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!

At my day job we have an advanced developer who was given a difficult project where he has to implement a dozen business rules. I’m talking “ask for a blessing before you go in” and “ask for forgiveness when you come out” complicated code.

I watched him work on the code, and he is methodical at writing down the rules and writing a test case to make sure he properly implemented...

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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.

CoolCoyotes is hosting a meeting of the Charlotte NC DotNetNuke User Group on February 18, 2010 at 6:30pm.

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Often, when writing Unit Tests you find yourself writing a batch of quite similar tests that exercise the various test cases for a method.

As I am endeavoring to add Unit Tests to all new code I write, I am learning my way through the MbUnit/Gallio Testing Framework which we have standardized on for all DNN testing.  MbUnit is an awesome testing framework and it has a number of Attributes that you can apply to a Test that allows you to provide different parameters. 

 We have been working with the Codeplex team for quite a while.  In December of 2008, we moved all of our project downloads to Codeplex and have been collaborating with them to build out our own DotNetNuke Community Forge.  Through this process I had the pleasure and privilege to get to know Sara Ford.  This week we got the news that Sara is moving on, Saying Farewell to Codeplex!

I just posted a module that allows you to easily create a sign-up list of verified email addresses.

A DotNetNuke portal administrator can place an instance of the module on a page and customize the sign-up message and the email verification message. The captured data can also be exported to Excel.

The module and code are posted here:

http://www.adefwebserver.com/DotNetNukeHELP/Misc/SignUp/

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At the start of every year I like to do a quick roundup of some of the activities the security team have been up to. In general the better job we do, the less anyone hears about it, but rest assurred that we've busy working away to ensure DotNetNuke is as secure as possible and to help out anyone who's concerned their site may have been hacked.

Cathal Connolly Core :: Security

In earlier blogs (Part 1 and Part 2 of this series) I described how I have developed a Framework that allows developers to create DotNetNuke (DNN) modules using the new ASP.NET MVC Framework.  In this blog I will describe the new base class which is used to enable this ability - MvcModuleApplication.

Prior to DotNetNuke 5.0, all module controls had to be ASP.NET User Controls that inherited from PortalModuleBase – a base class in the DotNetNuke Web Application Framework that provided the context necessary for DotNetNuke’s Module Injection logic to load and inject the module control in the page. (Since about DNN 4.4 a module control was not required to be an ascx file – it could be a compiled server control, but it still had to inherit from PortalModuleBase and thus ultimately from UserControl).

8 important things to know if you consider, (or use) the Store module.

I get an email every time a person joins one of my DotNetNuke sites. Lately I noticed that I am getting more emails than usual. This is across all sites like:

ADefHelpDesk.com – DotNetNuke Help Desk module OpenLight Group – DotNetNuke and Silverlight Blog Site DNN Silverlight – DotNetNuke and Silverlight example code and tutorials SilverlightDesktop.net...

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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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In an earlier blog I introduced the idea of using ASP.NET MVC to develop DotNetNuke modules, and I walked through how you could create a simple ASP.NET MVC Module Application.  Now that I have demonstrated that it is feasible to use the MVC Framework in a WebForms Application, I will start to dig into how this was done.

But first, before we look at the code, lets review how the standard ASP.NET MVC Pipeline works. This is summarized effectively by Steve Sanderson, on his blog.

The Events team has moved all DNN Events source components to CodePlex, starting with the Events release 05.00.03.

We also started with user documentation, using the CodePlex documentation Wiki.

Last week, shaun posted a blog in which he discussed whether DotNetNuke (DNN) should be rewritten in ASP.NET MVC.  This blog created quite a stir, both within the DotNetNuke Community and within the ASP.NET Community as a whole. 

In a comment that I added to shaun’s post I suggested that the debate should not be over whether DNN should be rewritten in ASP.NET MVC (or any other framework that may come in the future), the discussion should be on “How can we enable developers to use the ASP.NET Technologies of their choice when developing extensions for DNN.”  After all, if we rewrite DNN in MVC we effectively lock out WebForm developers.

