Shaun Walker's blog

DotNetNuke 7.0 Only Weeks Away!

sbwalker — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 18:02:05 GMT

The software industry moves at a lightning pace, and it is only through constant focus and continuous investment that a software product can remain both stable and relevant over the long term. As we approach the 10 Year Anniversary of the DotNetNuke platform, it seems only fitting that we are on the verge of announcing yet another significant product milestone. DotNetNuke 7.0 is just around the corner and represents a bold step forward for our Content Management Platform, including substantial business productivity enhancements, investments in web platform relevance, and a significant overhaul and modernization of the user interface and user experience.

It has been five months since I posted the announcement that the next major version of the platform was going to be DotNetNuke 7.0. This announcement created tremendous excitement and anticipation in the DotNetNuke community, as major version increments have always been utilized as an opportunity to introduce revolutionary new product features and capabilities. After months of intense product development, the finish line is finally in sight.

With that, I am pleased to announce that we released a Release Candidate (RC) of DotNetNuke 7.0 yesterday. You can download the RC from our project page on Codeplex. A Release Candidate represents a software version which is very near to “release” quality. So although we will not be officially endorsing the RC for production use, or providing an official upgrade path, it does represent a significant milestone in our software development efforts ( if you are looking for a more detailed explanation of our software release terminology, I would encourage you to read the blog written by Co-Founder, Joe Brinkman titled "What's In A Name?" ).

Modernizing a software platform does have its share of challenges from a backward compatibility perspective and, as usual, we are taking great care in ensuring a seamless upgrade path for our customers. In order to remain relevant and progressive, you need to be aware that DotNetNuke 7.0 has adopted a new set of baseline infrastructure requirements including ASP.NET 4.0. As a result we are encouraging all major stakeholders in the ecosystem ( module developers, designers, partners, customers, etc... ) to take the opportunity to install the RC in their own local environments. This is the last opportunity to let us know about any final issues which may need to be addressed prior to final release.

Mark your calendars now… the expected public release date (RTM) for DotNetNuke 7.0 will be Wednesday, November 28th.

On a side note, we expect to release a 6.2.5 Maintenance version today. This release contains some high priority product quality improvements as well as security patches for some vulnerabilities reported through our standard ecosystem channels. As a result we will be encouraging all of our customers to upgrade to the 6.2.5 release as soon as it is available.

I hope everyone is as excited as I am about the upcoming DotNetNuke 7.0 release. Please take the opportunity over the next week to put the new platform through its paces. Remember, only through our collective efforts can we ensure that this release has the greatest market impact of any DotNetNuke release to date.

Scott Hunter to present at DNN World 2012

sbwalker — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 00:28:58 GMT

Today, I am really excited to announce that Scott Hunter, Principal Program Manager for Microsoft ASP.NET, has agreed to do a developer keynote presentation at this fall’s DNN World conference on October 10-12th in Orlando, Florida.

Scott Hunter has been at Microsoft on the Web Platform and Tools team as a Principal Program Manager for the past five years focusing on .NET Web Development. This includes working on .NET 3.5, .NET 4 and the upcoming .NET 4.5 plus ASP.NET Web Forms, Web Pages and Razor Syntax, ASP.NET MVC and most recently ASP.NET Web API. Prior to working at Microsoft, Scott spent a couple of years building intranet websites for managing the oil fields of large oil firms in California. His first programming experience was working for a startup in California called Mustang Software building bulletin board systems in Turbo Pascal.

Based on the massive wave of next generation server and web development tools being released by Microsoft this fall, coupled with our plans to embrace a client services development model ( ie. Web API, jQuery, Knockout.js, etc… ) in DotNetNuke 7.0, we felt that Scott would be an excellent candidate to address the developer audience at this years DNN World conference.

If you are interested in hearing more about Scott’s role and background at Microsoft I would encourage you to watch a recent interview with him conducted by Tim Huckaby for Bytes by MSDN, or check out his recent appearance on .NET Rocks!

I should also mention that the early discount for Commercial Customers & Partners was so popular that the deadline was extended to July 15th… so I encourage you to move quickly to take advantage of the 50% savings!

Microsoft Declares the Future of ASP.NET is Web API

sbwalker — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 23:13:04 GMT

Sitting on a plane on my way home from Tech Ed 2012 in Orlando, I thought it would be a good time to jot down some key takeaways from this year’s conference. Some of these items I have known since the Microsoft MVP Summit which occurred in Redmond in late February ( but due to NDA restrictions I could not share them with the developer community at large ) and some of them are a result of insightful conversations with a wide variety of industry insiders and Microsoft employees at the conference.

