After working with ASP.Net Webforms for the past decade, the time has come to move on. I have enjoyed using Webforms and I was pretty good at bending ASP.Net to my will. Having recently tried some newer web frameworks I find that I am more productive than ever before. Over the past couple of years I have dabbled with ASP.Net MVC, jQuery and even WebFormsMVP but none of them truly held my interest for long. I never felt like they really offered solutions to problems that I was worried about. Because of my involvement with DotNetNuke, and the fact that it relies heavily on Webforms, I found that I couldn’t justify the use of some of these technologies. Things like WebFormsMVP added too much friction to the way I was used to working. ASP.Net MVC couldn’t really work in any meaningful way with DotNetNuke. And jQuery was a nice add-on, but it didn’t fundamentally change the way I developed modules.

From time to time I run across some great development resources on the web that are worth sharing. The below list of blog posts by Troy Hunt is a great starting point if you want to find out about the biggest threats to the security of your websites and the techniques you can use in your development and site administration efforts to prevent such exploits. While we take every effort to ensure that the core framework remains secure, there is still a lot of control that is left in the hands of module developers and site administrators.

If you have downloaded and installed DotNetNuke 6.1 you have probably noticed that the core modules are “missing” from the DotNetNuke packages. This is a large change from every previous version of DotNetNuke. Ever since Shaun first released DotNetNuke in 2002, we have included a number of modules in the core platform. How these modules have been packaged has changed over the years, but customers have become accustomed to seeing them.

In DotNetNuke 6.0 we provided a great new capability that integrates the DotNetNuke Forge and DotNetNuke Store (SnowCovered) into the core platform. This feature means that every module in the Forge can be quickly discovered and installed into the platform in just a couple of clicks. If you haven’t tried this feature, I definitely recommend you give it a try. It is definitely one of the great new features in the DotNetNuke 6 platform.

DotNetNuke has undergone many changes over the last 8 years in the way the product is developed and managed. Having been part of the main engineering and product teams from the early days of the Open Source project I have had a number of roles on the team. Last year I moved from being focused on application development as part of the Engineering team to being more focused on product management. A big part of my role on the product management team was handling release management.

I am pleased to announce that DotNetNuke 6.0.2 is officially released. This maintenance release further solidifies DotNetNuke 6.0 and resolves a few outstanding issues which were not addressed in the 6.0.1 release. Like with the 6.0.1 release, our goal was to continue providing quick resolution of outstanding issues to ensure that customers could upgrade to the 6.x platform with little difficulty.

I am pleased to announce that DotNetNuke 6.0.1 is officially released. This maintenance release was focused on resolving a number of issues that were found in the 6.0.0 release. Given the extensive set of changes in DotNetNuke 6.0 we recognized the need to quickly identify and resolve issues discovered by our customers as they tried the new release in production environments. This maintenance release further improves what many customers have already told us was a pretty stable release.

Late last year, I began work on getting DotNetNuke to run on Windows Azure. After a few months of research and numerous dead-ends, I finally had a fully working prototype. During this same period, David Rodríguez, was also doing some work with DotNetNuke and Azure as well.

After working through a few dead-ends of his own, David found the Azure Accelerator project from Slalom Consulting and decided to use this as a base for developing a DotNetNuke version.

I am pleased to announce the launch of DotNetNuke 6.  This release marks a significant milestone in the history of DotNetNuke platform.  Keep reading to find out all that DotNetNuke 6 has to offer both seasoned users and those just seeing the platform for the first time.

After 8 months of effort the finish line is in sight. With almost 3000 code checkins touching more than 2000 individual files, this release has been monumental in it’s scope compared to most DotNetNuke releases. Not since the days of DotNetNuke 2.0 and 3.0 have we accomplished so much in a single release. In spite of the sheer number of changes we have made, DotNetNuke 6 is one of the most stable platform versions in quite a while. That is not just my opinion but the opinion of the vast majority of people participating in our beta testing.

The clock is winding down on the DotNetNuke 6 release. All of the features have been integrated and we are now focused exclusively on polishing the app before we ship later this month. At this point we have identified all of the issues we plan to resolve for the initial launch and are working through final phases of the testing process. In order to assist people in planning for a smooth upgrade process for 6.0 we are providing a second beta release so that people can retest upgrades and installations which may have had serious issues with Beta 1. If you find an issue we ask that you enter it in the bug tracker so that we can evaluate whether it a showstopping issue or whether it is something that could be held for our first 6.x maintenance release which we expect to be about a month after the DotNetNuke 6.0 launch.

