Any of you that attended DotNetNuke World this year would probably agree… There were few moments when you didn’t see me holding a camera. Most often, I was pointing it at you too, hoping to catch you having the fun time that we all know you were. While I am not a professional photographer, I definitely do my best to create the best images possible. Hopefully the pictures below reflect that.

We just had the first Bay Area DotNetNuke User Group (BayDUG) meeting after having a break for over a year now. It was a great presentation. Chris Hammond did an overview of the features that DotNetNuke now offers to people that enable them to being rolling out their mobile-friendly websites. As great as the overview was, it was missing something… Why would you use one feature over another? What should I think about before deciding the “best way” for my website when building my mobile-friendly site?

I look forward to many things at DotNetNuke World – the networking, the events, the people, and more. But one of the things I enjoy immensely is preparing a presentation for people. This year, my presentation for DNN World was DotNetNuke Widgets, from A to Z. Widgets (a.k.a., skin widgets) in DNN are largely misunderstood and seldom used.

It was quite a fun thing to run the DotNetNuke SUPER Fan contest for the first time ever. Though it really was a lot of work both for me and each of the entrants, it was more than worth the effort. I was very honored to be able to run this contest, because as you probably realize, being a self-proclaimed super fan of DotNetNuke myself, I couldn’t wait to be able to officially designate and announce “the” SUPER fan. This is just what we did at DotNetNuke World.

As most of you know I was at the DotNetNuke World 2011 event in Orlando Florida this past week, and I thought I would give a quick recap of my experience with the event and share how much different I felt this event was in comparison to the previous DotNetNuke Connections events.  To help try and give proper justice to the topic, I'm going to break my review out in a few different categories to help make it a bit more understandable, and without further delay, here we go!

Dear DotNetNuke Community,

Movember is coming up, and I am getting the DotNetNuke Team going again this year. For those of you who weren’t with the company last year Movember is this. You start with a clean shaven face on November 1^st, and grow a mustache (not a beard, not a goatee) for the ENTIRE month, to raise awareness (and money) for cancers that effect men, primarily prostate cancer.

I love to see success in any shape in the DotNetNuke community and ecosystem. I especially love the successes that we see in user groups. I blogged about an up and coming user group in Charlotte, NC not too long ago. They have been experiencing incredible growth for a niche topic user group (as all DNN user groups are). I knew then that it wouldn’t be long before I would find myself in Charlotte presenting at the Queen City DotNetNuke User Group (QCDUG).

• Folder Providers: Azure, and Amazon, move it to the cloud.
• The new UI of course and how you can use the features in your development.
• DDR Menu, who wants flat menus anymore?
• And all the great stuff you can do creating your own modules.

It has been such an overwhelming task to have to keep all of the entries for the DotNetNuke SUPER Fan Contest under wraps.  There really are some very creative and simply outstanding entries for this first run of the contest – even some surprises!  We’ve had entries from some people that you probably would know, and some new people as well. 

It’s been a month since I first announced the user group contest for DotNetNuke World.  This is actually two contests in one.  First, all DotNetNuke user groups are encouraged to compete to get the most members to register to attend DotNetNuke World.  The other contest involves the members of the ODUG trying to get the most referrals to register for the conference.  Both contests have some amazing prizes.  Here is an update of who is in the lead right now.

Do you LOVE DotNetNuke?  Do you find yourself running to DotNetNuke events, or jumping to the front of a line just to get a DotNetNuke t-shirt?  Have you had the uncontrollable urge to take a picture with the logo, put the logo on something, or meet and greet with some of the most well-known folks in the DotNetNuke community?

Have you ever had one of the co-founders of DotNetNuke Corporation speak at your user group?  How about the founder of DotNetNuke itself, Shaun Walker?  Not many user groups can say that they’ve have a co-founder present a session at their user group.  With the contest I am announcing, any user group can make this happen!

So this year will be my 3rd year, (would be my 4th if I hadn’t bailed at the last minute on year 1), that I will be speaking at the St. Louis Day(s) of .Net. If you haven’t been to the STLDODN you should definitely check it out. It is a great two day event, and at $125 (if you register by 7/8/2011) the price can hardly be beat!

The event is being held this year on August 5th and 6th, 2011. Again at the Ameristar Casino in St. Charles, MO, about 10 minutes from where I used to live (two moves ago now).

Read the full blog post for all the details.

