Charles Nurse

Look Mom – NoSQL!

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 00:04:31 GMT

Its been a while since I blogged here, but I recently started a new blog series on my personal blog on the topic of NoSQL databases.

Recently this topic and in particular a particular subclass of databases called “Document Databases” came up in a discussion the Product Team were having on proposed features for 6.vNext..

So I decided it was time to dive into this class of databases in order to find out if they could provide some benefit to us in the Medium to Long Term.

The topic is very technical so I don’t propose to reproduce every blog post here – but if you are interested in what I find out then feel free to visit my personal blog.

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I’ll be speaking at DevReach

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 08:00:00 GMT

I am pleased to announce that I will be speaking at DevReach in Sofia, Bulgaria next month. This is the sixth year for this conference - which bills itself as the Premier Conference on Microsoft Technologies in Eastern and Central Europe - but its the first time for me.

Tags: devreach,Conference

Category: Events

Module Categorization in DotNetNuke 6 – Organize your Modules

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 21:16:37 GMT

DotNetNuke 6 introduces some really cool new features – especially the new User Interface – but there are also quite a few smaller enhancements that make it easier for Admins and Host users to manage their site.

One of these is the concept of Module Categorization. Module Categorization allows Host users to categorize their modules so that finding a module in the Control Panel is much easier.

Lets look at how it works.

When logged in as a Super User browse to the Host >> Extensions module and click on one of the links to edit an Extension. You will then see a new drop-down list which allows you to choose the category for the module

There are a number of default categories created and most of the modules that are shipped with DotNetNuke are categorized already. For example the HtmlPro module that is being edited is in the Common Category by default.

Once a module is categorized, what does this mean?

When we go to add a module to a page using the new DotNetNuke 6 Control Panel we now see that we can select the category of module that we would like to add.

In DotNetNuke 5.6 and earlier versions, the Module drop-down list displayed every module available to that user – in some sites the list could be huge, making it difficult to find modules. In DotNetNuke 6 this drop-down list is filtered based on the selected category, and by default the Common category is preselected.

Any module can be added to the Common category, but if managed properly, this should allow Page Administrators to find the module they want to add much easier.

DotNetNuke 6 Community Edition includes two Categories by default – Admin and Common, but Super Users can add new Module Categories through the Taxonomy module, by adding terms to the Module_Categories Vocabulary.

During the Beta process a number of people have suggested adding support for categories to the package manifest to allow the developer to preselect the category on install. This ability was intentionally left out as the goal of Module Categorization is to allow Super Users to manage the categorization, and allowing extension developers to add categories would defeat this goal.

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Tags: Module,categories,Taxonomy

Category: Development

Its going to be a busy Spring

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 04:27:49 GMT

This year I have decided to place a bigger focus on speaking at Developer Conferences and so over the last few months I have been submitting session proposals to major conferences around North America.

I am pleased to say that many of my submissions have been accepted and I have quite a busy speaking calendar for the upcoming Spring conference season.

VSLive

Conference Dates: April 18-22, 2011
Venue: Rio, Las Vegas
Website: http://vslive.com/lv

This excellent conference for .NET Developers is held two or three times a year and in April it will be held in Las Vegas. I will be presenting two sessions at this conference.

The Almighty @ – A Razor Primer
WebMatrix Real World Data Centric Applications

If you would like to see me speak please use the registration code – VLSPK23 – for a $400 savings.

DevTeach

Conference Dates: May 30 – June 3, 2011
Venue: Intercontinental Hotel, Montreal, Canada
Website: http://www.devteach.com/

This excellent conference which is held annually in one of Canada’s 3 major cities, is this year planned for Montreal in the beautiful province of Quebec. Come and see me speak on:

The Almighty @ – A Razor Primer
Have your Cake and Eat it Too - Using the WebFormsMVP Framework to Develop Testable Web Applications

Prairie DevCon

Conference Dates: June 13-14, 2011
Venue: Delta Regina, Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada
Website: http://www.prairiedevcon.com/

The Prairie Developer Conference is the conference event for software professionals in the Canadian prairies! At this conference I will be teaming up with my son Andrew to give two Razor presentations

The Nurse² Razor Show – Parts 1 and 2

Notice that the focus is Razor – Razor and WebMatrix are new technologies and DotNetNuke’s support for Razor means that I will be able to put a DNN spin on many of my speaking engagements.

If you plan on attending any of these conferences – ping me (@cnurse is my twiiter alias) – and we can meet up.

This post is cross-posted from my personal blog.

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Tags: vslive,devteach,prairiedevcon,razor,webmatrix

Happy New Year 2011

Sat, 01 Jan 2011 08:00:00 GMT

For the fifth year in a row, I awoke this New Years morning to an email from Microsoft, congratulating me on being awarded an MVP (Most Valuable Professional) Award for ASP.NET for the coming year.

Tags: mvp

Razor Tips and Tricks #4 – Extending the Helpers

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 03:52:13 GMT

On Monday, we launched the Razor DotNetNuke Hackathon with a meeting of SEADUG (Seattle DotNetNuke User Group) held at Microsoft offices in beautiful downtown Bellevue.