I am pleased to announce that DotNetNuke 5.6.3 is officially released. This release resolves a number of security issues with previous versions and resolves a few outstanding issues from 5.6.2 including:

• Updated Telerik Version – 5.6.3 includes the Q1 2011 SP2 version of Telerik ASP.Net AJAX controls. This version of Telerik includes support for the final version of IE9 along with dozens of bug fixes.
• Improved Security – This release includes 6 different security enhancements and fixes.

Over the last 6 weeks, the DotNetNuke team has been hard at work preparing for our first Beta release of DotNetNuke 6. The DotNetNuke 6 Beta does not include a lot of new functionality but does include significant refinements of the features we had previously highlighted during our CTPs. Even as we were putting the finishing touches on the beta release, the team has been actively out promoting the upcoming launch and demoing DotNetNuke 6 at every opportunity. We have used these opportunities to get feedback from the community and have incorporated some of the suggestions into this release.

For the past 4 years I had the task of working with the speaker selection committee to solicit speakers for the annual DotNetNuke conference. This is a challenging task as we must filter through almost two hundred submissions to find the handful of sessions that will be presented at the conference. With few exceptions the submissions are excellent and we would be lucky to have any of the speakers presenting at the conference. This year was no different. Not only did we get submissions from speakers who have spoken at past conferences, but we also received a number of entries from new speakers as well. In total, we had 177 sessions that we had to whittle down to 27.

DotNetNuke 6 has been a release experience unlike any in the history of DotNetNuke. We have had more packaged releases, more visibility into the code, more discussions with the community and a greater iterative approach to development than at any point in our past.

The community has been able to follow along with us as we progressed from the early UI concepts to a much more polished and refined look. If you were really adventurous, you could watch this transition on almost a daily basis as we kept up a steady stream of code updates on CodePlex. Because we intentionally moved to a longer release cycle, we have been able to go through many iterations, getting community feedback all along the way. With each release our community has told us what they liked, and what they didn’t. After each CTP we have been able to incorporate some of the feedback to help arrive at a much better product. As a result we have been able to progress to what we think is a much more contemporary look, even while taking into account the needs and desires of the overall community. This is just not something that was possible when we were operating under shorter release cycles.

It is once again that time of year when we ask all of you to submit your session abstracts for this years North American DotNetNuke user and developer conference. This years conference has a new name, a new location and a significantly reduced price. DotNetNuke World will be November 9th through the 11th in lovely Orlando, Florida, with registration costing as low as $349 for those registering early. So make sure to save the dates on your calendar, and you should definitely plan to register early for the best conference pricing.

Much like past years, we are accepting session submissions that focus on Development, Design, Administration and Business. We have expanded the number of rooms this year so that we could accommodate more sessions with a broader appeal to business decision makers and end users. This years conference will focus on the “Cloud, Mobile, Social Revolution” so keep that in mind as you are developing your session abstracts.

DotNetNuke has always shipped with a lot of functionality in the form of modules. Some of the modules that ship with DotNetNuke are fairly shallow, while others have very rich functionality. One of the modules which is often overlooked on many sites is the Form and List module. This module has a lot of rich functionality for defining tabular data structures as well as a complete templating system for displaying or collecting the data defined by the structure.

Recently, I saw some examples from Armand Datema at 2DNN which showed that Form and List can be leveraged for building sophisticated website functionality. I decided to use this same technique in my CMSExpo talk on DotNetNuke Core Modules. For my demo, I wanted to use the Form and List module to create a banner rotator.

It has been 4 weeks since our last CTP release. The DotNetNuke development team has been working hard and it definitely shows in this latest release. CTP 3 includes major improvements to features spotlighted in previous CTPs but also includes some new features as well. We are making good progress on 6.0 which is scheduled for a mid-summer release, but we still have a few features to finish up and quite a few places that need some UI cleanup, but I think you’ll see that this release is definitely making huge strides in terms of stability and polish.

We continue to get a lot of great feedback from the community on the previous CTPs. Don’t assume that what you see in the CTP is how things will work in the final release. We are spending a lot of time trying out different designs and implementations to get community feedback on particular features. Often, it is only when using a feature in a more realistic environment will you find the limitations of a design or implementation. I encourage you to take a few minutes to try out the new CTP and join the conversation. With your help we can make DotNetNuke 6.0 a truly great release.

One of the biggest complaints of anyone using XSLT in .Net is that we are stuck on XSLT and XPATH 1.0. While 1.0 provides a lot of capability it is easy to run headlong into the shortcomings of the language. For a number of reasons which I’ll never understand, Microsoft has not chosen to support XSLT 2.0 or XPATH 2.0 in .Net which forces developers to either live with the limitations of 1.0 or use a 3rd party XSLT engine. Neither of those options is really great.