First, let’s travel back in time 4 years to the Microsoft MVP Summit in 2008. Microsoft was facing some heat from market newcomer Ruby on Rails and responded with a new web development framework of its own, ASP.NET MVC. At the Summit they estimated that MVC would only be applicable for ~10% of all new web development projects. Based on that prediction I questioned why they were investing such considerable resources for such a relative edge case, but my guess is that they felt it was an important edge case at the time as some of the more vocal .NET evangelists as well as some very high profile start-ups ( ie. Twitter ) had publicly announced their intent to use Rails.

Microsoft made a lot of noise about MVC. In fact, they focused so much of their messaging and marketing hype around MVC that it appeared that WebForms was essentially dead. Yes, it may have been true that Microsoft continued to invest in WebForms, but from an outside perspective it really appeared that MVC was the only framework getting any real attention. As a result, MVC started to gain market share. An inside source at Microsoft told me that MVC usage has grown at a rate of about 5% per year and now sits at ~30%. Essentially by focusing so much marketing effort on MVC, Microsoft actually created a larger market demand for it. This is because in the Microsoft ecosystem there is somewhat of a bandwagon mentality amongst developers. If Microsoft spends a lot of time talking about a specific technology, developers get the perception that it must be really important. So rather than choosing the right tool for the job, they often choose the tool with the most marketing hype and then try to sell it to the customer.

In 2010, I blogged about the fact that MVC did not make any business sense for the DotNetNuke platform. This was because our ecosystem relied on third party extensions which were dependent on the WebForms model. If we migrated the core to MVC it would mean that all of the third party extensions would no longer be compatible, which would be an irresponsible business decision for us to make at the expense of our users and customers. However, this did not stop the debate from continuing to occur in our ecosystem. Clearly some developers had drunk Microsoft’s Kool-Aid about MVC and were of the mindset, to paraphrase an old Scottish saying, “If its not MVC, it’s crap”. Now, this is a rather ignorant position to take as most of the benefits of MVC can be achieved in WebForms with solid architecture and responsible coding practices. Clean separation of concerns, unit testing, and direct control over page output are all possible in the WebForms model – it just requires diligence and discipline.

So over the past few years some horror stories have begun to bubble to the surface of software development projects focused on ground-up rewrites of web applications for the sole purpose of migrating from WebForms to MVC. These large scale rewrites were typically initiated by engineering teams with only a single argument driving the business decision, that Microsoft was promoting MVC as “the future”. These ill-fated rewrites offered no benefit to end users or customers and in fact resulted in a less stable, less scalable and more complicated systems – basically taking one step forward and two full steps back. A case in point is the announcement earlier this week that a popular open source .NET CMS provider has decided to pull the plug on their new MVC product which has been under active development for more than 18 months and revert back to WebForms.

The availability of multiple server-side development models has deeply fragmented the Microsoft developer community. Some folks like to compare it to the age-old VB vs. C# language debate. However, the VB vs. C# language debate was ultimately more of a religious war because at least the two dominant programming languages were compatible with one another and could be used interchangeably. The issue with WebForms vs. MVC is much more challenging. This is because the messaging from Microsoft has positioned the two solutions as being incompatible with one another and as a result web developers feel like they are forced to choose one path or another. Yes, it is true that it has always been technically possible to use WebForms and MVC in the same project, but the tooling support has always made this feel “dirty”. The fragmentation has also made it difficult to attract newcomers as the perceived barrier to entry for learning ASP.NET has become higher. As a result many new software developers entering the market are gravitating to environments where the development model seems more simple and intuitive ( ie. PHP or Ruby ).

At the same time that the Web Platform team was busy promoting ASP.NET MVC, the Microsoft Office team has been promoting Sharepoint as a platform for building internal enterprise web applications. Sharepoint has great penetration in the enterprise and over time has been enhanced with improved extensibility capabilities for software developers. But, like many other mature enterprise ASP.NET web applications, it is built on the WebForms development model. Similar to DotNetNuke, Sharepoint leverages a rich third party ecosystem for both generic web controls and more specialized WebParts – both of which rely on WebForms. So basically this resulted in a situation where the Web Platform group had headed off in one direction and the Office team had gone in another direction, and the end customer was stuck in the middle trying to figure out what to do with their existing investments in Microsoft technology. It really emphasized the perception that the left hand was not speaking to the right hand, as strategically speaking there did not seem to be any high level plan from Microsoft to ensure consistency and continuity across the different product lines.

