think?
I'll readily admit, I've seen tons of Resharper posts over the years reading weblogs.asp.net, but i've honestly never payed attention to them.
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DotNetNuke 4.5.5 Released
Yet again I was headfirst into the Project240z and I missed another DotNetNuke Release! 4.5.5 dropped last week with a few major items fixed that caused probelms in the 4.5.4 release. You can see those issues, as well as other issues from past releases in the Project Issue Tracker
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OpenForce07 Agenda
Are you going to OpenForce07 in Las Vegas November 5-8th 2007? I am! And I even have the badge displaying on http://chrishammond.com
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DotNetNuke Underconstruction.htm
If you're having problems with your DotNetNuke site, mainly every time the site loads the first time (after the site has been reset), going to the install/underconstruction.htm file, here's a quick tip.
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DotNetNuke 4.5.4 Released!
Over the weekend (I missed it because I was working on my car all weekend www.project240z.com) DotNetNuke 4.5.4 dropped, you can get it from www.dotnetnuke.com
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Office Fun
Sometimes you just have to take a break at the office and play with toys! I must say, our office environment is great, everyone is under 40 (except for Grandpa Henry), and we get to enjoy our days. We are always looking for experienced or willing to learn DotNetNuke developers at Engage Software. Below is a link to some of the fun we had yesterday. (right click and download the file before trying to watch it, it is a 350mb file, as it's in HD)
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Video Tutorial on DotNetNuke Membership Providers
Henry has put together a video tutorial covering DotNetNuke Membership providers, sort of as a follow up to his original blog post a few months back discussing the topic. His blog post and subsequent forum posts have generated a lot of questions.
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Did last night's Windows Update kill your DNN sites?
There apparently were two .Net Security Patches made available last night in WIndows Update. They are causing some problems with DNN, not sure which versions specifically, but I've seen issues reported in 4.3.6 and 4.3.5 so far.
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Packaging your DotNetNuke Module using NANT
A few years back I was enlightened by Chris Paterra in the ways of using NANT scripts to aid in the packaging of DotNetNuke Modules. Using NANT to package your WAP (web application project) modules within Visual Studio 2005 is a snap, and can save you a LOT of time each time you have to come up with a new release.
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St. Louis DotNetNuke User's Group meeting tonight!
Kind of a last minute blog post, but we're holding the July 2007 St. Louis DNN User's Group meeting tonight.
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DotNetNuke Tip Modifying your Portal Aliases
Welcome back to the DotNetNuke tips! I started doing this over a year ago, though with getting married last fall and working on my Datsun 240Z lately I haven't blogged near as much lately about DNN topics. So here we go, starting up again with my DotNetNuke Tips.
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Problems installing VS 2k5 SP1 on Vista?
So I know I did this back in November without issues, but in February I reinstalled XP and got away from Vista.
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Importing Video from the Canon HV20 to Windows MovieMaker
If you recently purchased a Canon HV20 you might be a bit surprised when you go to try and use any of the High Definition video you recorded with it. Canon didn't bother to include software on the CD to actually use the video you record. You might try hooking up your camera to your Windows XP machine via Firewire but that won't get you very far either. All I was able to do was to get it to the point where it would transfer DV, which wasn't acceptable to me so I didn't even bother to see if it would work.
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Back in the Saddle Again
Well... I'm back onto Vista yet again. I started running Vista on my main desktop back in the fall, sometime right around the RTM date. February came and I was getting sick of it. I was having a horrible time with Vista, I reinstalled XP and came to find out that most of my problems weren't actually Vista, but my network in my house, my domain controller was down, but up, and killing the network. Once I got that cleaned up XP was flying again.
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DotNetNuke wins Editor's Choice from Visual Studio Magazine
Last week it was announced that DNN won Editor's choice from Visual Studio Magazine, read the press release here!
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OpenForce 07 Speaker Announcements
A day or so ago Joe posted a link to the speaker announcements for the OpenForce 07 conference in Vegas in November.
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Project240z.com Upgraded
I upgraded Project240z.com to DotNetNuke 4.5.2 tonight, no issues what so ever.
