Blog

I'm happy to announce that I've been selected to speak at the OpenForce07 DotNetNuke conference in Las Vegas during this year's fall DevConnections. DevConnections looks to be one of the larger conferences this year now that the PDC has been cancelled for this year. I'll be presenting on "Portal Administration Best Practices".

I look forward to sharing what I've learned over the last 4+ years working with DNN in corporate and noncorporate environments, I've worked on some of the largest DNN implementations out there and hope to be able to share some of my experiences with those projects.

Being selected to present at the first DotNetNuke conference is a great honor. I know quite a few other guys from my company (www.engagesoftware.com) will be in attendance as well. My wife...

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If you're anything like me, you've been greatly looking forward to Visual Studio Orcas, with its enhanced support for JavaScript.  You might also not know that some of that functionality is available to us currently in Visual Studio 2005.  It's not exactly easy to setup and use, but once you get it going, it can really help out when you're trying to figure out why, for example, all elements on your page suddenly disappear, only in IE.

Using this Knowledge Base article as a starting point, http://support.microsoft.com/kb/816173, I was able to get up, running, and debugging.  The first step is to enable debugging from Internet Explorer, by unchecking the "Disable Script Debugging (Internet Explorer)" box in IE's Advanced Options.  Then, in order to actually set a breakpoint and step into your javascript code, you'll need to use the debugger keyword in your code.  Just put that statement in your script wherever you would like the debugger to break, and...

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Working on web sites, I've come across the need, more and more, to be using JavaScript to make an application run more smoothly.  Unfortunately, I have absolutely no training in JavaScript, which means most of what I write does the job, but misses a number of the essentials.  Fortunately, there is hope.  If you, like me, didn't know that JavaScript objects are dictionaries, or that JavaScript inheritance is between objects, not classes, you should check out Ray Djajadinata's article for MSDN Magazine, Create Advanced Web Applications with Object-Oriented Techniques in JavaScript.  It really helped me to understand some more of all of this JavaScript craziness that I always saw but never understood.

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Last week we were able to release the long awaited new release of Engage: Publish with all new bells and whistles.

Engage: Publish is an article management system / workflow engine for your DotNetNuke portal. It provides advanced content management capabilities with workflow - approval, content categorization and related articles.  With Engage: Publish you’ll never have to worry about clicking the update button in DotNetNuke.  Your content history is safe and sound.  Plus, if you have multiple authors of content, you’ll be secure knowing that the content created by your authors will not be “live” until an administrator approves.  All this plus several different ways of managing content categories and displays you'll wonder how you ever lived without Publish.

A demo of Engage: Publish...

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I'm proud to finally announce that the DotNetNuke Wiki Project has officially released the first "production" version of the Wiki module. This version is labeled 04.00.01 and can be downloaded from the Project downloads page. You can find out more information for the Wiki module on the Project Page, and some basic instructions, version history and release notes available on the Wiki Example page, which is running the released version of the Wiki module. Thanks to Josh Handel for helping to get this project rolling again by donating his Ktomics Wiki module to be converted and used for the official DotNetNuke Wiki module.

Requirements: DotNetNuke 4.4.1 or greater

Look...

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When Brian Schwartz left for his Honeymoon last week I know he wasn't expecting to find this when he came back!

 

We knew Brian was getting back from his honeymoon and coming into the office today, so yesterday we purchased 600 sq/ft of reynolds wrap from Sam's Club. After that we got to work. Throughout the afternoon we spent a few minutes here and there working on the office, wrapping everything that wasn't fastened down. After our company meeting last night three of us stayed late to finish up the office. We wrapped EVERYTHING. We wrapped every book, stack of papers, spare change, the desk, bookshelf, whiteboard, a paperclip, a tie, a pair of pants, the office door and we even layed the last of the foil on the floor to cover the carpet.

Check out some of the photos I uploaded over on Flickr.

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When developing code for .NET, there are a number of attributes that you can define on parts of your code to make your job easier while you are debugging. These are new in .NET 2.0, and part of the System.Diagnostics namespace.

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How many times have you upgraded a 2000 database to find that the Diagramming Feature doesn't work? Worse yet, you get an error that leads you down the yellow brick road to no where....

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I've had too many clients come to me and ask how they can search through all of their Text/HTML modules on a portal to look for links that point to their development URL rather than their production URL. Instead of telling them they had to manually look at every page to find all instances of these invalid links I created a new module, available from www.engagemodules.com

Engage: F3 allows you to quickly and easily search through all Text/HTML modules installed on a site, generate a report of links found, and directly links to the edit control for each of those modules to allow you to correct the invalid links.

Above and beyond the use case where you are searching for a URL, you can use Engage: F3...

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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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