Every year since the first North American DotNetNuke conference (then named OpenForce), it was nothing short of the who’s who of the DotNetNuke community and ecosystem.  The buzz resulting from people before, during, and after the event was simply gravitating, and was sure to make anyone who didn’t attend jealous of those that did.  If you pay any attention to the blogs, forums, and twitter during this time, this proves true every year.

As you may have read here, I recently visited the Orlando DotNetNuke Users Group, and Dallas DotNetNuke User Group to show them the latest and greatest version of DotNetNuke – version 6!

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.

One of the great things about being in the DotNetNuke community is meeting new people.  I’ve had the pleasure of meeting a couple of folks from all over the world.  Recently, I finally met a couple from North Carolina that are co-leading a DNN user group there.  I’d known them for a long time, but never met them in person until the Day of DotNetNuke in Orlando.

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to speak at a user group meeting.  I think the last time was December of 2010.  While that doesn’t sound like a long time, it was nearly 6 months ago!  I am attempting to make up for it next month with two DotNetNuke user group meetings in June.

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.

Shaun Walker, Joe Brinkman, Richard Dumas and myself made the trek to Chicago this weekend for DotNetNuke’s first showing at CMSExpo (www.cmsexpo.net).

We weren’t really sure what to expect, as the conference was in the past a Joomla dominate conference, and while there isn’t anything wrong with that, it gave us some concerns. I must say though, all those concerns have been tossed out the Window. We had a great first day!

read the full post for all the details

If you are in the Chicagoland area, or are up for a trip to Chicago, you should check out the CMS Expo coming up the 2nd through the 4th of May, 2011.

What is CMS Expo?

“CMS Expo is a 3-day learning and business conference designed to help content pros get the facts, find the support and make the contacts needed to help them succeed. Hosted by the CMS Association, CMSX delivers timely, relevant and actionable insights to help leaders make informed decisions for business.” – http://cmsx.us/

Where is CMS Expo?

The CMS Expo is being held at the Hilton Orrington Hotel in Evanston, IL

Who is going?

Shaun Walker, Joe Brinkman and myself (Chris Hammond) from DotNetNuke will be presenting sessions, and we will have Richard Dumas along for the ride as well. We have a number of sessions that we are providing, as well as prizes that will be available at our booth. You can see a full listing of our sessions from the DotNetNuke page of the CMS Expo website.

There was a twitter contest this morning to see if anyone could accurately guess who the keynote speaker would be at this years Day of DotNetNuke Orlando event.  Originally, a DotNetNuke shirt was offered as a prize for the right guess.  There were plenty of guesses, but no one hit the target.  Next, the deal was sweetened with a DNN boomerang.  Still, no one guessed the right person – but there certainly were plenty of entertaining guesses!  Finally, the stakes were raised to include not just a DNN t-shirt and boomerang, but also a frisbee.  At the time of this writing, the keynote speaker was not guessed, so no one gets the swag.  That shouldn’t prevent you from knowing who the speaker is though!

It’s always so cool to be able to tell you about the great things that the community gets to participate in and/or benefit from.  This is perhaps one of the cooler things…  A brand new program for competing to be the DotNetNuke site of the month!  Anyone can enter their site to the contest, but the contest is being hosted exclusively within Facebook and open to anyone to submit and win (except for lowly employees like me).

Today Shaun Walker and I had the pleasure of demonstrating how well DotNetNuke works with Microsoft WebMatrix and the new Razor scripting engine at CodeMash.  CodeMash is a great regional development conference that focuses on exposing developers to a wide variety of languages and platforms.  A common theme throughout CodeMash has always been how we can simplify our development processes without loosing power and flexibility.  WebMatrix and Razor

As you saw with the Razor scripts that were submitted as part of our recent Razor Hackathon, it is possible to build a wide variety of modules and scripts using Razor.  As you probably saw in the announcement during the WebMatrix launch event at CodeMash, DotNetNuke 5.6.1 Release Candidate is now available for immediate download from the DotNetNuke CodePlex download page.  The Release Candidate contains the final RTM version of the Razor engine and we expect the final DotNetNuke 5.6.1 version to ship next week on January 19th.

All I can say is “wow”!  We were very excited to use Microsoft’s Razor technology as the theme for this Hackathon programming contest and our entrants did not disappoint!  The winning entry from Ian Robinson, “Razor’s Edge User Map”, features integration of DotNetNuke’s user profile data with Google’s geolocation API to produce driving directions from a users location to a local business!  And using Razor technology in DotNetNuke made this amazingly simple to do!

