Over the past couple of years our issue database has been showing signs of age.  Searches often result in error messages, linking issues can cause server instability, and our general issue workflow has become unwieldy.  We are currently running an older version of Gemini because of some changes to the security model which has made upgrading a non-trivial issue.  To help resolve these problems, we have performed a complete review of our current issue tracking processes and have just completed an overhaul of our infrastructure to allow us to transition to the current version of Gemini.

Last week I attended Tech Ed Australia for the 5th time in a row and what a great time was had by all.  I did plenty of networking (really means beer drinking with delegates) and attended a bunch of cool sessions and I even delivered a lunch time session on my fave topics, DotNetNuke, Silverlight and RIA Services. 

I went to a bunch of Silverlight/UX sessions by Shane Morris (Microsoft) which were excellent and really brought home to...

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If you just read the latest DotNetNuke news letter you will have seen that the new teams have been announced.  I'm very honoured to have been promoted to Trustee!!  How cool.  I have been working with DNN since it started way back when and have had a great time.  Recently I have been a bit quiet while I got the hang of being a dad, but now I’m back into it and hope to bring a lot of value to the project by crafting up a testing strategy and automated tests.

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I have made a few changes to the AuthenticationService so that it can be used from any portal and child portals as well.  The previous post had a few hard coded variables to get the ball rolling. 

using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Web.Ria; using System.Web.Ria.ApplicationServices; using DotNetNuke.Entities.Portals; using DotNetNuke.Security.Membership; using DotNetNuke.Common.Utilities; using...

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A man in a hot air balloon, realizing he was lost, reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended further and shouted to the lady "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am" The woman below replied, "You're in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You're between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude." "You must be in IT," said the balloonist....

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Wow I turn away for a little while to be a new dad and then DNN gets over 700,000 users!  Pretty impressive growth.  Won’t be long before we hit the million mark.  We had a little prize for the 100,000th person who signed up, maybe we should get a prize together for the millionth.

To do automated web tests of your projects you can use a cool tool called Watin. 

“Welcome at the WatiN (pronounced as What-in) website. Inspired by Watir development of WatiN started in December 2005 to make a similar kind of Web Application Testing possible for the .Net languages. Since then WatiN has grown into an easy to use, feature rich and stable framework. WatiN is developed in C# and aims to bring you an easy way to automate your tests with Internet Explorer and FireFox using .Net.”

Once you have Watin you can then write tests like this that will open up your browsers go to the page you are working on, add values, click buttons etc and help to make sure your projects work as you expect.

/// ...

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I have been looking for a good way to add code to my blogs and Charles put me onto the Insert Code for Windows Live Writer plugin.  Works a treat.  Click the Read more to see how the code looks.

Check out Crafty Codes blog on how to set up the WLW with DNNBlog.

New book out for DNN on Wrox Press, DotNetNuke Websites, Problem Design Solution.  I tech edited this book and thought it was pretty good in its creation of a story of building a site from scratch to a functioning DNN site.

Cheers

I jsut had a look at the number of registered users and its 599000.  Thas really close to 600,000, I remember when we gave a prize for the 100,000th person to register, wow that was a while ago.

I have completed the template for VS2008 that I was building so I could build TDD DNN Modules easily.  Download it from Code Plex.  Here's how to use it.

The vbproj for the module has some modifications to allow you to develop outside the DesktopModules folder, see this post for details http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/825/EntryID/1873/Default.aspx. ...

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Had a few requests for more details on how Im auto packaging and developing the Help.  So here it is.

xmlversion="1.0"encoding="utf-8"?>

ProjectDefaultTargets="Build"xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"ToolsVersion="3.5">

     PropertyGroup>

          Configuration Condition=" '$(Configuration)' == '' ">DebugConfiguration>

          Platform Condition=" '$(Platform)' == '' ">AnyCPUPlatform>

          ProductVersion>9.0.30428ProductVersion>

...

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I have been rewriting the Help Module using Test Driven Development Techniques.  This means that I write a unit test or 4 for each piece of functionality.    The test results look like this:

I have been doing this for the SqlDataProvider and have been keeping my code coverage as high as is possible.  At the moment it is at 91%, this is because some parts of teh code will never be hit by tests...

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When releasing a Core Module we need to submit a package that contains the installable zip, a source zip, the release notes and the test cases.  Making this package can get tedious so I have created a MSBuild mod for my proj file.  This is an update on my earlier post.

In the last section of the proj file add this.

 TargetName="AfterBuild"DependsOnTargets="DeployModule">

 Target>

 PropertyGroup>

    ModuleFolder>TestDrivenDNNModuleModuleFolder>

    DNNDirectory>C:\DotNetNuke\Vault\WebsiteDNNDirectory>

...

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I am rewriting the Help module and am doing it TDD style.  As I was writing a test to check the adding of a tutorial to the db I realised that what I really wanted to do was not only add the tutorial but also the list of associated category IDs.  So I did a bit of research and came up with this.  There is now a new parameter on the Help_AddTutorial sproc that takes an xml field.  The XML is a list of the categories.  The XML is then parsed and added to a temporary table which is then used to add the multiple...

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When you build a DNN module using the template or from scratch you probably locate the project under the Desktop modules folder and start developing.  Doing this complicates source control and automated building in my experience so I wanted a way to build my modules in a separate folder away from the target host website.  Andrew Nurse dropped a snippet of a build script to me that copies the assemblies, pdb files and the rest of the files you need to debug your module on.  It copies the files marked as Content...

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Two things.

1. Version 3.0.2 will be packaged and entered into the tracker tonight.
2. Version 4.0.0 is under way.  The skeleton project with the testing framework has been checked into Vault and work has started on the automated test framework as well.

Cheers

Michael Kordahi aka the Delicate Genius is a Microsoft Developer Evangelist in Sydney, he inteviewed me about my ReMIX session last week check it out here http://delicategeniusblog.com/?p=682.

There is some free top quality training going on down Orlando way on the weekend between the two US Tech Ed sessions.  Check out http://www.openforce08.com/Home/OpenForceConnect/Orlando/Overview/tabid/115/Default.aspx for more details.  Looks like a great weekend of DNN, shame I cant make the trip for the 4th time this year :).

Let me know if youre going.

Just got this new bling for my Blog about ReMIX '08. Building Rich Internet Applications using Microsoft Silverlight 2

I will be presenting at ReMIX Australia '08 in Sydney and Melbourne in May.  Check out the details here

http://www.microsoft.com/australia/remix08/index.aspx

Got my email this morning reawarding me MVP for another year.  Now enough of that time to get back to finishing the TDD DNN Module template.

I have now nearly completed the module.  Tests are now in place for all layers and cover

• 100% of the testable code in the Edit part of the module
• 100% of the Controller
• 100% of the testable parts of SqlDataProvider

You can check out the code solution at http://www.codeplex.com/TestDrivenDNNModule

I'll write the rest of the tests ASAP.

When you are developing a DNN module you have access to a bunch of properties in the core framework such as UserID, ModuleID and LocalResourceFile.  When you start developing modules using Test Driven Development (TDD) you still need access to these properties which means we need to be able to access them from  the presenter class.

The presenter class has a construct like this



        Public Sub New(ByVal _View As IViewTestDrivenDNNModule)

            View = _View

           ...

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I drew this up to help give an understanding of how the testing of DNN Modules is going to work for my TDD DNN Module template at CodePlex.



This diagram shows how each level of a DNN module can be unit tested using RhinoMocks to generate the mock objects.  It also shows where I will be driving the integration testing and...

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