As I indicated last week, I am pleased to announce the Call for Speakers for the 2010 DotNetNuke Connections conference.  Once again, this years conference will be held at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas from November 1st through the 4th with pre and post-conference training available as well. 

We could not do this show without our speakers and we have been fortunate in the past to have had some great session proposals by many well respected speakers.  Some of those speakers have been selected to present their sessions and unfortunately some of them have not been.  Such is the nature of any conference.  As usual we will continue to look for new speakers to bring fresh new topics to the conference.  So if you have submitted sessions in the past then I would encourage you to submit again.  If you have public speaking experience and some great ideas for sessions then I would invite you to submit your sessions as well.

Remember that all speakers will be required to present at least two sessions.  So make sure you submit plenty of session abstracts to improve your odds of getting selected.

This article is cross-posted from my personal blog.

One of the tenets of Unit Testing is that in order to test a piece of code we often need to create some alternate implementation of one or more of the Interfaces involved in a test.  This concept is generally called a Test Double.  However there are many types of Test Double, and there is some degree...

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At the last Microsoft MVP summit, I was eating lunch with Jeff Paries who I had collaborated with on previous Silverlight projects, but had not met in person until that week. I commented that I had not used the Silverlight gauge he created about a year ago because it was too big...

The last three weeks I have found myself extremely busy with the Skinning Contest. First, I built a module for the voting portion of the contest (with the help of Joe, thanks Joe!). When originally deployed, we found some problems with allowing everyone to vote so I apologize to those who initially couldn't vote (we have corrected this as of last week), so I spent a bit more time investigating that. Next I started preparing a skin object for public release (also for the skinning contest). Finally, I spent a good portion of this week re-packaging the 25 submissions for public consumption (this requires proper licensing, structure, naming, etc.)...

Over the past several months we have been making some significant changes in our release process.  We have made a commitment to monthly releases, opened up our code repository and in general have made a move to be more transparent.  During this same period we have also made some changes to our development processes to separate our feature development from our bug fixes.  The DotNetNuke 5.3.0 is our first quarterly feature release that is benefiting from this new development process. 

In addition to splitting out our feature development, we are also using a more formal Scrum methodology and have broken down our features into different code sprints.  This process allows us to deliver a set of features that can stand alone  and be tested independent from other features or enhancements which might be delivered in later sprints.  This flexibility also enables us to be a little more fluid with our quarterly releases which are often timed to coincide with major marketing events.  This Alpha release is a merge between the 5.2.3 codebase and DotNetNuke 5.3.0 Sprint 1 development branch and includes the following features:

We are once again in the heart of the planning season for the DotNetNuke DevConnections and SDC conferences. It is that time of year when we ask all of you to submit your session abstracts for this years DotNetNuke North American conference.  Later this week we’ll be opening up the official Call for Speakers on DotNetNuke.com, but I wanted to take the opportunity to give speakers a heads up so they could start preparing their abstracts so that they are ready once we open the submission form.  Like the last three years, we are accepting  session submissions in 4 different topic areas:  Development, Design, Administration and Open Source.

DotNetNuke recently moved to an Open Repository that is hosted on CodePlex.  As Phil Beadle recently noted, the synchronization process is now fully operational and is running nightly to ensure that the CodePlex repository mirrors our internal version control system.  Of course, having access to the source code and understanding how to use the source code to get to a working build is two different things.  The source code package that we deliver with each release is slightly modified from our own internal repository in order to minimize confusion for the community.  Over the years the core team has become accustomed to these steps, but for new people, getting DotNetNuke up and running from source code can be a bit daunting.  Hopefully I can help dispel the mystery and make it a little easier to understand why DotNetNuke source code is packaged in this manner.

So it has been over five and a half years since I started a job. I forgot how nervous one can get! I’m excited, but nervous at the same time. New people, new places, new things to do. Fortunately for me, I know some of the faces, less so some of the places, and have an idea of some of the new things to do. I’m starting up at DotNetNuke’s Headquarters in the morning.

While you will find a bunch of free DotNetNuke modules with source code...

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Today the German DotNetNuke User Group meets at Berlin

Here is my disclaimer, Cathal has a post explaining the correct way to install DotNetNuke on Windows 7 so that you can use the “cross-app pool isolation feature”.