Last week Shaun blogged about ASP.NET MVC and DotNetNuke.  As tends to occur when discussing technology choices, this sparked enormous controversy.  Enter Rob Conery of TekPub!  After congratulating Shaun on making the right decision for DotNetNuke, he’s offered 50 free coupons to his Mastering MVC series.  Here's how to get one!

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).

Yesterday we released a public Beta of the upcoming Links Module.

The release tracking process took a lot of time, and we were awaiting a formally release module much earlier. Nevertheless, it is finally available for download as a formal release of the Events module.

The objective of this Events release is to fix all known bugs and improve performance and table structure of the Events module. Upgrading an existing Events module to this version is recommended.

This new release covers 43 issues. Events 05.00.03 will work for any DNN version 4.7.0 and up.

This article is cross-posted from my personal blog.

We haven’t been very good at using automated tests in the DotNetNuke project but that will change dramatically this year.  We have established a Community Quality team who will be focusing on “Integration Tests” using the WatiN Framework, and in the “Open Core” development area we will be creating Unit Tests for new development, as well as back-filling Unit Tests for the older areas of the core.

In December the DotNetNuke project made a large upgrade to our issue tracker which had been stuck on an old version for the last couple of years.  We have been using Gemini from Countersoft for the last 6 years and it has served us well.  Unfortunately, earlier versions were having performance problems with the amount of issues we were tracking across all the module projects along with the Core framework.  Countersoft made a decision when moving from 2.x to 3.x to completely overhaul the security model.  If you ever had to use Gemini 2.x for a large project like ours you would have found that the task for migrating the old security settings was enormous.  We had over 40 projects each with security configuration affecting hundreds of users.  As a result of the shear amount of work involved, we avoided upgrades long past the time when an upgrade was warranted.

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.

After a long absence I have come back to the Newsfeeds project. I don’t have an excuse, only reasons (I have devoted a lot of effort to other parts of the DNN project). I'm very sorry I can't pick up on the forum posts. I’m not very good at this. I’m still on the lookout for someone to help out with iwonder who has been doing a fantastic job on this until now. I have kept an eye out on those forums though and decided that the module needed 2 important changes

It has been almost one month since we have announced accepting submissions for the second official DotNetNuke Skinning Contest. Thanks to all who took the time to write us with feedback and motivation to keep this event moving forward. I didn’t get a chance to write about what motivation we have for the contest the past few weeks after the launch since my schedule and time didn’t permit. I wanted to just express my thoughts here about the contest and hope you will join me in this event.

Why another skin contest, you might ask. Well, the answer is simple. The skin contest is for you, all of the active community members.

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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 2010 is going to be a great season for the DotNetNuke Community.  Over the course of the last few months many foundational changes have occurred upon which much is building.  Large ocean waves begin with ripples unnoticed in the deep, but as they approach the shore they are magnified.  And I can’t help but draw the comparison as I look forward to this season like an expectant surfer!

I am pleased to announce that DotNetNuke 5.2.2 has been released.  DotNetNuke 5.2.2 is a monthly stabilization release and includes a number of fixes aimed at improving the overall stability and performance of the platform.  Over the last year we have been undergoing a lot of changes behind the scenes in how we manage the DotNetNuke release process which I’ll be discussing in a separate post.  The result of all that effort is that our releases are becoming more predictable and with greater emphasis...

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A few weeks ago we upgraded our forums to a new version and a new look.  We also added some new features, including user avatars derived from the site profile.  The forums has supported a user avatar feature for quite some time, but we took it one step further in this version by (a) adding a control for Avatar in the site-wide user profile and (b) allowing this custom profile property to be configured into the forum.  The result is that we now have the ability to support user avatar throughout the site and a first implementation of it’s usage in the forum.  You can expect to see use of profile property information in other areas, but for now… why not add a user avatar to your profile?

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.