By Charles Nurse on 6/30/2008

Many of you know that I grew up in England.  As a result I enjoy watching Football (Soccer to you North Americans).

On Sunday I watched the European Championship final in HD on my 46" LCD TV - that was cool, and I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate all the Spanish football fans in the DotNetNuke Community on the victory of their team.

During my vacation in Italy I found it difficult to keep up with the early group play (although Italy's results were plastered across the media), but I was impressed with Spain's performances at all stages of the competition.

It is not always the case - but I truly believe that this year the best team won.

And by the way - don't expect much from Vicenc this week - he's probably still celebrating !!

By Charles Nurse on 6/20/2008

 Got internet access - on a regular computer - at our hotel in Rome, so I am taking the opportunity for a quick update.  Its hard doing anything more than texting updates to Twitter on my mobile !!  Plus Rogers roaming charges are extreme !!

Read More »

By Charles Nurse on 6/3/2008

Tomorrow - my wife and I will be leaving Vancouver for Italy (Milan, Venice, Florence, Tuscany and Rome).   Next week is our 25th Wedding Anniversary and we will be in Florence for that celebration.

We will be gone for 17 days so you won't be seeing me on these forums and/or blogs until June 23rd.  I won't have my laptop with me -my wife wonders if I can survive.

We have been planning this trip for over a year now, and I am really looking forward to it.  I spent some time in Italy as a poor University Student, backpacking and hostelling, and I know Italy has changed a lot in 30 years.

By Charles Nurse on 6/2/2008

I have been having some fun recently with TDD or Test Driven Development.

For those of you who who haven't experienced this development technique the concept is simple in theory, but is such a paradigm shift that it takes a bit of getting used to.

The idea is simple - the first thing you do is to write a test, and then develop the code until the test passes.  The idea is that you only build what you need to get the test to pass.  The results aof this process is that the code is "less bloated",  and of course if done correctly every line of code can be tested independent of other components of the application.

There are a number of testing frameworks, NUnit, MBUnit and MSTest, and the Visual Studio testing tools, while they default to the built in Unit Testing framework can be configured to use the framework of your ch ... Read More »

By Charles Nurse on 5/29/2008

In previous blogs I have introduced the new "Unified Extension/Package Installer", particularly with respect to how it is used.  In this blog I will start to introduce developers to the new system.

The concept of the new Installer can be summed up as follows:

• Provide a manifest driven installation - in this case configuration over convention
• Provide a single "unified" manifest applicable to all extension types - modules/skins/languages
• Provide a "component" based installer - a files component for modules can be reused in installing skins or languages files
• Provide extension points for developers to take advantage of the new system.

So lets dive in to the new manifest and see what is going on.

Read More »

By Charles Nurse on 5/29/2008

In my previous blog (Part 1) of this series of Blogs about "Understanding the manifest" used in the new Extension Installer, I introduced the overal design of the new Installer manifest.  In this blog I will delve more deeply into the "components" area of the manifest.

As with my first blog lets look at an example.  As we are focussing in ths blog on the "components" are of the manifest, lets look at the components node in detail.

Ths example is for a simple "HelloWorld" module.  You will notice that we have 3 components.  Most package types will include a component that is specfic for that type.&# ... Read More »

By Charles Nurse on 5/28/2008

Michael Washington in a blog about updating his sites made reference to the fact that you no longer need to manualy modify your web.config settings prior to upgrading a site.

Why is this?  The answer is a new class that was introduced into the core (in 4.6.0) called XmlMerge.  This class is designed to allow developers to create xml files that can be used to "update" one of the core "config" files, and is especially useful for upgrades or component installations.

We have had the ability for some time to provide cleanup files - these files are named xx.xx.xx.txt and contain a list of folders and files to delete when upgrading to version xx.xx.xx.  This allows us to remove unneccessary files from production sites.  Starting in version 4.6.0 we added the ability to add a "xx.xx.xx.config" ... Read More »

By Charles Nurse on 5/23/2008

As many of you may know - I am a transplanted Brit.  I grew up in the UK in the city of Bristol and moved to Canada when I was 22. 

As a transplanted Brit I am a soccer afficionado.  For those of you who follow me on twitter or have my IM you may know already that my home town team in England - Bristol City - is on the brink of promotion to the English Premier League.

I will be getting up early tomorrow (7am local time) to watch Bristol City play Hull City in the Championship Play Off Final at Wembley to see if they can get the dream ticket to mega soccer dollars that is the "English Premier League".

As an aside, some of you may know that one of my hobbies is Genealogy.  I recently discovered that one of my ancestors (my great-great-great-uncle - William Richmond Nurse) was one of the first Presidents of Bristol City Football Club back in the late 1800's.

So - Go Robins go!!&a ... Read More »

By Charles Nurse on 4/21/2008

This Blog is the first in a series of Blogs that I intend to write about new concepts and ideas that I discover in my travels through .NET.  These will not neccessarily be my ideas - in fact most of them won't be, but I hope you will find them interesting and useful for your own development projects.

A few weeks ago when the new codeplex-based DNN Forge was introduced, I created a project that I called "The Family Tree project".  I have been working off-and-on for about 3 years on both a GEDCOM parser and a rich Object Model for managing Family Tree information.  The problem I had with this project is that early on I had taken a Waterfall approach to the design, and as this was a hobby project - and therefore I had limited time to work on it - the progress was painfully slow.

On Friday, after returning from the MVP summit and seeing all the cool new stuff coming along as well as a new emphasis on Test Driven Development, I d ... Read More »

By Charles Nurse on 4/7/2008

In my previous blog in this series I described how the new Extension Installer processes the manifest.  In summary the Installer creates an instance of a PackageInstaller and passes the manifest to it.  The PackageInstaller then parses the manifest and creates a ComponentInstaller for each component referenced in the manifest.  we sthus end up with the PackageInstaller having a collection (SortedList(Of T)) of ComponentInstallers.

Installing the Package

In this blog I will describe the next step in the process - Installing the Package.  As in my previous blog we will start in the Install wizard.