Mitchel's Personal Web Portal

Segregation of Duties: DNS, Domain Registration & Hosting

Mitchel Sellers — Wed, 09 May 2012 17:59:00 GMT

This blog focuses a lot of development and management of web applications in a secure manner. In this posting I'm going to introduce a common principal of computer science, Separation of Concerns, and how a focus on separation is critical to the long term success and stability of your hosting environment.

Development and Test DotNetNuke Installations and Search Engines

Mitchel Sellers — Mon, 07 May 2012 05:35:00 GMT

It is quite often that when working on a new version of a site that you will have a development, test, upgrade copy of the site that might be around for a while. It is also possible that if you are working for a third-party that you might stage client sites on your server for a period of time before go-live. At first glance this all seems common place and not something that you would be concerned about. However, that is not the case. Search engines have become overly aggressive in indexing sites, including those that have no direct back links but have been e-mailed to individuals or similar processes. In this post I'll discuss some important considerations when working with these "non-production" installations to help you ensure that search engines will NOT index the content and cause confusion.

DotNetNuke Login and Auto Complete - How to Cope

Mitchel Sellers — Fri, 04 May 2012 17:31:00 GMT

Recently I have been getting a lot of questions regarding the DotNetNuke login and why when you go to login that "auto complete" is disabled on the username/password fields. The typical follow-up question to that is "how can I change that behavior". So after answering this question individually around 5-6 times I though it would be best to get this out here, at least my opinion on the issue.

Windows Updates, Monitoring, and ASP.NET...Oops!

Mitchel Sellers — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 15:58:00 GMT

For those of you that are regular readers of this blog you will know that outages of the site are very, very rare with the past year showing almost 99.9% up time. Well if you were around here this AM you will know that the record for up time was killed, with the sites being down almost 10 hours today. In this post I'll talk a little about my experience with this as I know a number of other people across the world have experienced similar issues this morning based on my conversations with a few of them.

Replacing My iPad with a Windows 8 Slate How its Possible

Mitchel Sellers — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 22:42:00 GMT

For those of you that follow me on Twitter you might have found one of the tweets from earlier this week to spark your interest specifically "Its official with WIndows 8 my Samsung Slate replaces the iPad.". As I promised in that tweet this is the blog posting that shows my justification behind the claim and why for at least my use this transition is not only possible, but beneficial to me. Before I get too far into this though, I'll provide a bit of background on the basis/use scenarios that are important to me then I'll discuss the specifics.

Installing Windows 8 Consumer Preview to Samsung Series 7 Slate

Mitchel Sellers — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 03:55:00 GMT

Others have blogged about this, for example Brad Wilson Blogged about using the Developer Preview that was released at BUILD last year. I used his tutorial as a stepping point to get my install up and running. In this post I'll go through the process that I went through to get the Community Preview up and running.

Visual Studio 11 Caller Member Info Attributes

Mitchel Sellers — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 18:32:00 GMT

If you have been paying attention to what is going on in the Microsoft Community today you will notice is a big day. Visual Studio 11 Beta as well as Windows 8 Consumer Preview were both released this morning, for those of us developers it means tons of new tools to try out and lots of new functionality that we can use in our applications as well as productivity and language improvements with.NET 4.5. With this, I'm starting a new blog series highlighting some of the new items that I find helpful, cool, or otherwise interesting with VS 11 Development. Today's installment talks about Caller Member Info Attributes.

Simple Zip Code to Zip Code Distance Calcuations with SQL Server

Mitchel Sellers — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 16:00:00 GMT

Over the years I have implemented a number of various "near me" style searches using third-party zip code databases and a long, complicated formula to find the distance between two different latitudes and longitudes. Well, starting with SQL Server 2008, it is possible to get the same result, with a lot less effort, following two simple steps. In this post I will walk through things step by step.

DotNetNuke 6.x Text Editor Upgrade Issues

Mitchel Sellers — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 18:46:00 GMT

In the past 2-3 weeks I have been working on upgrading the DotNetNuke Installations on both this website and the IowaComputerGurus website and finally I can say I'm done with the upgrades. These sites, although not that complex had a number of issues with the upgrades, some of which I have blogged about in the past, and then today a brand new oddity was discovered. After upgrading the site everything was functional, however the text editors were behaving very unusually. Clicking "Save" at times would not redirect you back to the page, but content would be saved. Other times it would redirect you back to the page, but your changes were not saved. I couldn't find any rhyme or reason behind it, so I started digging.

Improve Performance with Static File Caching

Mitchel Sellers — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 07:54:00 GMT

This post will be the first of what will be many posts with regards to application performance. After giving a number of presentations over the last 1-2 years, including one this evening in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area I've decided that some of these tips/tricks that I have with regards to improving application performance should really get put out here so people can find them and make the improvements to their applications. Going forward all of these posts will be categorized with at least the "Performance" category and then others that identify what systems are benefited by the changes. The subject of this post is Static Content Caching.

2011 Year in Review and a look at 2012

Mitchel Sellers — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 19:32:00 GMT

Over the last few years I have been trying to keep a little bit better track of usage of the content here on MitchelSellers.com as well as just keeping track of other interactions that I have through User Groups, Open Source Projects, and the like. Each year around the end of the year I try to compile a few of these items, if not for everyone that is reading things here for myself to see how things progress year to year.