Occam’s Razor is an often referenced heuristic that basically states that the simplest explanation is more likely to be the correct one.  This principle has many corollaries in computer science as we often strive to find the simplest solution to a problem in order to keep the complexity of our applications under control.  The new ASP.Net Razor view engine embraces this philosophy and certainly shows that even simple solutions can be very powerful.  Charles Nurse has a recent series of blog posts which discuss how you can even use Razor within DotNetNuke, with the focus being on lowering the barrier for creating DotNetNuke modules.

In keeping with this focus on simplicity, On December 6th, the Seattle DotNetNuke User Group (SEADUG) will be hosting the DotNetNuke Razor Hackathon.  Like previous Hackathons, we’ll be live streaming the kick-off event on DotNetNuke.com. 

Have you ever created a skin in DotNetNuke? Have you ever wanted to or needed to? Getting started with skinning is actually fairly easy, we show you how to do so in our DotNetNuke Skinning webinar which starts tomorrow morning.

I know that this is a little late with DevConnections being a little over a week-and-a-half ago, but I thought that it was still important that I get my highlights out here on the blog as i think there are number of incredibly good things coming in the future for DotNetNuke.  For a more detailed review I highly recommend that you check out Will Strohl's blog post, as he goes into a bit deeper discussion than I do.

At the last OpenForce event I took my little point and shoot Panasonic along with the intent of using it as a video camera. Nothing works better to capture the atmosphere than video, IMO.

Some of you have likely heard of Movember, some of you have likely not. So here’s the quick and dirty basics about the Month of Movember borrowed from the Official site.

“Movember challenges men to change their appearance and the face of men’s health by growing a moustache. The rules are simple, start Movember 1st  clean-shaven and then grow a moustache for the entire month.  The moustache becomes the ribbon for men’s health, the means by which awareness and funds are raised for cancers that affect men.  Much like the commitment to run or walk for charity, the men of Movember commit to growing a moustache for 30 days. ” http://us.movember.com/about/

So what the heck does this have to do with DotNetNuke? Well, not much, except that cancer effects everyone, man and woman, geek and jock. the same. I’ve created a DotNetNuke Movember team for the Employees and Community to join and participate in for 2010. To join the team visit http://us.movember.com/register/104438 and follow the steps. I’ll personally donate $1* to every person’s donation campaign that joins the DotNetNuke team on Movember.com to help you get started. 

If you are attending the pre-conference training for DotNetNuke Connections next week here’s the information you need to know prior to coming to the class!

First off, if you aren’t registered for the training yet get signed up soon! http://devconnections.com/shows/FALL2010DN/default.asp?c=3&s=158 If you are registered for DotNetNuke Connections but not the training you can add the training on, so get to it!

So here’s what you need to know about the training on Monday. We will be developing a module that you can walk away with at the end of the session, in either VB or C#. In the morning session I will go through the basics of what we will be creating, the afternoon will be spent actually building the module in lab sessions. I, as well as other DNN Corp employees, will be walking around helping everyone with the process of doing the building of the module. You can do your development in either C# or VB, whatever you choose, we will provide source code examples and support for both.

A few weeks ago, I enjoyed my very first experience at the Silicon Valley Code Camp.  I have to admit, with all of the stigma and mystique surrounding Silicon Valley, I was quite intimidated walking into this event.  With this being the 5th time actually holding a code camp here in Silicon Valley, I knew that they were going to know what they were doing, and they didn’t disappoint.

The Networking Event which takes place each year at the DotNetNuke conference in Las Vegas always seems to be a highlight for many.  Kristian Ranstrom, who is presenting a session during DotNetNuke Connections ‘10 agrees, telling us that he always enjoys the evening of socializing and that “getting everyone together is great.”  In this edition of our speaker Q&A series, you can learn more about Kristian – and if you’re attending the conference, you will likely have your opportunity to meet him at this year’s Networking Event which takes place on the evening of November 3rd. 
 
 

Ian Robinson, who is speaking at this year’s DotNetNuke Connections conference in Las Vegas, is having himself a busy year.  By the end of 2010, he will have visited Vietnam and The Netherlands, spoken at four conferences, helped organize the Day of DotNetNuke Chicago, and run a marathon.  Through his Twitter account (@irobinson) he’ll have also shared a wealth of insights on #dnn … and #craftbeer.  We look forward to seeing Ian again at this year’s DotNetNuke Connections event - and invite you to learn a little bit more about him in our most recent speaker Q&A.

