Earlier this week we announced that DotNetNuke has raised venture capital from a syndicate of tier 1 venture capital firms, August Capital and Sierra Ventures. Considering the current state of the global economy, this announcement is a huge vote of confidence in our product and community, and a testament to the global impact we have made on the industry. It means that DotNetNuke Corporation is now going to be able to deliver on its promise of rapidly innovating the DotNetNuke platform and creating new opportunities for participants in our ecosystem.

Anticipation for the DotNetNuke OpenForce 08 Conferences is growing, and we are now only a month away from the kickoff event. OpenForce Europe 08 occurs on October 6 & 7 at the Leeuwenhorst Conference Center near Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Following this event, OpenForce North America follows up with its second annual conference on November 10-13 co-located with DevConnections in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada

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I just wanted to provide a heads up that I am doing an in-person presentation at the BAY.NET User Group on Wednesday evening this week. I met one of their user group leaders, Oliver Nguyen, at the MVP Summit this past spring and he kindly invited me to come and speak about DotNetNuke. I am honoured for the opportunity and look forward to meeting their membership...

Further to my last blog on this subject, I think it may be useful to provide some details on one of the more challenging trademark issues we are currently dealing with, as it may shed some light on the legal complications of protecting the project brand.

When DotNetNuke was originally announced in February 2003, the developer community in its insatiable appetite for simple concise technology acronyms, immediately abbreviated the DotNetNuke name to 'DNN'. This short-hand reference has been synonymously linked to the project ever since, especially in on-line communication channels such as the forums and blogs hosted on dotnetnuke.com.

I mentioned in my last blog that I would post an update once we were successfully able to work through the security issues reported last week. The most important update is Version 4.8.3 was released this past Tuesday and fully addresses each of the reported items. You can get it now from the Downloads page on our site.

Since the DotNetNuke application was originally released, we have been committed to providing a highly secure web platform to the Microsoft community. Security on the web is a challenging area and we have gone to great lengths over the past 5 years to ensure the integrity of the application. We are certainly not perfect; therefore, we have (regrettably) dealt with a number of security issues over the years. In each case, we were able to solve the problem and issue a patch release which offered the necessary level of protection to the community. There is a tough balancing act between disclosing too much information or too little information, and we have relied on the process established by some of the industry giants in terms of dealing with these types of issues.

In case you did not know already, DotNetNuke Corporation has been offering professional Support services for the DotNetNuke platform since January of this year through our Subscription Program. We have definitely been encouraged with the level of interest in the program so far and appreciate the business provided by those organizations who have chosen to take advantage of the service. However, one thing which I have been meaning to do for some time, is write a blog which clarifies certain aspects of the program, as I believe there are some incorrect assumptions which have been circulating in the community since its introduction.

In early April our friend Michael Desmond, from Redmond Developer News, wrote a thought provoking article related to Open Source on the Microsoft platform. The title of the article was "Open Source .NET Projects Getting Cold Shoulder?" and it featured quotes from Jeff Atwood ( formerly of Vertigo - the original authors of the IBuySpy Portal sample application in 2000 ) which highlighted that "open source projects are treated as second-class citizens in the Microsoft ecosystem". Later, in May, Michael Desmond followed up on the original article and published a new editorial focussed on the question of "Should Microsoft be doing more to make open source development a first-class citizen in the .NET space?".

When it comes to software, a component or service which survives for an extended period of time without substantial refactoring is generally considered to be an anomoly. However, there are cases when a solution fulfills the business requirements so completely that you have the luxury of leaving it on autopilot for quite some time. Generally, this only happens in situations where a broad set of use cases were examined up front, the primary stakeholders were accurately identified, clear goals were established, multiple prototypes were developed, user participation resulted in continuous feedback loops, and the architecture and implementation were properly abstracted from external factors. The Skinning Engine in DotNetNuke is an example of a solution which has stood the test of time and has served the community well.