So last month I blogged that DotNetNuke was picking up momentum and would soon overtake Gallery ( a PHP photo gallery app ) as the most downloaded Project in the entire Windows Web App Gallery. Well this past weekend it achieved this distinction and in the process surpassed 108,000 downloads!

The United Nations Public Administration Network ( or UNPAN ) is organised by the UN Division for Public Administration and is part of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. It’s mission statement is to promote the sharing of knowledge, experiences and best practices throughout the world in sound public policies, effective public administration and efficient civil services, through capacity-building and cooperation among the United Nations Member States, with emphasis on south-south cooperation and UNPAN's commitment to integrity and excellence.

I am a regular reader of Matt Asay’s “Open Road” blog on CNET as I generally find his commentary on the business and politics of open source to be informative, insightful, and thought provoking. Last week Matt posted a blog about the fact that commercial open source had very good year in 2009. In the article, he mentioned the progress of a number of companies with commercial...

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ARPA-E, or Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, is a United States government agency set up to promote and fund research and development of advanced energy technologies. It received $400 million funding in April 2009 through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA).

Unless you have been living under a rock for the past year, I assume you must have heard of ASP.NET MVC by now. ASP.NET MVC is new framework created by Microsoft which offers an alternate development model to the traditional WebForms approach typically utilized in ASP.NET.

Another DotNetNuke sighting…

Pfizer Inc., a pharmaceutical company committed to helping people improve their health by discovering and developing medicines, is using DotNetNuke for its Robitussin product line website. The website provides consumers with wellness information related to cold and flu symptoms and their associated treatments and showcases how Pfizer’s products provide you with effective...

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Last Tuesday I had the privilege to present at the Seattle DotNetNuke User Group, a group created by our very own Scott Willhite ( DotNetNuke Director of Community Relations ). Originally Charles Nurse had been invited as the guest speaker but due to a personal scheduling conflict he was unable to make it, so Scott Willhite asked me if I could fill in and I enthusiastically agreed.

Microsoft announced the Windows Web Gallery at the MIX09 conference in March 2009. During Scott Guthrie’s keynote ( at approximately the 42 minute mark ), Bill Staples ( General Manager of Microsoft's Web Platform and Tools Engineering Teams ) showcased DotNetNuke as one of the initial applications which was being made available through this innovative new channel.

The benefits of the Windows...

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 The CodePlex Foundation was announced on September 10, 2009 and I was very honoured to be invited to serve as an interim member of the Board of Directors. To recap, the mission of the CodePlex Foundation is to “enable the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities”. Over the past 4 months we have worked hard to deliver on that promise, and I would like to believe that my experience in creating and managing a large open source project and community ecosystem has provided value to the Foundation in these early stages.

Now that we are a week into 2010, I think the time is right to share one of my more serious New Years Resolutions for the coming year. Reflecting upon 2009, I can point to many areas where I was instrumental in helping chart an exciting new course for the DotNetNuke project, but the one area where I believe I fell significantly short is in regards to community participation.

In past years I was far more active in community channels such as Forums and Blogs and I personally believe this increased level of transparency was instrumental in stimulating the overall health and momentum of the project. Therefore in 2010 I resolve to increase my community activity and become much more vocal on a wide variety of topics which affect the DotNetNuke ecosystem.

In the spring of this year, we spent considerable time brainstorming the user experience strategy for the DotNetNuke platform. Embracing Web 2.0 techniques and making DotNetNuke more visually appealing and contemporary had been on the roadmap for quite some time and we knew that we needed a new user interface paradigm in order to accomplish this goal. And to ensure that end-users received the optimal user experience possible, we also recognized that we needed to enforce consistency and provide formal conventions for web developers and designers. This meant that whatever solution we chose needed to be accessible to everyone and therefore needed to be available as part of our core platform.