There are a number of modules in DotNetNuke which rely heavily on XSLT for advanced formatting: Reports, Form & List and XML module are three that come immediately to mind. It would be great if we could break out of the limitations imposed by the reliance on XSLT 1.0.

Well, in fact you can. .Net has supported the concept of XSLT Extension Objects for quite a long time. Essentially, extension objects are .Net code that you can call from within your XSLT. With this capability you can easily code whatever functionality is missing from XSLT 1.0. This is just what a group of Microsoft MVPs did with the EXSLT.NET module which is a .NET implementation of EXSLT. Much of the work done in EXSLT was subsequently incorporated in XSLT 2.0.

Building software is a challenging business. That is one of the things I like about it. There is always a new obstacle to overcome or new technology and techniques to better solve an old issue. In short, building software is like solving a giant puzzle that has multiple correct answers. Some of the answers may require brute force or crude techniques where others may be elegant in their simplicity.

There are never any shortage of challenges in software development. Even when your own code works correctly, sometimes external factors can conspire against you and create new challenges.

It has been a scant two and a half weeks since we released the first Community Technology Preview for DotNetNuke 6.0 and we are now ready to follow that up with another CTP release. In this release we have a number of new features which are approaching completion and where we would like some feedback. While many of these features are fully functional, we are still working on cleaning up the user interface to provide a unified look across the core platform. Please take a few minutes to install the latest CTP and let us know what you think.

When DotNetNuke was first launched back in 2002, website navigation was just beginning to undergo a major shift. At the time most sites still used a relatively static navigation structure with very little interactivity beyond a few simple hover animations and hyperlinks. In fact, the original navigation structure for DotNetNuke was only a single level deep. Over the course of the following 3 years things progressed very rapidly. Sites began borrowing UI elements from desktop applications in order to provide users with a more familiar look and feel.

In 2003, DotNetNuke explored a number of navigation options and finally settled on a menu control provided by a developer from a company up in Naperville, Illinois. Solutions Partner Inc., was home to Jon Henning, an experienced JavaScript and .Net developer who had crafted his own menu control that was completely customizable using JavaScript, CSS and .Net. The Solpart menu was highly configurable and provided designers with the ability to fully integrate the navigation structure into the overall site design. If you have ever seen a DotNetNuke 1.x website, you would realize what a major advance this was.

I am pleased to announce that DotNetNuke 5.6.2 is officially released. This release resolves a number of outstanding issues with the 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 versions and adds a few new significant enhancements including:

• User Management – 5.6.2 now includes the ability to restore or remove soft-deleted users. For more information on this feature please see the recent blog post by Ash Prasad and my follow-up video post.
• Improved Performance – This release includes 20 different performance enhancements that continues our focus on providing a fast, scalable web platform for delivering your content and applications to your users.

Today marks another milestone in the upcoming Hadron release of DotNetNuke. For the first time ever, DotNetNuke is offering a Community Technology Preview that will allow you to begin testing the latest version long before we have completed all the features. As I discussed last week, the CTP is not intended to be production ready software but is an opportunity for the community to get a chance to start kicking the tires. The CTP is an important milestone as it will allow us to gather feedback from the community much earlier in the release cycle and thereby allow us more time to incorporate that feedback into the final release.

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet." Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

Sometimes a name is everything. It can convey meaning and emotion. In the world of software, a name can convey the stability or instability of a release. The name, or label, that we apply to a release is our way of communicating to you some important information about our product.

Next week, for the first time since DotNetNuke was created, we will be releasing a Community Technology Preview (CTP). This CTP will be for the upcoming DotNetNuke 6.0 release. Later this spring we will release another CTP, a Beta or two and a Release Candidate (RC).

Each of these terms (CTP, Beta, RC) represents a specific milestone in our release process and it is important to understand the distinction to know what you can expect in each release. Most developers in the Microsoft ecosystem will understand the terminology, but this post is intended to be a refresher so that as we discuss these releases in our community everyone will know what we are talking about. Our definitions may be slightly different than the way it is used by other companies and that is ok, as long as we are consistent in our usage.

In my position as the release manager for DotNetNuke, I end up installing DotNetNuke numerous times every week. While I have a set of PowerShell scripts which makes this process relatively painless there were still some areas that I felt needed improvement. In the past I have created all of my sites as applications in a virtual directory under the default site in IIS 7.5 (Windows 7). This usually results in some URL for my site that looks like this: http://localhost/myDNNsite.