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DotNetNuke Marketplace Enhancements and Changes
Joe Brinkman just announced some major changes for the DotNetNuke Marketplace (http://marketplace.dotnetnuke.com/) Scoot on over to his blog and check them out.
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DotNetNuke 4.5.2 Released
EDIT: Originally posted by Shaun Walker in the benefactors forum.....
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I'm speaking at OpenForce 07, DotNetNuke Conference during DevConnections
I'm happy to announce that I've been selected to speak at the OpenForce07 DotNetNuke conference in Las Vegas during this year's fall DevConnections. DevConnections looks to be one of the larger conferences this year now that the PDC has been cancelled for this year. I'll be presenting on "Portal Administration Best Practices".
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I've got a lot of work to do...
According to CommunityServer here on weblogs.asp.net I have a TON of work to get done.
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Upgrade from the KTomics Wiki module to the DotNetNuke Wiki Module
Josh has posted a SQL script with some instructions on how to upgrade from the Ktomics Wiki module, to the DotNetNuke Wiki module.
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Welcome to CommunityServer2007
Woah, it looks like we got an upgrade here at http://weblogs.asp.net/ last night.....
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Last chance to submit topics for the DotNetNuke OpenForce 07 Conference
Tomorrow (5/15/07) is the last day to submit topics for DotNetNuke OpenForce 07 conference in Las Vegas in November. If you're interested in presenting be sure to get your proposals in quickly!
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Engage: Publish 4.2 Released for consumption!
Last week we were able to release the long awaited new release of Engage: Publish with all new bells and whistles.
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My DotNetNuke History, and a game of DNN Tag
A few months back there was a game of blog TAG going on with .Net related weblogs, I'm still bitter no one tagged me! So I'm starting up my own game of tag, this time it's DotNetNuke related tagging! So here it goes, the first in the game, and at the bottom of this post I'll list off 3 other DNN'rs that I'll "tag" and they should blog about their DNN history, and then tag 3 more DNN'rs each. So here goes my DotNetNuke History!
I haven't reminisced in a while, I was trying to think of something interesting to blog about tonight, and figured I'd do a little community work! So here it goes, feel free to add your own "Story" when you get tagged, but first you must read mine!
Back in the day I was working for a local company here in St. Louis, Swank Motion Pictures, www.swank.com. Don't let the name fool you, it's not that kind of company, it is a great family owned business here in St. Louis. I worked there for almost 3 years, that time around, I had previously worked there, twice.
Back in 2002 I was working on Classic ASP apps, nothing too fancy, and without hardly any training whatsoever. In December of 2002 me and my boss took an Atomic.Net class with a training company in town called Quilogy, it was a week long class, and after the first day I was at home playing around with VisualStudio.net in the evenings. One of the first things I did while playing with .Net was to download the IBuySpy portal and store packages.
I was actually interested in the two IBS packages because I was also a partner in a small racing business at the time, www.soloperformance.com, and I was interested in setting up a store on this newly learned wonder called .Net. Over the next two months or two I pieced together an application in which I merged the IBS Store and Portal into a single app, most of the work on this app was actually done while I was in San Francisco at VSLive 2003 in February.
Sometime in Early January of 2003 I started to hear about this new application, the IBuySpy workshop, but for the life of me I couldn't figure out what it actually was, as I didn't see the original announcement for it in the forums. I saw forum posts referencing something called workshop but wasn't quite clear on what it was. It was probably a month or so before I figured out what the IBSW actually was, and started to try to use it.
By Summer of 2003 I was using what was now called DotNetNuke on a few of the websites I ran for hobby, www.solo2.org at the time was one of the most prominent, but there were quite a few others as well. Sometime in the spring of 2003 I started to convert the application I had built using IBS Portal/Store into a DNN application. Considering how new I was to DNN, and actually how new DNN was to everyone, I was one of those guys who developed an application by hacking into the "core" code. Consider that my lesson learned! When I went to upgrade to DNN 2.* later, I learned just how painful it is to go from a hacked version of DNN to a newer version, and I've done my best since then to not hack into the core.