It’s 8:15am on Sunday, October 3rd, I am at O’hare International Airport waiting to board my flight and begin the journey back home. As I sit here, I think, in admiration, of the people that made yesterday’s event a success. Their hard work and dedication is inspiring. Trust me folks, organizing such an event is NOT a piece of cake, its tough work. So with that said, I would like to personally thank all the organizers, volunteers, sponsors, and other supporters that contributed to making this event happen.

If you’ve never been to the annual DotNetNuke convention in Las Vegas Nevada your first time there you are going to be overwhelmed. The Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino is enormous, if you’re staying in the Mandalay Bay or THEHotel, plan on giving yourself 10-15 minutes to walk to where the convention is each morning, you won’t go outside, but you’ll definitely go for a hike.

First things first, THEHotel is another hotel (a fancier/pricier one), attached to the casino that is Mandalay Bay, you can think of them as being on opposite corners of a square. The convention center is on one of the corners between the two, if you consider that corner stretched way the hell out of place, and a long way away from the other corners :)

Today, as part of our ongoing DotNetNuke Connections speakers Q&A series, we highlight a developer who is excited to be speaking at DevConnections for the first time.  Though Chad Nash of Data Springs Inc. isn’t yet on the speaker circuit, he is certainly well-recognized in the community as a top selling vendor of modules for DotNetNuke.  If you haven’t had the opportunity to meet Chad at one of the past conferences in Las Vegas, your chance is now!  Catch Chad during his session – or say hello to him and his staff at their exhibitor booth (# 607/609)

As we lead up to DotNetNuke Connections November 1-4, 2010, Bill Walker and I are highlighting some of the speakers who will be presenting sessions at this year’s conference. Last week we introduced you to Brandon Haynes, today we’ll introduce you to one of the guys who has had the most influence on DotNetNuke in the past 4 or 5 years, Charles Nurse. So sit back and enjoy our brief interview with Charles, and stay tuned as we feature more speakers in the coming weeks. You might also check out some of the recently announced Offers for DNN Connections, some expire soon!

As we lead up to DotNetNuke Connections November 1-4, 2010, Bill Walker and I are highlighting some of the speakers who will be presenting sessions at this year’s conference. Last week we introduced you to Cathal Connolly and Bruce Chapman, today I have the pleasure of featuring a cohort of Cathal’s on the Security team for DotNetNuke, Brandon Haynes. So sit back and enjoy our brief interview with Brandon, and stay tuned as we feature more speakers in the coming weeks. You might also check out some of the recently announced Offers for DNN Connections, some expire soon!

As we lead up to DotNetNuke Connections November 1-4, 2010, Bill Walker and I are highlighting some of the speakers who will be presenting sessions at this year’s conference. Last week Bill introduced you to Mitchel Sellers, today I have the pleasure of featuring DotNetNuke Corp.’s very own Cathal Connolly. So sit back and enjoy our brief interview with Cathal, and stay tuned as we feature more speakers in the coming weeks. You might also check out some of the recently announced Offers for DNN Connections.

I feel a bit overwhelmed right now.  I haven’t presented at any community events in at least a couple of months, and I have somehow found myself committed to 7 different public presentations at 4 different events in 4 different cities over the next 2 months – and that’s not including 2 huge presentations that are not public.

I am not complaining though.  I wouldn’t agree to any of them if I didn’t enjoy it.  I just didn’t realize how quickly they all sprung up on me!  :)

We’re proud to announce this year keynote speaker at Day of DotNetNuke Chicago event is Nik Kalyani. If you haven’t been around the community much, Nik Kalyani is one of the co-founders of DotNetNuke Corp. He’s a real talented individual who wears many hats within DotNetNuke.

Nik has been an integral part of the ecosystem. With his creative and the passion for innovation within community, he has led many DotNetNuke engagements. The most recent community engagement is DNN mobile Hackathon in St. Louis which received tremendous support from people not just from St. Louis but across the country.

If you haven’t been to Las Vegas Nevada for the annual DotNetNuke Conference you are definitely missing out on a good time! I look forward to going every year, and to be honest, I get the most enjoyment out of seeing all the people and talking outside of the sessions than I do in the sessions themselves. That being said, the sessions are well worth the price of the conference! But where else are you going to get to meet the big names in the DotNetNuke World each and every year?

