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.

This week, we officially launched the second annual DotNetNuke Community Choice Awards.  While the nominations period has only been open for a matter of days now, we have already received some high-quality and varied examples of DotNetNuke web sites.

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.

The DotNetNuke Mobile Hackathon, conducted in cooperation with the St. Louis DotNetNuke User Group, Appcelerator and HyperCrunch, has been an awesome event and generated some really nice applications!  Typically, the short duration of the event (only a week of development) results in applications which are small, limited or even simple examples.  But this event has drawn some really terrific talent and produced some very interesting, very functional entries!

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.

A question arose today about .Net Framework - 3.5 and 3.5 Client, as well as 4.0 and 4.0 Client.  In Visual Studio 2010 you are able to select your Framework target.  This is not new, but which one to select! So what is the difference between the Framework and the Framework Client?

The differences are the components that are installed. The "Client" profiles are intended to be slimmed down releases that include only what is needed by client/desktop applications. For example, it doesn't include the ASP.NET...

One of the great strengths of DotNetNuke is the fact that you can host as many sites as you’d like, from a single installation of DNN.  Did I confused you?  Imagine that you are currently managing 5 or more websites, each with its own web hosting plan.  If they are each DNN, or otherwise a .Net and database enabled website, you’re easily spending over $7,000.00 just in hosting fees.  Imagine being able to spend a fraction of that amount by consolidating all of your websites...

In this new series of posts I’d like to present some great free enhancements to improve usability of your DotNetNuke Community Edition - starting with Advanved Control Panel.

Visual Studio, by default, displays a splash screen on start-up.  I have noticed through the versions this is getting longer and longer.  The splash screen just displays the branding information of Visual Studio and also includes information (if supplied) for all packages installed.  This information can take sometime to display and I and my fellow developers do not want to see this every time Visual Studio is started.  It is basically preferred instead to get right to the job at hand and start coding.

...

I just posted a new DotNetNuke Silverlight 4 View Model (MVVM) module. This module allows you to easily gather, and process Expense Reports, from users in your DotNetNuke portal.

Advantages of Using Silverlight It is faster - When viewing the Expense Reports for a single user, there are no post-backs. The application moves considerably faster than a normal web application....

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.

When you run a user group, or any other event that has one or more people presenting topical information to others, you know that your presenter is coming prepared with some great information.  Otherwise, you wouldn’t have asked them to come, right?  At the very least, your speaker is knowledgeable in a specific area, has real-world expertise, is able to communicate to others, and will come prepared with a slide deck, or other visual presentation tools.

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.

During DNN 5.5 was developed, supported by the DNN Corp. (thanks for that!), the open source localization component for DotNetNuke EALO and the open source Workflow module were improved by my ITM colleague Steffen Ivanowtisch. They now run on DotNetNuke 5.5. You can download all new releases directly at codeplex.

In previous posts I described how WebMatrix can be used to download DotNetNuke and install it on your local computer and how you can use WebMatrix to publish your DotNetNuke site to a Hosting Provider.

Some of you have probably already been asking the...

I got my wife an HTC EVO last weekend (way cool, by the way).  Her first stop?  The Android Market to load up on all of her favorite apps for getting information and staying connected. But why is that interesting?

In the first part of this blog, I illustrated the creation of a MSDN style help file for the DNN core API, and the fact that the help file is now an integral part of a DNN release. In the second part I illustrated what has been achieved for the DNN 5.5 release. In this last part of this blog cycle, I will explain how YOU can be of assistance to every DNN  developer, including yourself!

In case you missed it, there is a Hackathon that is going on right now (the submission deadline is tomorrow so you still have time to throw a quick mobile project together).

As part of the Hackathon event in St. Louis last week I gave a brief presentation on how to quickly and easily...

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.

I am happy to announced that my ShoutcastStats 05.01.00 module now is released on http://dnnshoutcaststats.codeplex.com . The module renders on 2 module definitions the statistics from an Shoutcast broadcasting server.  This is mostly used from internet radio stations.

WCF is a highly configurable technology/framework from Microsoft.  You can configure various deployment and security scenarious by simply editing your web.config file without have to make any code changes to your service contract or code.  That is incredibly powerful.  It is also incredibly complex.  Most of the examples you will find if you search the internet for “WCF Security” will talk about transport and message security, federation, WIF, ACS, etc…. and you will spend hours and hours reading whitepapers...

Over the past two days I’ve delivered a topic called Jumpstart: DotNetNuke Module Development, you can download the PDF for the presentation here. This session is a basic intro into quickly starting to do some DotNetNuke Module Development, and if you happened to have missed it you can actually watch a previous version of this presentation in the Beginning DotNetNuke Module Development...

In a previous post I described how WebMatrix can be used to download DotNetNuke and install it on your local computer.  In this blog I will describe how you can use WebMatrix to publish your DotNetNuke site to a Hosting Provider.

First lets slightly modify the content from a plain vanilla DotNetNuke site, by deleting the modules on the front page and adding a single HTML module...

Last night we held the kick-off for the third in our DotNetNuke Hackathon...

The release release of DotNetNuke 5.5. marks a serious new version. Part of the changes involves a serious change in the core table structure of DNN. If you are using a version of Events in DNN 5.5, you must upgrade Events to version 5.1.4. This Events version is included in the Upgrade & Install packages of DNN 5.5.

 

Just go to Host > Extensions > Install Available Extension and install Events 5.1.4!

One of my main tasks working at the United Nation and the European Commission Joint Research Centre was to get all developers on the same page with developing in DotNetNuke.  This is a difficult task in itself as everybody has their own flavour.  So the best way to tackle this was to introduce the DotNetNuke templates.  I used the ones from Chris Hammond on CodePlex both C# and VB to do this.  They ran straight out of the box and with...

The 5.5.0 CE and PE versions of DotNetNuke have been released. The release notes can be read @ http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/825/EntryId/2747/DotNetNuke-5-5-release.aspx . This release contains a fix for one "medium" security issue.

I am happy to announce...

So we’re getting down to the final hours before the Hackathon, and those of us attending are getting ready for our trips! Nik and I both arrive from California tomorrow afternoon, while Joe is coming into St. Louis earlier in the day.

Wednesday (the 18th, tonight, depending on when you read this) we will be broadcasting the Hackathon kickoff from St. Louis DotNetNuke User Group. You will be able watch the session live, or watch the recordings later on.

The Hackathon contest will run until the 25th,...