For those of you proposing to write Razor “scripts” as part of the Hackathon, I have decided to write a series of short Tips and Tricks.

In this fourth post I will cover how you can go about extending the provided helpers to provide a simpler API for the scripts to consume.

The DotNetNukeWebPage class, which is the base class for all Razor scripts used in DotNetNuke has three additional properties.

Figure 1 – DotNetNukeWebPage Proeprties

   1:  Protected Friend Property Dnn As DnnHelper

   2:  Protected Friend Property Html As HtmlHelper

   3:  Protected Friend Property Url As UrlHelper

In this tip we are going to extend the Dnn property to add an extra method. The Dnn property is an instance of the DnnHelper class which is defined in the DotNetNuke.Web.Razor library.

Figure 2 - The DnnHelper Class

   1:  Public Class DnnHelper

2:

   3:      Private _context As ModuleInstanceContext

4:

   5:      Public Sub New(ByVal context As ModuleInstanceContext)

   6:          _context = context

   7:      End Sub

8:

   9:      Public ReadOnly Property [Module] As ModuleInfo

  10:          Get

  11:              Return _context.Configuration

  12:          End Get

  13:      End Property

14:

  15:      Public ReadOnly Property Tab As TabInfo

  16:          Get

  17:              Return _context.PortalSettings.ActiveTab

  18:          End Get

  19:      End Property

20:

  21:      Public ReadOnly Property Portal As PortalSettings

  22:          Get

  23:              Return _context.PortalSettings

  24:          End Get

  25:      End Property

26:

  27:      Public ReadOnly Property User As UserInfo

  28:          Get

  29:              Return _context.PortalSettings.UserInfo

  30:          End Get

  31:      End Property

32:

  33:  End Class

Imagine that you want to write a script which lists all of the roles on the site. You could use the full DotNetNuke API in your Razor script as shown in Figure 3

Figure 3 – Role List script

There is nothing wrong with this – it works. But what if you could have a much simpler script to do the same task (Figure 4).

Figure 4 – Simplified Role List script

For beginner developers who are trying their hand at DotNetNuke development using the Razor Host module, this is much more intuitive. But GetRoles() is not a member of the DnnHelper class, and I don’t want to modify a core class. This is where the wonders of Extension methods comes in. Since C# 3 (or VB 9) which shipped with Visual Studio 2008, we have been able to add functionality to existing classes, without modifying the class directly.

In a separate project, I added a class DnnHelperExtensions, where I defined the following extension method (Figure 5).

Figure 5 – GetRoles Extension Method

   1:  public static class DnnHelperExtensions

   2:  {

   3:      public static List GetRoles(this DnnHelper helper)

   4:      {

   5:          var controller = new RoleController();

   6:          var _roles = new List(controller.GetRoleNames(

   7:                                      helper.Portal.PortalId

   8:                                      ));

9:

  10:          return _roles;

  11:      }

  12:  }

This method hides the DotNetNuke complexity from the scripter. We don’t need to worry about what namespace(s) to include in our script and we don’t care that GetRoleNames needs a PortalId as the helper method takes care of it.

There is one final step that we need to do to get this to work. We need to add a reference to the Helpers namespace in the web.config file that lives in the RazorModules folder.

Figure 6 – Updating web.config

   1:  <system.web.webPages.razor>

   2:    <pages pageBaseType="DotNetNuke.Web.Razor.DotNetNukeWebPage">

   3:      <namespaces>

   4:        <add namespace="Microsoft.Web.Helpers" />

   5:        <add namespace="WebMatrix.Data" />

   6:        <add namespace="DotNetNuke.Web.Razor.Helpers" />

   7:      namespaces>

   8:    pages>

   9:  system.web.webPages.razor>

In the final release of the Razor Host Module, we will add the DotNetNuke.Web.Razor.Helpers namespace to the web.config included, and we will start to flesh out the DnnHelper class with some more intuitive methods.

However, if ever ever feel that something is missing you can create your own. Just make sure that all your helper Extension Methods are in the same namespace and all you will need to do is add the assembly to the bin folder, and they will just work.

Figure 7 – The Resulting Razor Script in Action.

This post is cross-posted from my personal blog.

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Tags: razor,webmatrix,Hackathon

Razor Tips and Tricks #3 – “Look, No forms”

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 15:21:38 GMT

On Monday, we launched the Razor DotNetNuke Hackathon with a meeting of SEADUG (Seattle DotNetNuke User Group) held at Microsoft offices in beautiful downtown Bellevue.

For those of you proposing to write Razor “scripts” as part of the Hackathon, I have decided to write a series of short Tips and Tricks.

In this third post I will cover a couple of caveats when using Razor scripts in the DotNetNuke context.

No Forms

The first caveat is that because the Razor script is still running within the context of a ASP.NET WebForm, you need to be careful when using Razor scripts that you find (or write yourself) for collecting form data.

tags cannot be embedded inside other form tags – and because an ASP.NET WebForm (.aspx) always contain a tag, this means that Razor scripts used in the DotNetNuke context cannot contain tags.

