Blog

Recently I’ve been spending quite a bit of my time working on one project in particular; an eLearning Management System (LMS) for DotnetNuke. I’d like to take some time to describe Engage:Campus and then cover the basics of course creation and course enrollment.

In Plain English

Engage: Campus allows businesses to create courses that are relevant to their business, deliver them to the audience of their choice online, and track the results that are generated as users take courses.

This blog post marks the release of a new module for DotNetNuke. It addresses a common feature request of many web sites - empowering users to email a friend a link to your site. It is free module which includes source code. There was a lot of effort put in to making the module very clean and simple.

For more information about the module, or to download the module, visit the Engage Software product page for Engage: Tell A Friend or the listing on Snowcovered.

While the pages listed above provide all of the necessary information - I'd like to share a few technical highlights/features with those of you reading this who are developers...

Last weekend I attended a local .NET Developer conference - the St. Louis Day of .NET. It was a regular work day (9-5) of .NET-centric one-hour sessions. Most of the sessions were based (to varying degrees) on content from the recent Professional Developer's Conference (PDC) in Los Angeles.

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This post is overdue. I wanted to use this image in my slide deck for a presentation I gave last month at the Bloomington, IL .NET user group, but...

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The current provider model in DotNetNuke is very flexible, but with that flexibility comes development overhead. Over the past few months I've started thinking about how much time I spend simply on [easy, repetitive] data access tasks, and its a little depressing.

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Members of the Engage Software team led six sessions (the entire DotNetNuke track) last week at TulsaTechFest 2008.

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With the new skinning changes in DotNetNuke, it may be helpful to give an overview of available approaches to skin developers.

Each of these approaches attempts to answer the question "How do I embed and customize all that great functionality that DNN provides in my skin?" In other words, given that we have a pre-set base of options for functionality (core skin objects), and each of those options exposes certain customization points (skin object properties) that I'd like to set…how the heck do I get it done?

The answer may depend on which technologies you are familiar with (or willing to learn), but let's examine each of the different approaches and see if one clicks for you.

Note: For the sake of simplicity, I'm going to leave out the following buzz words: XTHML, CSS, table-based, and any other new age standards loving or old-school table defensiveness babble.

What's available pre-DNN 5 The "XML? I've heard of that!" approach



...

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Earlier today I created a list of blogs, podcasts, and web sites that are of interest to me as a developer. This are the sites I keep tabs on so I can stay up on the latest and keep learning. Some of them I frequent more regularly than others...

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If you have recently edited your reporting services web.config and can no longer access your reports you may want to check if your web.config file contains an xmlns attribute on the configuration element. If it does, you will not be able to access your report manager.  Simply removing the attribute will solve this issue.

I ran into this issue today after i edited a property in the web.config using the IIS tool (under asp.net tab). As i had no idea what had originally caused the issue it took a few hours to figure out that it was because i had edited the web.config with IIS.

Here is the error message that the report manager would display:

"The report server is not responding. Verify that the report server is running and can be accessed from this computer."

Here is the error message from the log file: 

Microsoft.ReportingServices.Diagnostics.Utilities.InternalCatalogExcepti on: An internal error occurred on the report server. See the error log for more details. ---> System.NullReferenceException:...

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Running all the new .NET 3.0 goodness on your development machine, but want to install content templates (maybe the DNN starter kit?) for Visual Studio 2005? You may see this error: Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.Wizardframework, Version=8.0.0.0,...'

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