By Jon Henning on Thursday, June 19, 2008

With the launch of DotNetNuke 5 getting closer, I figured it was a good time to put together a quick video on some of the new functionality that will be found within the webcontrols.  This video will introduce you to the new ways you can customize version 2 of the DotNetNuke Menu by simply tweaking your css.  It starts out giving a brief overview of where we came from in earlier releases and how we are making strides to improve the ability for both a DotNetNuke skinner and end portal administrator.  Enjoy!

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By Jon Henning on 5/12/2008

One of the new features coming in Cambrian is an update in the permissions grid.  The current grid supports two states, Allow and Null (not assigned).  The new grid will support three states (Allow, Deny, and Null).  The obvious question here is how do you present this to the user?  The current design allows for a nice compact way to set the permissions within a grid utilizing checkboxes.  The new way will use a new DotNetNuke WebControl that supports multiple states and mimics a checkbox.  The original name I came up with for the control was DNNTriStateCheckbox.  However, while developing this control I soon realized there was no reason I needed to only support 3 states and saw the opportunity to support any number of states and not necessarily look like a checkbox.  So the control is now called DNNMultiStateBox.  It is probably the simplest of all the controls in the Read More »

By Jon Henning on Monday, April 21, 2008

Having attending this year's MVP Summit, I have to say I am even more interested in writing some Silverlight applications.  One of the questions I am trying to answer is just how to get Silverlight to talk to the server, especially when it comes to DotNetNuke integration.  Some quick searching yielded this excellent blog on how Silverlight and javascript can interact.  I thought it may be helpful to some people to see how to allow Silverlight to call into a PageMethod and pass and return a rich object.  I admit this may not be the best option, as I still need to do some research, but at a bare minimum this approach should Read More »

By Jon Henning on Monday, April 14, 2008

One of the things I have been doing lately with my projects like the DotNetNuke CodeEndeavors AJAX templates along with the ClientAPI and WebControls is to use a custom MSBuild script to package the code up as part of the project's compilation.  Since a csproj/vbproj file is already a MSBuild script this is rather simple.  The problem I had was that the editing of these files within Visual Studio was cumbersome.  Having to right-click on the project in Solution Explorer and choose Unload Project, then right-click again and choose Edit xxxxx.vbproj, then make my modifications, then right-click again to reload the project was getting annoying. 

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By Jon Henning on 4/13/2008

While sitting at the airport waiting for my plane to depart to the MVP Summit, I decided to spend a little time optimizing the new ClientAPI (codenamed Caspian) for the Cambrian release.  One of the new features for this release was to allow the output of the ClientAPI and Webcontrols to emit compliant markup (more detail mentioned in this blog).  There was two areas that this affected my code.

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By Jon Henning on 3/24/2008

The whole idea of the $ function and who "owns" that "namespace" has become quite muddy.  When I first learned of the use of $ and found that MS was adopting the same notation, I decided to do it as well.  For at the time, I felt that all frameworks simply used it as a quick way to get the reference to a DOM element.  Soon afterwards I learned that frameworks like prototyle use it for much more.

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By Jon Henning on Wednesday, December 12, 2007

The ClientAPI and WebControls Beta codenamed Caspian and DawnTreader are now being released to the general public. Features of this release include:

• Tweening
• Control Methods
• Conversion of entier ClientAPI and WebControls to utilize MS AJAX Framework
• Embedded and Compressed scripts
• XHTML Compliant output
• and much Read More »

By Jon Henning on Friday, November 30, 2007

I believe the content of what I covered from the OpenForce conference is worth sharing with a broader audience. In fact, I believe the concepts discussed are fundamental to successfully writing DotNetNuke modules with a rich client-side experience. You can download the recording here. In a few days/weeks I will be releasing two DotNetNuke module templates that build on the concepts introduced in my session: DotNetNuke Compiled AJAX Module and DotNetNuke Compiled Silverlight Module. I also plan on releasing a video or two on how they are used, as they include: the MSBuild script for automatic packaging and deployment, the new ClientAPI ControlMethod calls, handle client-side localization, allow for VS.NET 2008 javascript Intellisense, and provide a means for modules to interact with each other on the client (a kind of client-side IMC). Read More »

By Jon Henning on Thursday, November 15, 2007

The OpenForce conference was a lot of fun. I particularly enjoyed meeting many of the community members who I have only known via the internet.  The only disappointment I had was that my session was not chosen to be video taped, for I am excited in sharing the information with the community members who could not attend.  All not lost, however, as I have posted my slides and code here.  It may ... Read More »

By Jon Henning on 11/14/2007

For a long time now many skinners for DotNetNuke have felt like customizing individual menu items was like looking for the Holy Grail.  All the menus I have contributed to the community (Solpart and DNNMenu) have always had the ability to customize each menu item.  The problem always was
how do we allow ... Read More »