With the introduction of ASP.NET MVC, it also made some of the third party control vendors scratch their heads, and wonder what the heck Microsoft was thinking. The original value proposition of ASP.NET over Classic ASP was the ability for web developers to emulate the highly productive desktop development model by using abstract components for creating rich, interactive web interfaces. Web control vendors like Telerik, Infragistics, DevExpress, and ComponentArt had all built sizable businesses offering powerful user interface components to WebForms developers. And even after MVC was introduced these vendors continued to improve their products, offering greater productivity and a superior user experience via AJAX to what was possible in MVC. And since many developers were comfortable and satisfied with these third party solutions, the demand remained strong and the third party web control market continued to prosper despite the availability of MVC.

While all of this was going on in the Microsoft ecosystem, there has also been a fundamental shift in the general software development industry. Driven by the explosion of Internet-enabled devices, the focus has now centered on service-oriented architecture (SOA). Service-oriented architecture is all about defining a public API for your product that any client can consume; whether it’s a native application running on a smart phone or tablet, a web browser taking advantage of HTML5 and Javascript, or a rich desktop application running on a PC. REST-based services which utilize the less verbose characteristics of JSON as a transport mechanism, have become the preferred approach over older, more bloated SOAP-based techniques. SOA also has the benefit of producing a cross-platform API, as every major technology stack is able to interact with standard REST-based web services. And for web applications, more and more developers are turning to robust Javascript libraries like JQuery and Knockout for browser-based client-side development techniques for calling web services and rendering content to end users. In fact, traditional server-side page rendering has largely fallen out of favor, resulting in decreased demand for server-side frameworks like Ruby on Rails, WebForms, and (gasp) MVC.

In response to these new industry trends, Microsoft did what it always does – it immediately poured some resources into developing a solution which will ensure they remain relevant and competitive in the web space. This work culminated in a new framework which was branded as Web API. It is convention-based and designed to embrace native HTTP standards without copious layers of abstraction. This framework is designed to be the ultimate replacement for both the REST aspects of WCF and ASP.NET MVC Web Services. And since it was developed out of band with a dependency only on ASP.NET 4.0, it means that it can be used immediately in a variety of production scenarios.

So at Tech Ed 2012 it was made abundantly clear in numerous sessions that Microsoft views Web API as the “Future of ASP.NET”. In fact, one Microsoft PM even went as far as to say that if we look 3-4 years into the future, that all ASP.NET web applications will be developed using the Web API approach. This is a fairly bold prediction and clearly telegraphs where Microsoft plans to allocate its resources going forward. Currently Web API is being delivered as part of the MVC4 package, but this is only temporary for the sake of convenience. It also sounds like there are still internal discussions going on in terms of how to brand the various aspects of ASP.NET going forward – perhaps the moniker of “ASP.NET Web Stack” coined a couple years ago by Scott Hanselman and utilized as part of the open source release of ASP.NET bits on Codeplex a few months back will eventually stick.

Web API is being positioned as the unification of ASP.NET – the glue that is able to pull this fragmented mess back together again. The “One ASP.NET” strategy will promote the use of all frameworks - WebForms, MVC, and Web API, even within the same web project. Basically the message is utilize the appropriate aspects of each framework to solve your business problems. Instead of navigating developers to a fork in the road, the plan is to educate them that “hybrid” applications are a great strategy for delivering solutions to customers. In addition, the service-oriented approach coupled with client-side development promoted by Web API can effectively be used in both WebForms and MVC applications. So this means it is also relevant to application platforms like DotNetNuke and Sharepoint, which means that it starts to create a unified development strategy across all ASP.NET product lines once again.

And so what about MVC? There have actually been rumors floated that MVC has reached a stage of maturity where, similar to WebForms, it will be treated more as a maintenance product line going forward ( MVC4 may in fact be the last significant iteration of this framework ). This may sound alarming to some folks who have recently adopted MVC but it really shouldn’t, as both WebForms and MVC will continue to play a vital role in delivering solutions to customers. They will just not be the primary area where Microsoft is spending the majority of its R&D resources. That distinction will obviously go to Web API. And when the question comes up of why not enhance MVC to make it work with Web API, you must take a step back and look at this from the higher level to see that it really makes no sense. MVC is a server-side page compositing framework; whereas, Web API promotes client-side page compositing with a heavy focus on web services. In order to make MVC work well with Web API, would require a complete rewrite of MVC and at the end of the day, there would be no upgrade path for existing MVC applications. So it really does not make much business sense.

