Blog

Yesterday, version four of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK was released (as noted in this blog post, V4 VS SDK Targeting VS 2005 Released!).  While I don't plan on developing any Visual Studio add-ins or extensions, I noticed that the SDK included SandCastle, which is a tool to build documentation based on your inline XML comments.  If you're working with large or distant groups, it can help to compile some of your work into a readable API document, and SandCastle will do that for you.  You'll need to go to http://www.sandcastledocs.com/ to get an automation script or GUI, since this release doesn't include any interface.  Get it here: Visual Studio 2005 SDK version 4.0.

Also released recently was the March CTP for Visual Studio Codename "Orcas."  This release includes a number of pretty cool updates to the IDE, including the new web form editor...

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The Rating control from the AjaxControlToolkit has been of use to use as we work on some of our websites that use our Engage: Publish module.  However, we needed to make a change to the style of the container around the Rating in order to change a background image from saying "Please rate!" to "Thanks for rating."  We tried wrapping it in an UpdatePanel to get at the CssClass, but we couldn't get it to react.  Eventually, we got the following javascript to work (which needs to be declared after divRating is declared).

   



...

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Since the 1.0 release of ASP.NET AJAX Extensions, we've been making use of the new functionality offered us through AJAX, both from the core extensions and through the AjaxControlToolkit.  However, we've run into a road block a number of times when we're tried to use the new UpdatePanel control to add some AJAX responsiveness into our web pages.  In short, we hadn't ever gotten it to work.

Recently, some clients were pressing us for some functionality that required UpdatePanels (or diving much deeper than we liked into JavaScript), so after another failed attempt at partial rendering, I handed the project over to a colleague to see if he might have any better luck.  Fortunately, he was able to search out the information we needed.  I had seen Jon Henning's blog post about integrating UpdatePanels into DNN, but it was rather old, so I didn't...

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Sometimes, you have elements on your webpage (such as a Solpart menu or the greyed-out background of a ModalPopup) that you want to display over an embedded Flash element. And they don't. And it's frustrating.

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With the 1.0 release of ASP.NET AJAX, we have started integrating controls from the control toolkit into some of our DotNetNuke modules. We've come across a couple of issues with the ModalPopup control in the (admittedly still Beta) AJAX control toolkit.

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As techies, we here at Engage Software were enthusiastic regarding the release of IE7, and subsequently left IE6 behind. However a large number of the population at large, including our clients, are keeping it very much alive. Not being able to install IE6 and IE7 on the same machine has been a frustration in recent days.....but MS has come up with a relatively painless solution.

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I recently had to create a private assemblypackage for one of our modules and in doing so I ran into problems that caused me to spend a day of my life that I will never get back. I thought I would share this and possibly save someone the pain that it has caused me.

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Last week I got started on getting the DotNetNuke Wiki module into a 4.4.0 source solution, so that I could convert the module to ASP.NET 2.0 and debug it in Visual Studio. Normally this wouldn't be anything out of the ordinary, I setup DotNetNuke solutions for a living, I can do it in my sleep, but I decided I was going to do all of this on my main machine running Windows Vista Ultimate edition.

You would think this might not be too difficult, but it sure was. Here's what I was starting with.

DotNetNuke 4.4.0 Source package, available for download from www.dotnetnuke.com.

Visual Studio 2005 w/ SP1

IIS7 Installed

IIS6 compatibility partially installed.

After multiple failures, and quite a bit of head smashing (on the wall) I gave up for the weekend. I blogged about the troubles, and a little birdie came to the rescue (If you read this birdie and don't mind me mentioning your name let me know)!

The little birdie...

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I see this requested all the time, so I figured I'd blog how I proceed with upgrading a DNN Instance.

If you're upgrading your DotNetNuke instance, here is a list of simple steps to follow during the upgrade process.

First tip, test the upgrade on a staging site first, pull a copy of the database and files down, try the upgrade, make sure all your functionality is still there. Then upgrade production (backup everything first)

 

Here’s the steps to upgrade

 

1.       Backup the database.

2.       Backup the file system.

3.       Make sure you did 1 & 2

4.       Extract the latest DNN ZIP file somewhere, i usually use the installation package, not the upgrade package out of preference.

5.       Edit the web.config file from DNN package

a.       Modify the SQL connection strings, there are two places, you can get the string from your original web.config

b.      Be sure to copy the Machinekey ValidationKey and Decription key values...

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Just in time for Christmas a new version of DotNetNuke has been released. On it's 4 year anniversary of the first release, DotNetNuke released version 4.4.

"On December 24th, 2002, the code which was to become the DotNetNuke web application framework was first released to the community.  On the fourth anniversary of this date, DotNetNuke version 4.4.0 - a release with significant performance enhancements - has now been made available for download"

If you've never used DotNetNuke before, do yourself a favor and try it out, there are no licensing fees to download it, use it, or even modify it. It's open source, free, and a great way to easily start building a website via an intuitive web based UI.

Version 4.4 marks the first ASP.NET 2.0 only release, prior to this release DNN was maintaining two sets of code, one for .Net 1.1 and one for .Net 2.0. 4.4 marks significant improvements in performance over previous versions as this version was heavily tested and tweaked in a full scale performance...

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