However, I posted a tutorial that explains how to install DotNetNuke the “old way”...

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Over the last several years DotNetNuke has maintained a policy of providing an upgrade path for users running previous versions of the platform.  Only in rare instances will we intentionally break a feature or an API or do something that would cause 3rd party extensions to break.  Customers have expressed to us over the years how important it is to maintain an upgrade path.  This concept is not unique to DotNetNuke.  Various projects and companies will take a different stance on the topic.  I was reminded of this recently with the Windows 7 launch where XP users were forced to make a tough decision – go through the hassle of installing a clean version of Windows 7 and then installing all of their old software and migrating their data (I hope grandpa had good backups), just stick with Windows XP, or move to a competitor.  Even Apple recognized the problem with the Windows 7 approach as evidenced by their Mac vs PC commercials.

It has been a goal of the DNN project to be able to allow developers and anyone interested to download the latest source code from CodePlex without affecting our internal operations.  To do this I have created a CruiseControl.Net project that synchronises the source code in our internal system out to CodePlex on a daily basis.  If you check out the Source page for the project you will see the following today:

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This years DotNetNuke Designer Challenge has been a resounding success and now its your turn to participate!  Twenty-five skins have been submitted by 19 different designers in 4 categories.  But now its time for you to pick the Community Favorite and win yourself a free book!

In my spare time, I often find myself playing with ideas for enhancing the DotNetNuke (DNN) core.  Most of the time I am developing prototypes as a “proof of concept” – i.e. they are not complete, and may never be completed.

One example of this is my recent blog series on developing modules for DNN using ASP.NET MVC.  So far I have demonstrated that the default MVC Application created using the ASP.NET MVC version 1 template can be converted, with little effort, into a DNN module.  In order to accomplish this I had to create a framework that sits on top of the DNN core.

The automation tests now have the ability to test if an email was sent correctly. To run the Email Configuration test you will need to update the “TestEmailPath” value to match the name of the subfolder you created eg  “D:\Tests\TestEmails”

For the Email Configuration test you will need to add a file to the “Packages” folder. The file is called “mailDrop.xml” and is located in the “Support Files” folder within your project. Copy this file into your “Packages” folder. Open the xml file in a text editor, update the value for “pickupDirectoryLocation” to match the path of your “TestEmails” folder, ex. “D:\Tests\TestEmails”. Save the mailDrop.xml file.

Please download the project from http://dotnetnukeautomation.codeplex.com/ and join in.

When under extremely heavy load there is a possibility that Microsoft ado.net classes may return "stale" data i.e. the results of an old query rather than the result of the query that was just executed. This is quite a rare case and only exhibits under extreme load or/and insufficent resources. As the error comes from code external to DotNetNuke i.e. somewhere within the .net framework, ado.net or the database drivers themselves our options were limited. A change introduced in 5.1.1 to mitigate this issue introduced a problem that may be seen by some users running 5.1.1 - 5.2.3. Whilst this has been fixed in 5.3.0, there is an optional workaround that users experiencing timeouts when upgrading/install modules might consider.

The DotNetNuke Automation Testing project is available on CodePlex at http://dotnetnukeautomation.codeplex.com/ and is welcoming testers and developers and anyone else who would like to contribute to try it out and write your won tests based on the style we have set up.  To get started you will need to set a few variables and create some folders.  Stefan did a nice post on it a few weeks back...

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The Automation Test Project is well and truly underway now.  You can check out the progress we are making and the suite of tests that have been written to help with the Build Verification that now happens on every release here http://dotnetnukeautomation.codeplex.com/.  These tests test a set of scenarios that we need to ensure work every release, hence they get executed on a very regular basis which is tedious if you have to do it manually every time.  If you check out the project you will see there are...

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I'm proud to announce that 25 skins have entered the second DotNetNuke Skinning Contest.
A large variety of well designed, high quality skins have been submitted.
I would like to thank all the submitters for their contribution to the community.
I'm sure the results of this contest will be a boost for both DotNetNuke and the submitters.

You are probably thinking “Didn’t he already post a free DotNetNuke Silverlight file Uploader ?”. Well yeah I did, but this one is different.

This one allows a DotNetNuke portal administrator to place an instance of the module on a page and upload files. Each file has the ModuleID saved in its database record. The module will only show files for that module instance.