DotNetNuke is a web content management system and an application framework that has grown over the past 8 years to solve many of the challenges faced by developers when building websites and web applications. Because of this rich feature set, it is possible that there may be areas of the platform which you have yet to explore. In this ongoing series, I plan to use short video clips to highlight some of my favorite features of the platform.

A few weeks ago, Ash Prasad, a software engineer at DotNetNuke Corp. discussed a new feature he worked on for 5.6.2. Ash did a really great job on the feature and I thought it would be worthwhile to show this feature in action. The new user management features definitely make deleting and restoring users much easier and restores the ability to permanently delete users from you DotNetNuke site.

Over the past year the DotNetNuke team has been working hard to improve the pace of our releases and to provide the community with the opportunity to participate in beta testing in order to provide feedback prior to a release. As of this morning DotNetNuke 5.6.2 beta packages are now available for download from our Beta Downloads page. We have made a number of fixes to the platform and incorporated a couple dozen performance enhancements. 5.6.2 further stabilizes the 5.6 platform and should be a solid foundation for your DotNetNuke site. Please keep in mind that this is just a beta and is not intended for production use. Upgrades to the final 5.6.2 release are not supported. We still have a few additional issues that we expect to be resolved prior to our Mid-March release but welcome any feedback.

I am pleased to announce that earlier this afternoon, DotNetNuke Blog 04.01.00 passed the final checks in the community release tracker and is now officially released. Blog 4.1.0 will be included with DotNetNuke 05.06.02 which is due out mid march. In the meantime, you can download 4.1 directly from CodePlex. The blog team is now moving full steam ahead on the many changes we have planned for the 05.00.00 release which we expect to coincide with the launch of DotNetNuke 06.00.00.

As previously announced, Blog 5.0 will include dependencies on several features coming in DotNetNuke 6.0. One of the major changes coming in DotNetNuke 6.0 is an updated UI. The blog team will be working hard to make sure that Blog 5.0 supports the new UI standards of DotNetNuke 6.0. Not only will this help to provide a more unified experience between the blog and the core framework, it will also help other module developers who can use the blog module as a reference for how to take advantage of the new core UI enhancements.

This past weekend a new DotNetNuke Blog release candidate was posted on CodePlex. This version of the blog addressed several longstanding issues with the Blog module and should be the final Release Candidate prior to the official release. In 4.1.0 we really focused on fixing some of the biggest problems with 4.0 and doing some security hardening based on feedback from our security team. In addition we added support for custom JS and CSS and temporarily removed support for Twitter (we’ll be bringing back an improved Twitter option in the next release).

One of the features that I was really excited about including in this release was the ability to support code formatting in the blog module. There are many different methods that I have used over the last several years to format code in my blog posts. The common denominator in every case is that it generally required me to add some custom JavaScript and CSS in the blog post so that it could be displayed properly. In addition to code formatting, we also wanted to support the ability of administrators to include their own CSS to override defaults.

For the last year or so there has been a lot of interest in the DotNetNuke community about how to run DotNetNuke on Windows Azure.  Many people have looked at the problem and could not find a viable solution that didn’t involve major changes to the core platform.  This past fall, DotNetNuke Corp. was asked by Microsoft to perform a feasibility study identifying any technical barriers that prevented DotNetNuke from running on Windows Azure.   I was pleasantly surprised by what I found and over the course of the next few weeks I’ll present my findings in a series of blog posts.  Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Clause, and he is running DotNetNuke on Windows Azure.

• Understanding Azure
• SQL Azure
• Azure Drives
• Web Roles and IIS
• Putting it All together

Part 1: Understanding Azure

Background

Prior to the official launch of Windows Azure, Charles Nurse had looked at running DotNetNuke on Windows Azure.  At the time it was concluded that we could not run without major architectural changes to DotNetNuke or to Windows Azure.  Since that time several other people in the community have also tried to get DotNetNuke running on Windows Azure and have arrived at the same conclusion.  David Rodriguez has actually made significant progress, but his solution required substantial changes to DotNetNuke and is not compatible without also modifying any module you wish to use.

DotNetNuke already runs on a number of different Cloud platforms and we really don’t want to re-architect DotNetNuke just to run on Azure.  That approach was rejected because ultimately Azure support is only needed by a small fraction of our overall community.  Re-architecting the platform would require significant development effort which could be better spent on features that serve a much larger segment of our community.  Also, re-architecting the platform would introduce a significant amount of risk since it would potentially impact every Module and Skin currently running on the platform.  The downsides of re-architecting DotNetNuke vastly outweigh the anticipated benefits to a small percentage of our user base.