I just want to make quick update to everyone who has been following the Day of DotNetNuke Chicago event coming up in October. We’re now have published our list of awesome speakers and wonderful sessions. Check out the site and learn more about those respected community and core team members.

There are plenty of sessions that are aiming to help you get up to speed or learning the best practices when walking away from the event. Whatever your background might be, we have broad list of topics that should help satisfying your thirst of DotNetNuke knowledge. Day Of DotNetNuke Chicago topics include design, mobile development, content administration, ecosystem, and development.

So if you’ve been under a rock lately you might not have heard that the annual DotNetNuke conference is coming up. While in the past it has been branded as OpenForce, this year it is just simply DotNetNuke Connections, to better fit inline with the DevConnections banner.

This years event is once again going to be held in conjunction with DevConnections in Las Vegas Nevada, November 1-4. The conference is at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino, a great venue that has been the amazing home to the DotNetNuke conference for the previous three years.

On August 18th we kicked off the Mobile DotNetNuke Hackathon at the St. Louis DotNetNuke User Group.  During the kick-off we had a great demonstration of Appcelerator Titanium from Kevin Whinnery.  Kevin is an Appcelerator Engineer and Product Evangelist and it was clear from his presentation that he was both passionate and knowledgeable about Titanium.  Almost everyone we spoke with was extremely interested in giving Titanium a try and the Hackathon was the perfect opportunity to kick the tires and build a great mobile application.

If you have been following the voting this last week, you know that we had 5 great Hackathon entries, 4 of which were built with Titanium.  The voting has ended and Scott Willhite should be announcing the results shortly.  Regardless of which mobile app is declared the Hackathon winner, the real winner is the entire DotNetNuke community.  We have gained valuable knowledge about a great tool that can aid in extending the reach of websites and web applications that we all build.  We have also added 6 more Open Source applications to the DotNetNuke forge which will provide great starting points when developing new mobile applications.

The date of the event is fast approaching and I hope you all have your schedule straightened out to attend the Day of DotNetNuke Chicago conference coming up. If not, go ahead and get your hotel booked using our list of hotels with speacial rates on our site.

We’ve been getting great submissions from speakers across the country and even from the neighrboring countries. This event is going to be an awesome one with great content, respected speakers, and wonderful networking opportunities!

I apologize for not being able to publish the details about speakers and sessions just yet, along with my day job and other approaching deadlines I’m working hard on it. Realizing there isn’t excuse for it (plus there are too many speakers and sessions to review), I’ll be able to get together with the team and publish the details early next week on our site.

Last week we challenged DotNetNuke developers to create and submit applications for the latest DotNetNuke Mobile Hackathon.  Entries had to have a mobile application component and a DotNetNuke component that allowed the mobile application and a DotNetNuke website to work together to provide a compelling mobile DotNetNuke experience for the user.  Because the mobile development space is a bit new to many of us, we enlisted the aid of Appcelerator in sponsoring the event and giving a short demo of their Titanium Mobile product to the Hackathon kickoff event attendees.  Titanium simplifies mobile development and allows developers to target several mobile platforms using a single code base.  Apparently our developer community liked Titanium as well, since 4 of the 5 entries were created using the Titanium Mobile SDK.

Last Wednesday night we kicked off the DotNetNuke Mobile Hackathon in St. Louis.  The focus of this hackathon is developing applications that span the DotNetNuke and mobile application space.  Participants have until the 6PM CST on August 25th to submit their entries.  As we mentioned at the user group meeting, we have been working on a community application that allows DotNetNuke users to stay connected even when they are not in front of their computer.  Starting today we are distributing the source code for DNN Pulse on the DotNetNuke Forge.

DNN Pulse is being built with Appcelerator Titanium and takes advantage of Xmlhttprequests, geolocation and mapping services to connect the user to the DotNetNuke community in their local area and on DotNetNuke.com.  During the coming months we will continue to add new features and functionality to the app so that no matter where you are, you can always stay plugged into the community.  Titanium was a natural fit for us since it allows us to target multiple mobile platforms with a single codebase, and because all of the code is written in Javascript we can re-use our existing coding skills without needing to learn a new language.

The initial code release is still beta quality code.  After the hackathon is complete we will incorporate a few remaining features which are not in the current codebase and clean up some of the error handling.  If you plan to use some of this code in your own app, then keep that in mind and code appropriately.

This article is cross-posted from my personal blog.