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Bill Severance has posted in the Forge Forum a Call For Suggestions on how we can improve the Forge.

Now that this post has been available for a couple of weeks, I would like to ask the community if they have other ideas they would like to see added to the forge? The forge team wants to help you succeed with your projects! If there is something you think would be useful to the community that we have not thought of, let us know! If not, and you think what's suggested sounds great, let us know that as well.

The quicker we gather feedback and get our feature list nailed down the sooner we can make this available. Please use the Call For Suggestions forum post (Linked Above) to discuss this.

The 5.2.3 CE and PE versions of DotNetNuke have been released. The release notes can be read @ http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/825/EntryId/2497/DotNetNuke-5-2-3-Released.aspx

These releases fix a "low" security issue. 

Cathal Connolly Core :: Security

Another month, another DotNetNuke release.  With each passing month the Quality team continues to get better at building DotNetNuke in a repeatable manner.  Our processes are becoming more and more automated and our QA and maintenance teams are starting to become comfortable with the processes.  It is a marked change from where we were just 12 months ago.  As a stabilization release, we focused this month on closing out the highest profile issues in the issue tracker.  We continued our efforts to solidify the installation experience and have expended additional effort in adding more error handling to the New Module wizard that was added in 5.2.  One major change in this release is that we are moving away from doing any significant enhancements during a stabilization release.  Occasionally we will have a minor change to existing functionality that is aimed at providing better feedback or otherwise resolving a usability issue.  Outside of these issues we will do our best to avoid introducing any new or changed behaviors which are more likely to introduce new defects into the product.  We do have one significant change in this release in the form of support for the PayPal sandbox which was implemented prior to our policy change.  You can see the highlights from this release below.  As usual, you can review the ChangeLog for complete details.

At OpenForce ‘09 we made a lot of announcements about changes to the DotNetNuke project.  One change that we announced was a commitment to provide more regular releases.  Over the past several years we have always focused on making releases when the software was “ready”.  This policy worked well when the project was staffed by volunteers as planning for fixed release dates is extremely difficult when you don’t know from week to week who would be able to work on the project, or how much time they would have available.

In software development, there are 3 major levers that you have available to manage a release given a fixed set of resources:  Time, Scope and Quality.  In general, we don’t feel that quality is a factor where you can cut corners.  This only leaves time and scope as levers you can use when preparing a release.  In the past we have worked on a somewhat fixed scope and fixed quality philosophy.  We tried to determine the features and bug fixes that would go into a release and keep testing until we felt that the software met the desired quality.  In 2010, we have shifted this approach and are now working to fixed release dates with a desired quality level and will adjust the scope as needed to ensure that we can meet our time and quality commitments.

The first European Day of DotNetNuke event will take place at the Microsoft Conference Center, Paris, France on May 28, 2010 and will bring together DotNetNuke enthusiasts from across Europe.

This past year I had the pleasure of being asked by Jim Minatel at Wrox to write a Wrox Blox covering the basics of jQuery for ASP.Net Developers.  Having co-authored 2 previous books, I realized that writing a book, regardless of the size, is a lot of work, but something that I also find gratifying once you have a finished product.  Over the last 2 years, I had gotten more and more into jQuery and really loved its simplicity and power, and thought that this would be a great opportunity to share some of the knowledge I had gathered.

For those that are not familiar with the term, a Wrox Blox is a short e-book (30+ pages) which covers a narrow topic.  They are not intended to be an exhaustive discussion of a topic, but rather to cover one particular aspect of what is often a much broader subject matter.  Because of their narrower focus and the fact that they are only available as e-books, Wrox is able to keep the cost of the Wrox Blox very low.  Wrox Blox generally include a lot of code examples rather than being a purely theoretical discussion of a topic.

This is just a quick post to let you know that the RC (Release Candidate) of the Blog Module version 04.00.00 has been posted on here, on CodePlex.

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If you have a page that contains a lot of information for users to enter, you can run into a problem where their authentication will “time out”. Usually this authentication is set to expire after 20 minutes of “inactivity” (the user has not submitted a request to the web server). The problem is that if they, for example, click the Save button after their authentication has expired, their content is not saved and they are logged out of the site instead.

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Next week is a busy one for many in the DotNetNuke community.