By spring of 2004 I was actively posting in the DNN forum on asp.net, and also trying to assist with a project at the time known as ASP.NET Forums 2, I was hoping to help DNN and the Forums project merge together, or at least both use the same membership so that I could use them together to power SOLO2.ORG. In April of 2004 I got an email from my current boss. He saw some of my posts on the ASP.Net forums2 site and noticed I was in St. Louis, a few weeks later I was working for Engage Software in Des Peres, Missouri, www.engagesoftware.net.
At the time Engage was starting to use DotNetNuke, and also a little bit of Rainbow portal for various client projects. I quickly came in and squashed all use of Rainbow portal, and we went complete with DotNetNuke for our portal projects. In July of 2004 I was informed I was being considered for membership on the DotNetNuke core team. This was a tremendous honor for myself, and I was excited just to be considered.
One of the first major projects I worked on at Engage was to develop a new website for the St. Louis Children's Hospital, www.stlouischildrens.org. For that website we developed a content workflow module, allowing for a few Administrators of the site to maintain and approve content entered by 20-30 authors. The authors had the ability to add articles, but these articles must be approved before they are published onto the website.
The original site was developed against DotNetNuke 2.1.2, and over the years has worked it's way up the DNN upgradechain. Currently the site runs on 4.5.1, with our most recent release of Engage: Publish, version 4.2.6. Recently we posted Publish for sale on Snowcovered, and we're also getting ready to put the module up on the DotNetNuke Marketplace.
If you're developing your own modules for selling, I highly recommend getting your module reviewed by the DNN review program. It's a great way to provide assurance to potential customers that your module has been through the review process and meets up to at least some minimum standards. We had Publish reviewed back in January and it provided us some great feedback.
Over time I started presenting at user groups and techfests evengalizing DotNetNuke, that ended up leading to training sessions through Engage. Last year I performed corporate DotNetNuke training in Tennessee, Maine, Kentucky and Missouri. So far this year I've been to Washington D.C., New York, and Salt Lake City, Utah. I must say, I get a kick out of traveling around to different clients and helping them meet their business goals through the use of DotNetNuke.
Too long ago, probably fall of 2005, I was asked to take on a Module project, I stepped up to pick up a Wiki project for the DNN core. I say too long ago because it's not almost two years later and we're just now getting ready for the first official release. I take complete blame for the delays and lack of progress in the module's release. Thanks to Josh Handel for helping to get this new release going. Soon it will be making it out into the light of day, and after that, we'll have another release later this year.
What's the future hold for me? Right now it's big and bright. Things at Engage Software are going great, we're growing, hiring, growing, and hiring more. The DotNetNuke project is growing and releasing new versions left and right. The corporation that was setup last fall www.dotnetnukecorp.com has been taking care of the project and even setup a conference in Las Vegas in November 2007.
I know where I'll be the 5 through the 8th of November. Hopefully I'll be speaking at the conference, but even if I'm not chosen to present I'll be there with bells on. I've also submitted speaking proposals for the SDC in the Netherlands in September 2007, so hopefully I'll be making my first trip to Europe this fall.
Now, for my 3 tags. Here's a challenge to Josh Handel, Scott Willhite, and Joe Brinkman to blog their own DotNetNuke histories, and tag 3 people of their own to do the same.
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DotNetNuke Conference announced for November 2007, in Vegas!
Vegas baby, vegas! I know where I'll be for my wife's birthday, in Vegas! Check out Joe Brinkman's blog post for more info, but basically there is a call out for speaker's for the OpenForce '07 conference. I've already submitted a few speaking proposals for the conference, but either way, speaking or not, I'll be there.
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DotNetNuke Specialists
If you're looking for DotNetNuke Specialists be sure to check out Engage Software! We specialize in everything DotNetNuke.
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A new St. Louis Dressage and Equestrian website
Just over a week ago a new St. Louis equestrian website went live. I built a new website for www.nottowayfarm.com
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Who is The Trashman?
Chris Hammond is The Trashman, yes, you heard it here first. I am known as The Trashman.