DotNetNuke has long occupied a rather uncomfortable position in the Microsoft ecosystem. When the project was started in late 2002, 'open source' on the Microsoft platform was a completely foreign concept; an oxymoron which often elicited blank stares or negative reactions from all types of stakeholders including both developers within the Microsoft ecosystem as well as open source idealists on non-Microsoft platforms. Over the years, as education and acceptance of open source has increased within the IT industry, so has the popularity and adoption of DotNetNuke. After 7 years and over 6 million downloads, I am very proud to be able to say that DotNetNuke thrived on the early adversity it faced and has successfully grown into the largest, most active open source project native to the Microsoft platform. With all that in mind, I am very excited to be a part of some ground-breaking news...

One aspect which has been critical to the success of the DotNetNuke platform is the ability to enhance the core functionality with custom extensions. Custom extensions are essential for delivering a complete solution and over the years thousands of diverse extensions have been created by software developers around the world. If you take a moment to consider the extensions landscape today, you soon recognize that the vast majority of them are commercial in nature, resulting in a flourishing commercial extension ecosystem in the DotNetNuke community. The commercial ecosystem is expansive and has been driven by entrepreneurial spirit but also by the availability of professional marketplaces where consumers can experience a wide range of products.   I’m pleased to announce that DotNetNuke Corp. has taken a major step forward in strengthening the DotNetNuke commercial ecosystem by acquiring the preeminent marketplace for DotNetNuke extension sales, Snowcovered.com, and adding the architect of Snowcovered, Brice Snow, to the DotNetNuke Corp. team.

The DotNetNuke ecosystem is a vibrant open source community where commercial and non-commercial stakeholders co-exist in an environment which encourages active involvement from both consumers and contributors. With such a diverse set of product stakeholders, DotNetNuke has always benefitted from an abundance of support options for end users. DotNetNuke Corp. is now pleased to offer Developer Support Services for highly focused engagements with our subscription customers. Our new Developer Support Services complement the services provided by our system integration partners.

There is never a dull moment when it comes to DotNetNuke, and the past week certainly had more than its fair share of excitement. The combination of a new product release, infrastructure upgrades, and broad media exposure had a noticeable impact on the ecosystem - and resulted in some unexpected challenges. The most visible issues manifested themselves in the focal point of the DotNetNuke community - the dotnetnuke.com website. So if you count yourselves amongst the thousands who visited the website last week and experienced uncharacteristically slow response times, we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. The good news is the issues have been resolved and the website is now performing better than ever. I would like to provide some insight into what happened.
 

Lately I have seen a number of posts in our Forums pointing out the fact that I have been much less vocal in community channels in recent months. Some people have even speculated that the reason for my absence may be related to the fact that we recently received Series A funding and that my role in the project has been significantly diminished - that I have been "castrated" or "muzzled" and that a "gag order" may now be in effect for the original project founders. Some folks have even gone as far as to suggest that I did not author the Founders Message in the last Community Newsletter sent out in February to coincide with the launch of Professional Edition - that it was actually written by "Marketing" or "Public Relations" consultants. All of these items seem to point to the same phenomenon - that there is currently a high degree of fear and uncertainty amongst the members of our community. And honestly, this is a perfectly natural reaction when you consider the magnitude of the recent changes in the DNN project.

DotNetNuke 4.9.3 represents a stabilization release to the production-grade 4.x codebase.

As always you can see a complete list with all the details of each fix/change in the ChangeLog.

Congratulations!  The online voting phase for Microsoft Canada’s Ignite IT Awards 2009 has closed and our submission has been selected as ONE of FIVE Developer finalists!

There is only 1 week left in the community voting for the Ignite IT awards from Microsoft Canada. In the Developer category, DotNetNuke is currently ranked #2 ( behind AgilePlanner for Digital Tableetop from the University of Calgary ) and could benefit from some community support to push it back into the lead. Remember that these awards are designed to recognize and reward the efforts of Canadian IT Professionals and Software Developers who have a great story and have made a difference in the software industry using Microsoft technology.

http://www.microsoft.com/canada/igniteit-awards/view_submissiondetails.aspx?id=247