Background

In preparation for the upcoming DotNetNuke Hackathon in St. Louis, I have been busy working on a new mobile application for the Android and iPhone platforms.  Nik Kalyani and I have been playing with the Appcelerator Titanium product for the past several months and have been intrigued by it’s promise to allow you to quickly develop mobile applications for multiple platforms using the coding skills that many web developers already possess.  When Nik started planning for the St. Louis Hackathon he decided to focus on building apps which bridge the mobile and DotNetNuke space.  He immediately thought that Appcelerator was a natural tool to use.

What attracted Nik and I to Titanium was the ability to program in JavaScript with a light sprinkling of HTML and CSS to create native iPhone and Android applications.  It also helped that Titanium is an Open Source product which is a big plus for the DotNetNuke community.  The real Titanium magic happens when you compile your application using Titanium Developer.  At that point a native application is generated for either Android or iPhone, and coming soon the BlackBerry as well.  Titanium Developer lets you run your app on the various platform emulators as well as allowing you to push your application directly to a physical device.  As a final step, Titanium Developer even assists with publishing your finished application to the Android Market and the iPhone App store.

With the Mobile DotNetNuke Hackathon coming up in St. Louis next week Joe Brinkman and I are going to be blogging about how you can get started with doing some mobile development with DotNetNuke, that way you are prepared to enter the contest. If you win the contest you stand a chance at winning some cool prizes, so you better dust off your development chops and get started!

My first post is going to cover how to easily get started with Appcelerator’s Titanium, a tool from an open source company located not too far from DotNetNuke Corp’s headquarters here in the Bay Area in California. The Titanium project is a tool for packaging and deploying (and testing) mobile applications,  meaning you can develop an application that will work on IPhone or Android, and in future releases will include Blackberry. Besides mobile you can also develop desktop applications, but we’re going to stick with the mobile side of things for now.

I’m pleased to announce the call for speakers for the second Day of DotNetNuke event in North America.

This year we will gather in the Chicagoland area for this free event serving those who are interested in learning about this world’s largest open source .NET web content management system and development framework.

Our focus in organizing the upcoming Chicago event is to provide high quality educational content for the community and to provide opportunities for in-person networking and socializing. Of course, great speakers and quality content are key ingredients to a successful conference.

It is unfortunate that the long-awaited Day Of DotNetNuke event in Florida got cancelled today. Will Strohl, creator of the event, officially published a note about the news for this year earlier today. However, don’t get too bummed out just yet because you can still have a chance to attend this awesome Day Of DotNetNuke in the Midwest area.

As Chris Hammond posted a few weeks back in regards to the annual St. Louis Day of .NET event, I’d like to keep everyone who has an interest in attending it posted.

Our of the 50 speakers from across the country presenting on various platforms, we have 6 speakers in DotNetNuke community got invited to present at the event (and more are coming), those include Joe Brinkman, Chris Hammond, Ian Robinson, Mitchel Sellers, Shaun Mehaffie and myself. You can see a full list of speakers on their site here:http://www.stlouisdayofdotnet.com/Speakers.aspx

This past weekend we received the entries for our second event in the Hackathon series which DotNetNuke Corp is promoting in conjunction with HyperCrunch.  DotNetNuke Hackathons are a great way for users to learn about DotNetNuke features or development techniques that they may not have tried before and put them into action.  The Hackathons are also a great way to introduce people to some of the great user groups that we have spread around the world.

Below are some of the videos from the recent “Visual DotNetNuke” Hackathon that was held at the Capital DotNetNuke User Group on June 16th.  You can find these videos and more from all of our Hackathon events on the Hackathon videos page on DotNetNuke.com.

In May, Nik Kalyani traveled to the Orlando DotNetNuke User Group to present the first DotNetNuke Hackathon event.  The Orlando Hackathon was very well attended and focused on teaching developers about the new MVP design pattern and the WebformsMVP framework that was included in DotNetNuke 5.3.

What is a Hackathon?

A Hackathon is a developer event that occurs over a short period of time.  Hackathons are informal events aimed at teaching developers some new technology which the developers then use in the development of a new project.  Because of the immersive nature of the events, developers are able to get a good jumpstart on using some new technology or development technique.  These events are designed to encourage participation by people who may not be familiar with a particular technology or concept.

The European Day of DotNetNuke will take place on MAy, 28^th in Paris, which is approaching quickly - so soon there is the deadline for session proposal.