So what does this have to do with DotNetNuke?

Well, around 8-12 months ago we recognized the software industry trends towards web services and client-side development. We decided to utilize a “hybrid” model which would provide compatibility for existing modules while at the same time provide a bridge for developers who wanted to utilize more modern web techniques. Customers who like the productivity and familiarity of WebForms can continue to build custom modules using the traditional approach. However, in DotNetNuke 6.2 we also introduced a new Service Framework which is actually built on top of MVC2 ( we chose to leverage MVC because it had the most intuitive, light-weight REST implementation in the .NET stack ). The Services Framework allowed us to build some rich interactive features in DotNetNuke 6.2, including the Messaging and Notification Center and Activity Feed. But based on where we know Microsoft is heading, it makes sense for the next major version of DotNetNuke ( which is expected to be released in Q4 2012 ) to migrate from MVC2 to Web API. This will likely result in some breaking changes in the Services Framework but we feel it is the best approach for ensuring the platform remains highly modern and relevant. The fact that our development strategy is perfectly aligned with the “One ASP.NET” strategy from Microsoft means that our customers and developer community can be confident in their current and future investments in the DotNetNuke platform.

C.M.S. Redefined: Cloud. Mobile. Social.

sbwalker — Wed, 09 May 2012 17:19:35 GMT

Almost exactly one year ago I posted a blog which highlighted the three most pervasive technological trends in the software industry and predicted that the Content Management market was in for a significant disruption in the coming years as it attempts to get comfortable with these new technologies. This same blog was republished with Bryan Ruby’s permission on the CMS Report website.

This morning I kicked off Day 2 at CMS Expo in Chicago, IL with a mini-keynote on this same topic. But rather than just talking about what cloud, mobile, and social represent from a technology perspective, I also tried to explain WHY these trends have come to the forefront in recent years.

At a fundamental level I believe they are actually driven by globalization. And globalization would not have been possible without some critical infrastructure, specifically Internet connectivity, access to broadband, and affordable mobile devices. These innovations provided the basis for a global distributed workforce. However, they alone were not enough to generate the expected return on investment in terms of increased business efficiency and productivity. Rather, this required the emergence of collaborative business networks – networks which could provide the necessary collaboration, coordination, and communication to forge deeper business relationships and more meaningful interactions. And these collaborative business networks rely on those three industry trends which we are all very familiar with now: cloud, mobile, social – also known as systems of engagement. Systems of engagement are critical for getting the most out of a global economy.

In the context of Content Management, we firmly believe that your CMS will continue to be the central hub of your business. However, we also believe that in order to adapt to the changing landscape, your CMS will need to be fully and deeply integrated with systems of engagement. The resulting solution is a perfect marriage of content creation and content delivery. And in looking at the innovation adoption lifecycle, we believe that the cloud, mobile, and social trends have already jumped the chasm and are well on their way to gaining mainstream adoption in the mid-market.

In summary, we believe the future of C.M.S. is already being redefined as Cloud, Mobile, and Social. And we are taking steps to ensure DotNetNuke is ready for this transformation.

The slides for my mini-keynote can be dowloaded here.

.NET Popularity Increases, Java and PHP Decrease…

sbwalker — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 04:47:42 GMT

TIOBE Software has maintained a Programming Community Index for more than 10 years. Updated on a monthly basis, it is an indicator of the popularity of programming languages in use around the world. The ratings are based on the number of skilled engineers, courses, seminars, and third party vendors actively using the various technologies determined primarily through search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Amazon, YouTube and Baidu.

The April 2012 edition was recently released and highlighted some interesting market trends…

From a position of strength at the turn of the century, Java usage has been in a steady state of decline for the past decade. This past month it actually lost its top ranking and fell below the popularity line for the C programming language ( which has maintained a relatively stable state in recent years ). There are obviously numerous reasons for Java’s fall from grace but the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle in late 2009 has certainly not helped reverse its fortunes.

Interestingly, PHP usage has also been declining according to TIOBE, with usage peaking at 10% between the years 2005-2010 and experiencing a steady decrease in the years since, to ~5% today. Ironically, this has happened despite the strong growth of LAMP CMS systems like Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla! in recent years. Perhaps customers have realized that PHP is still not capable of living up to the business challenges in mid-market and enterprise environments, and are looking elsewhere for tools they can depend on.