Microsoft Canada has combined the Ignite IT Awards, the MSDN Code Awards and the TechNet Innovation Awards for the first time this year. These awards are designed to recognize and reward the efforts of Canadian IT Professionals and Software Developers who have a great story and have made a difference in the software industry using Microsoft technology. Based on the fact our Enginering headquarters is located in British Columbia, Canada, we have sumitted the DotNetNuke product and Canadian development team for consideration. The voting is open to everyone worldwide, and we would definitely appreciate your support...

http://www.microsoft.com/canada/igniteit-awards/view_submissiondetails.aspx?id=247

Earlier this year I blogged about that fact that all the hype around Facebook had triggered my curiosity, and I was spending some of my spare time tinkering with the new Facebook platform. Rather than build the typical 'Hello World' application, I wanted to create an application which actually had some more practical use so I asked around to find out what people were looking for...

Earlier this week we announced that DotNetNuke has raised venture capital from a syndicate of tier 1 venture capital firms, August Capital and Sierra Ventures. Considering the current state of the global economy, this announcement is a huge vote of confidence in our product and community, and a testament to the global impact we have made on the industry. It means that DotNetNuke Corporation is now going to be able to deliver on its promise of rapidly innovating the DotNetNuke platform and creating new opportunities for participants in our ecosystem.

Anticipation for the DotNetNuke OpenForce 08 Conferences is growing, and we are now only a month away from the kickoff event. OpenForce Europe 08 occurs on October 6 & 7 at the Leeuwenhorst Conference Center near Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Following this event, OpenForce North America follows up with its second annual conference on November 10-13 co-located with DevConnections in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada

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I just wanted to provide a heads up that I am doing an in-person presentation at the BAY.NET User Group on Wednesday evening this week. I met one of their user group leaders, Oliver Nguyen, at the MVP Summit this past spring and he kindly invited me to come and speak about DotNetNuke. I am honoured for the opportunity and look forward to meeting their membership...

Further to my last blog on this subject, I think it may be useful to provide some details on one of the more challenging trademark issues we are currently dealing with, as it may shed some light on the legal complications of protecting the project brand.

When DotNetNuke was originally announced in February 2003, the developer community in its insatiable appetite for simple concise technology acronyms, immediately abbreviated the DotNetNuke name to 'DNN'. This short-hand reference has been synonymously linked to the project ever since, especially in on-line communication channels such as the forums and blogs hosted on dotnetnuke.com.

I mentioned in my last blog that I would post an update once we were successfully able to work through the security issues reported last week. The most important update is Version 4.8.3 was released this past Tuesday and fully addresses each of the reported items. You can get it now from the Downloads page on our site.

Since the DotNetNuke application was originally released, we have been committed to providing a highly secure web platform to the Microsoft community. Security on the web is a challenging area and we have gone to great lengths over the past 5 years to ensure the integrity of the application. We are certainly not perfect; therefore, we have (regrettably) dealt with a number of security issues over the years. In each case, we were able to solve the problem and issue a patch release which offered the necessary level of protection to the community. There is a tough balancing act between disclosing too much information or too little information, and we have relied on the process established by some of the industry giants in terms of dealing with these types of issues.

In case you did not know already, DotNetNuke Corporation has been offering professional Support services for the DotNetNuke platform since January of this year through our Subscription Program. We have definitely been encouraged with the level of interest in the program so far and appreciate the business provided by those organizations who have chosen to take advantage of the service. However, one thing which I have been meaning to do for some time, is write a blog which clarifies certain aspects of the program, as I believe there are some incorrect assumptions which have been circulating in the community since its introduction.

In early April our friend Michael Desmond, from Redmond Developer News, wrote a thought provoking article related to Open Source on the Microsoft platform. The title of the article was "Open Source .NET Projects Getting Cold Shoulder?" and it featured quotes from Jeff Atwood ( formerly of Vertigo - the original authors of the IBuySpy Portal sample application in 2000 ) which highlighted that "open source projects are treated as second-class citizens in the Microsoft ecosystem". Later, in May, Michael Desmond followed up on the original article and published a new editorial focussed on the question of "Should Microsoft be doing more to make open source development a first-class citizen in the .NET space?".