November 2007 - Posts

DNN 4.X development in Windows Vista, issues with ASP.NET Ajax
Friday, November 23, 2007 11:51 PM

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.

Well fine and dandy, but I'm positive that we had the codecheck in place for this. It ends up that with Vista I was having problems with that old version of System.web.extensions. The fix was rather easy, I simple downloaded the .Net 3.5 framework and installed it. Now it appears that all is well once again in Vistaland. If you need to download the 3.5 framework get it here from MS.

Now I have to decide, do I install VS2008 on my home machine, or do I spend some money and upgrade my machine (build a new one), then install 2k8 on that..... Decisions decisions.

Export Photos from CommunityServer 2.*
Monday, November 19, 2007 9:08 AM

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.

So what will I be using in DotNetNuke to replace the functionality that CommunityServer offers? Here's a list of functionality and my planned replacement

Photos: Flickr, I've been using Flickr for over a year now and you just can't beat the service they provide. $20/year and unlimited uploads/downloads, I've got over 10k photos uploaded to Flickr since I started using it, and with this export tool I'll have a few thousand more.

Blogs: Frankly, the DNN Blog is alright, but not great. So I'm working to configure the Engage: Publish module I work on nearly every day to provide blog functionality. It's one of the pricier modules you'll find out there, but that's because it has seen 3 years of development and is supported by a company with 14 employees. Adding this functionality will require the following: Tags, MetaBlogAPI Support, better URL handling

There are a few large things I need to work on. 1) Importing my Blog posts/tags from CS into the Engage: Publish module. 2) Friendly URL modifications to allow lookup and 301 redirections for the old URLs to find the new URLs within Publish. My goal is to have most of the above ready for testing after the Holiday Weekend.

OpenForce07: Collection of Posts
Wednesday, November 07, 2007 10:03 PM

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

OpenForce07 Wednesday Afternoon

OpenForce07 Wednesday, the time has come and gone, My Session

OpenForce07 Wednesday Morning

OpenForce07 Tuesday Afternoon: DNN Development Security

OpenForce Tuesday Afternoon:

OpenForce Tuesday: Shaun's Keynote

OpenForce Tuesday Morning: Scott Guthrie's keynote

 

OpenForce07 Tuesday Afternoon
Tuesday, November 06, 2007 5:02 PM

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.

So far things have been moving along really well. After Shaun's Keynote I went to his session entitles "DotNetNuke Business Opportunities". At the presentation he gave an overview of the various ways that an individual or business can make money by utilizing DNN. Here are some of the highlights from the presentation.

The CMS market currently is currently around 1.5 Billion Dollars annually and by 2010 will be 2.5 billion.

Some of the products that you can use in a DNN business include

  • Modules
  • Components and Controls
  • Skins
  • Vertical Market Apps
  • Documentation Materials/Books

Service opportunities within the DNN community include

  • Consulting
  • Custom Module Development
  • Skinning
  • Hosting
  • SaaS - Software as a Service
  • Documentation
  • Training
  • Translation Services

The presentation actually finished up a little early for Shaun so there was nearly 30 minutes of questions and answers, mostly revolving around the DotNetNuke Partner program that will be launching soon, hopefully later this month.

Shaun's session was the last before lunch, it's amazing that they can serve this many people food at once, but from what I saw it went pretty flawlessly. After lunch there was time to wander around the exhibition hall, I ended up hanging around the DNN Corp booth and answering questions as the Charles and Vincenc were staffing it and there were plenty of people stopping by to chat!

There's one more set of sessions this afternoon, starting around 4:15pm, I think I'm going to take in Cathal's "Creating Secure DotNetNuke Modules"

More later!

OpenForce Tuesday Morning: Scott Guthrie's keynote
Tuesday, November 06, 2007 11:43 AM

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.

Sitting here this morning I've seen quite a few core team members walking by.

Phil Beadle

Jon Henning

Vincenc Manasas (sorry Vincenc)

Joe Brinkman

After Scott's presentation is over there will be a short break for the expo hall and then Shaun Walker's DotNetNuke Keynote will take place. I'm sure that room will be packed, so if you read this before then, get there early.

So far Scott is just covering some of the basics of 2008. Such as:  Multitargeting to allow development in 2008 that can be built towards specific older frameworks of the .Net runtime, 2.0, 3.0, 3.5. The IDE will only show you intelligence and tools available to the specific version that you are targeting.

Integrated AJAX support within 2008: JavaScript intellisense, debugging, testing. ASP.NET Ajax built into VS2k8 instead of being a separated download for the framework.

Rich CSS Management and HTML designer the Expression WYSIWYG designer.

LINQ and rich Data Support, new technology in 3.5, easily queries and works with data, ORDesigner included

Scott just welcomed Sam up on stage to do a demo for ASP.NET on 2k8. Demos switching between design and source view and the speed at which he can switch. Sam is demoing some of the new CSS functionality within VS2k8, as well as LINQ data access and now paging on a review with AJAX. He's now on to covering JavaScript intellisense and debugging.

I'm now sitting in the speaker. Room, trying to get online. There's Wireless here at hte conference, and I can get connected to it, but from there I'm pretty much SOL. So far the speaker room isn't looking too much better as I'm still typing this and not posting it! Heh, gotta love that. I had a darn IP address specified on my wired connection, no wonder I couldn't get online.

 

 

Viva Las Vegas! OpenForce07 is almost here
Sunday, November 04, 2007 11:03 AM

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.

Today we're going to do some site seeing and then have dinner with her folks again. The rest of the week is DotNetNuke related.

If you're in Vegas for DevConnections/OpenForce be sure to checkout my session on Wednesday "DotNetNuke Administration Best Practices". I'm looking forward to the conference as a whole, as well as getting to speak at my first "big" conference. I've presented at Tulsa Tech Fest the past two years (5 sessions) and multiple user groups all over the country, but this is my first big conference.

A new tip from Scott Guthrie
Thursday, November 01, 2007 7:38 AM

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.

As for OpenForce, Natalie and I leave in less than 48 hours. I don't think I'm ready! I have way too much to get done before 6:15 Saturday morning rolls around.

by Chris Hammond | with no comments
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