The workaround is simple – just remove the tags from any Razor script you use in DotNetNuke. Any submit button will post back as usual and DotNetNuke will pass the Form variables to the script as normal.

Urls

The second caveat is that you should be careful with following Razor script examples that use Urls. For example you will often see something like:

@RenderPage("/Shared/_Header.cshtml");

The initial “/” means that we the url is starting at the web-root. As most Razor examples you see will assume that your Razor script is executing in the context of web-root – this example is fine. But in DotNetNuke, the Shared directory would probably be buried deep in the website folder structure (for example ~/DesktopModules/RazorModules/MyModule/Shared/).

In this case just leave out the initial “/” so that the url is relative.

@RenderPage("Shared/_Header.cshtml");

This post is cross-posted from my personal blog.

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Tags: razor,webmatrix

Razor Tips and Tricks #2 – Razor’s Custom web.config File

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 01:33:40 GMT

Yesterday we launched the Razor DotNetNuke Hackathon with a meeting of SEADUG (Seattle DotNetNuke User Group) held at Microsoft offices in beautiful downtown Bellevue.

For those of you proposing to write Razor “scripts” as part of the Hackathon, I have decided to write a series of short Tips and Tricks.

In this second post I will provide some information about the web.config file located in the RazorModules folder.

One of the neat features of Razor/WebPages is that the parser is highly configurable. Its configuration is controlled by a new section in web.config (shown in Figure 1). In theory the section can be placed in the web.config file in the web root, but as it is only of interest to Razor it can be placed in a custom web.config file in DesktopModules.

The file distributed with the Razor Host module is installed into the ~/DesktopModules/RazorModules folder.

Figure 1 – Custom web.config file

   1:    <system.web.webPages.razor>

   2:      <pages pageBaseType="DotNetNuke.Web.Razor.DotNetNukeWebPage">

   3:        <namespaces>

   4:          <add namespace="Microsoft.Web.Helpers" />

   5:          <add namespace="WebMatrix.Data" />

   6:        namespaces>

   7:      pages>

   8:    system.web.webPages.razor>

The entry on line 2 of the file tells the Razor parser that the Razor base type is DotNetNukeWebPage (not WebPage), and the namespaces nodes tell the parser to automatically “include” the specified namespaces.

If you want/need to use other namespaces – maybe from helpers that you wrote yourself – or that you found on the Internet - then adding the namespaces here means that you do not need “@using” statements in the .cshtml file(s).

By convention, the RazorHost module is installed in the RazorModules folder and as long as any other Razor module is located in a subfolder of RazorModules then it will “inherit” the settings in this custom web.config.

So, if you want to place your Razor script somewhere else – say DesktopModules/MyModules then you will need to deploy your own version of the web.config which contains the node at the least.

This post is cross-posted from my personal blog.

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Tags: razor,webmatrix,Hackathon

Razor Tips and Tricks –#1–Required Assemblies

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 15:25:02 GMT

Yesterday we launched the Razor DotNetNuke Hackathon with a meeting of SEADUG (Seattle DotNetNuke User Group) held at the Microsoft offices in beautiful downtown Bellevue.

For those of you proposing to write Razor “scripts” as part of the Hackathon I have decided to start a series of short Tips and Tricks.

In this first post I will provide the first Tip for anyone wanting to bundle their Razor Module for distribution to users who do not have WebMatrix OR the Razor Host Module installed on their machines.

When you try and create a Package from your Razor script using the Create Package Wizard, you are prompted for a list of assemblies to include. Here is the complete List

DotNetNuke.Web.Razor.dll
Microsoft.Web.Helpers.dll
System.Web.Helpers.dll
System.Web.Razor.dll
System.Web.WebPages.dll
System.Web.WebPages.Razor.dll
WebMatrix.Data.dll
WebMatrix.WebData.dll
Microsoft.Web.Infrastructure.dll

Of course, you can leave these out of you own package if you intend your users to have already installed the Razor Host module.

This post is cross-posted from my personal blog.

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Tags: razor,webmatrix,Hackathon

WebMatrix and DNN – 7 – Razor Scripting Deep Dive

Thu, 25 Nov 2010 15:33:41 GMT

In earlier articles in this series on the new WebMatrix suite of technologies from Microsoft, I described how we are supporting the use of Razor scripts in DotNetNuke, by providing a “Razor Host” module.

But what is Razor?

On my personal blog I have recently started a new series of articles that take a deep dive into the Razor Syntax. As these articles deal exclusively with Razor and WebPages, I decided not to cross-post them here.

However, for those interested in learning more about Razor then you can find the first three articles here.

Razor and WebPages – 1 – A New Way to Create Web Applications

Razor and WebPages – 2 – The Almighty @

Razor and WebPages – 3 – Razor syntax

The series is not complete – the following topics are planned.

Razor and WebPages – 4 – Razor Forms

Razor and WebPages – 5 – Using Data in WebPages

Razor and WebPages – 6 – Using Helpers

Razor and WebPages – 7 – Writing your own Helpers

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