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Need DotNetNuke Support?
If you're looking for DotNetNuke support there are quite a few options out there.
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Engage: F3, search your DotNetNuke Text/HTML modules
I've had too many clients come to me and ask how they can search through all of their Text/HTML modules on a portal to look for links that point to their development URL rather than their production URL. Instead of telling them they had to manually look at every page to find all instances of these invalid links I created a new module, available from www.engagemodules.com
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Children's Discovery Institute
If you're looking for a great cause, check out the recent developments over at the Children's Discovery Institute website, located at www.childrensdiscovery.org
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I'm going under the knife
Well, not me, but my Computer is going under the knife tonight.
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Woot Off Tracker to use?
Let's say today were a Woot Off, which is isn't. What Wootoff tracker would you use for trying to keep up to date with the latest item?
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Deleting unused blogs and photo galleries in CommunityServer.
I decided to remove some unused blogs and photo galleries from a few of my CommunityServer sites today. Here's some ROUGH SQL code to do it.
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Why I won't be upgrading to CommunityServer 2007
I'm really starting to lose enthusiasm for Community Server the more and more it becomes restricted and pricey with it's licensing model. I guess it's time to look into writing some conversion scripts from CS to DotNetNuke for Forums and Blogs, as DotNetNuke still remains a good free solution for community websites.
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Using DotNetNuke lists (c# included)
A quick update for using DotNetNuke's built in List functionality.
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New Module Developers guide for DotNetNuke
Michael Washington has put out a new module developers guide for DotNetNuke, he's got a link in his latest blog to the documentation page on DotNetNuke.com. Check it out, Michael has been hard at work on these two documents (parts 1 and 2) over the past few months, and they are great resources for getting familiar with DNN development.
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DotNetNuke® Gets Supercharged
Reproduced from http://www.dotnetnuke.com/About/NewsRoom/MediaReleases/DotNetNukeGetsSupercharged/tabid/1023/Default.aspx
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Windows Vista Ultimates available
It looks like some of the Vista Ultimate features are now available for download. I've got the Hold'em and bitlocker ultimates downloading now, along with what looked like 5-7 other updates as well.
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DotNetNuke 4.4.1 Released
Check out the latest release of DotNetNuke version 4.4.1 that was made public recently. Here's a list of the changelog from http://support.DotNetNuke.com/
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Launch Day
This past week has been pretty darn busy, actually, so far 2007 has been pretty darn busy. At work we've been cranking away on a pretty large project built upon DotNetNuke. It's like nothing I've seen done successfully with DNN before, so it'll be interesting to see when this latest version goes public how well it does. It's rewarding, but a damn lot of work lately. I can't wait for February. I keep telling myself in February I'm going to start working on my car again, www.project240z.com
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I skinned a Community Server site, what a pain!
I've skinned, or tweaked a CommunityServer site before, but what I must admin, it's definitely not an easy process, and not something I'd want anyone to have to go through!
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DotNetNuke Training in the United States of America, or even the World!
If you're looking for DotNetNuke Training anywhere in the world please let me know. I've got my passport and will travel.
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Tip, always set CustomErrors to Remote Only! Detroit Auto Show
Here's a quick tip for those of you using asp.net. In your web.config file, set CustomErrors="RemoteOnly".
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DotNetNuke Developer For Lexington Kentucky
If you're looking for DotNetNuke Development in the state of Kentucky be sure to check out www.engagesoftware.net. At Engage we will travel anywhere in the world to work with clients on their DotNetNuke projects. We've got experience in DotNetNuke training, skinning, development and implementation.
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DNN Daily Tip: Debugging DotNetNuke Development on Windows Vista and Visual Studio 2005
Last week I got started on getting the DotNetNuke Wiki module into a 4.4.0 source solution, so that I could convert the module to ASP.NET 2.0 and debug it in Visual Studio. Normally this wouldn't be anything out of the ordinary, I setup DotNetNuke solutions for a living, I can do it in my sleep, but I decided I was going to do all of this on my main machine running Windows Vista Ultimate edition.