The largest beneficiary of the decline in Java and PHP usage appears to be Microsoft’s .NET platform. In particular, usage of Microsoft’s C# programming language has been steadily increasing since it was introduced in 2002 and may soon achieve 10% market share. Combine that with usage of Visual Basic and you will notice that usage of Microsoft technology is near 15% worldwide ( nearly twice the adoption of PHP ), and is one of the few development platforms experiencing steady year over year growth. I believe this speaks to the proven reliability and enterprise capabilities of .NET, as well as Microsoft's ongoing commitment to maintain the relevance of its technology stack.

Based on the graph, it is also interesting to note that C# usage surpassed Visual Basic usage in late 2010, which coincidentally was the exact same time that DotNetNuke Corporation announced that it was going to migrate its core framework from VB to C#.

Microsoft Announces Open Technologies Inc. Subsidiary

sbwalker — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 04:45:47 GMT

A few weeks ago Microsoft surprised many folks in the industry by announcing a new wholly owned subsidiary known as Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. The stated goal of the new enterprise is to advance the company’s investment in openness – including interoperability, open standards and open source.

"The subsidiary provides a new way of engaging in a more clearly defined manner. This new structure will help facilitate the interaction between Microsoft's proprietary development processes and the company's open innovation efforts and relationships with open source and open standards communities," said Jean Paoli, who becomes president of the subsidiary after serving as Microsoft's general manager of interoperability strategy.

Since Microsoft chose to trickle out the announcement without much fanfare and without any detailed specifics, there has been a lot of speculation by industry analysts and media in the weeks since. Depending on their level of paranoia for the software giant, people seemed to fall into one of two camps, those who think that Microsoft created the subsidiary because of a desire for greater interoperability and compatibility, and those who feel they were looking for ways to protect their extensive patent portfolio. I actually think that neither of these conclusions were the primary driver. Instead, I personally think it has to do with IP governance.

Based on my experience as a founding interim director and advisor of the Outercurve Foundation, I have some insight into one of Microsoft’s previous open source initiatives. The mission of the Outercurve Foundation is to enable the exchange of code and ideas between commercial software companies and open source communities. Microsoft was the sole founding sponsor of the Foundation, providing the initial funding to create the non-profit organization and playing an instrumental role in defining its bylaws and agenda. Conceptually it appears that there is high degree of overlap in the goals of the Outercurve Foundation and the new Open Technologies Inc. subsidiary. However, it is important to note that the Outercurve Foundation was established as a completely independent entity, not owned or controlled by Microsoft in any way. I believe that this may be the primary driver for Microsoft’s decision to spin up a new open source commercial subsidiary rather than relying on the existing foundation.

The Outercurve Foundation utilizes a Gallery model for managing open source projects. There are currently four galleries which represent a variety of projects, with the majority based on Microsoft technology. Some open source projects have been contributed by the community and others originated within Microsoft. The important thing to note is in regards to project governance. In the majority of cases, the copyright for the open source projects intellectual property has been signed over to the Outercurve Foundation by the project founders. In turn, the Outercurve Foundation provides a variety of benefits including legal indemnification and IP management of contributor license agreements. However, this transfer of ownership to a non-profit foundation is not appropriate for every open source project. And I think this has created a bit of a dilemma for Microsoft over time.

As Microsoft has become more open in recent years, it has wanted to share more assets with the community. However, there is fairly clear evidence that Microsoft and Open Source are still “strange bedfellows” as they have not been able to share IP in a consistent manner. For example, Microsoft transferred ownership of the ASP.NET AJAX project to the Outercurve Foundation back in 2009 where the project was then released under a standard BSD open source license. Similarly, it transferred ownership of Orchard and WebFormsMVP. However, when Microsoft announced that it intended to release ASP.NET MVC under an open source license ( Microsoft Public License - MS-PL ), it did not transfer the IP to the Outercurve Foundation. Instead, it chose to retain ownership of the IP and continue to develop it internally.

So I think its not a coincidence that the announcement of the Open Technologies Inc. subsidiary comes hot on the heels of the announcement a few weeks earlier that the ASP.NET Web API and ASP.NET Web Pages ( including the Razor parsing engine ) are now available under an open source Apache 2.0 license. My hunch is that Microsoft Legal did not feel comfortable transferring these sizable technology assets to a third party foundation for governance. Rather, it might make more sense for this IP to be managed by an official commercial subsidiary of Microsoft, as it gives them much greater control and flexibility over how they engage with the community, accept contributions, and allow Microsoft employees to assist in its ongoing development.

I guess we will just have to wait and see how this new Open Technologies Inc. initiative from Microsoft evolves…