PDC05: DotNetNuke - The Migration to ASP.NET 2.0

The last session I attended today was called a "Birds of a feather" session... this is much less formal and is sort of a community-style meeting. This session was great as I had many questions and the opportunity to sit and listen to the authors of DNN discuss their thoughts and directions for the product, as well as to see that they are truly interested in the feedback from the community was simply great.

The primary objective was to discuss the migration of/support for .NET 2.0 in DNN. The discussion was of particular interest to me as there were many assumptions that I had made about which features of the framework they "had" to update to - however, after listening to them talk, I've pretty much changed my positions... the problem is... they are not just doing things earlier than .NET and therefore should be replaced with the "native" versions of such... rather they have a significant amount of "extra" functionality that they consider "core". to simply hack and replace with the .NET equivalents would be to throw away valuable features. This applies in particular to webparts as well as the skinning/themeing components... The team was truly thinking creatively about ways that they can grab the "best of both worlds" which is very encouraging.  It will be interesting to see how the final version looks on .NET 2.0 and what parts of the framework they were able to leverage and which ones they left with the default implementation.

Check out MSDN for more PDC05 information.