Upgrading MitchelSellers.com - A DotNetNuke Upgrade Retrospective

Mitchel Sellers — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 15:15:00 GMT

For those of you that are regular visitors to this site you most likely noticed a number of changes to the site over the past 24 hours, including a small amount of downtime. This was caused by changes surrounding the upgrade of this site to DotNetNuke version 6.1.2. Now, I have worked on a number of DotNetNuke upgrades over the years, and I lost count a few years back at about 300 upgrades. This site was by-far one of the hardest upgrades that I have ever completed and in this post I will share a bit around the growing pains that were experiences throughout the process.

Getting Up to Speed on DNN 6.x Design

Mitchel Sellers — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 21:28:00 GMT

So like many developers I have been spending some time recently updating my client, commercial, and open-source modules to support the new DotNetNuke 6 Form Pattern from a design perspective, to make my modules better integrate into the system. Looking around when I was starting there is very little "true" documentation on this concept, and for me it was a bit cumbersome pulling everything together. I started with this Wiki Article and then ended up spending a lot of time digging/inspecting lots of other modules that had been upgraded. So in this post, I'm going to take a bit more of a 'code-centric" no-nonsense approach to what your form should really look like, I hope that this helps you.

Understanding and Mitigating DotNetNuke Upgrade Risks

Mitchel Sellers — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 19:39:00 GMT

With all of the recent changes that have come to the DotNetNuke product in the past few years I have been seeing more and more situations where users have older installations that want to get to DNN 6.x to take advantage of the new features that are available with the latest version. I can't say as I blame them the newest features are great and a true benefit to all that use them, however, the road to getting there isn't always as peachy as it might seem, as you often find people with upgrades that fail horribly. This has been a common trend and some of the things that DotNetNuke Corporation has done really makes this process less error prone, but a bit portion of the "getting it right" upgrade process really falls in the hands of the site administrators that are going to be doing the upgrades. That is the focus on this blog post, how can we as site administrators identify potential risks and then mitigate/resolve the issues on our own?

DotNetNuke World 2011 Recap

Mitchel Sellers — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 16:10:00 GMT

As most of you know I was at the DotNetNuke World 2011 event in Orlando Florida this past week, and I thought I would give a quick recap of my experience with the event and share how much different I felt this event was in comparison to the previous DotNetNuke Connections events. To help try and give proper justice to the topic, I'm going to break my review out in a few different categories to help make it a bit more understandable, and without further delay, here we go!

Force User Roles Update via DotNetNuke

Mitchel Sellers — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 17:00:00 GMT

One of the things that I have been finding that I do a lot recently is updating user security roles based on actions either taken by the users or actions that have been taken by others. Doing so is quite simple from a DotNetNuke API perspective but how do you go about actually forcing the role membership change right away? That is what I'll talk about in this post.

DotNetNuke 6.1.x Release and Warning!

Mitchel Sellers — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:24:00 GMT

As I'm sure that you have seen in the last day or so DotNetNuke 6.1.0 was released. Overall, this release is a major improvement for DotNetNuke with enhancements to performance, support for mobile devices and other general upgrades. However, I've already been alerted to a major, slightly hidden change that I wanted to be sure to put out here as a warning.

DotNetNuke World and Blog Updates

Mitchel Sellers — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 14:15:00 GMT

It seems that the past few months have just flown by and I haven't gotten as much time to blog here as I have wanted. I hope to start changing that here in the next few weeks as I have a large number of items that I'm looking to get out here, just trying to find the time to get it done. But with DotNetNuke world just a little over a week away I wanted to post a quick note here about the event.

Securing a DotNetNuke Installation - Passwords

Mitchel Sellers — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 21:19:00 GMT

A while back I released a tool called Secure My Install that was designed to help people take existing DotNetNuke sites and change the way that they store passwords to use a more secure process. Many people have used that module successfully to convert their sites, however, I never took the time to share the few small steps that are needed to simply "secure" your site as soon as you set it up so that you can avoid all of the hassle in the beginning. In this post I'll walk through the simple process of changing your configuration to go from Encrypted Passwords to Hashed passwords and a bit of detail as to "why" you want to make the change.

SQL Server Forward_Only Cursor for Performance

Mitchel Sellers — Sat, 24 Sep 2011 03:36:00 GMT

For those of you that follow me on Twitter you might have heard my recent comments around a DotNetNuke SQL Script that I had to run that would have an impact of between 6 and 9 million SQL statements being executed on a database. As part of this project I was focusing a lot on SQL Server performance, and getting the best overall bang for the buck with the query. Sadly, given what I was working with a Cursor was needed to ensure that I had the best, most stable solution. In this post I'll share a little about the process and the lesson learned with cursors.

Canonical Portal Alias Woes DNN 5.6.2

Mitchel Sellers — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 19:26:00 GMT

One of the aditions to DotNetNuke 5.x (not sure when/where) was the ability for DotNetNuke to provide a Canonical url in the meta information for your page. When this all works well, things are going perfectly. You can configure the site to use the Canonical url via the "Admin Settings" page and normally all works well, but I had a very "interesting" issue with a site recently and I thought I'd share incase anyone else had a similar issue.

DotNetNuke 6.0.1 Performance And You

Mitchel Sellers — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 17:37:00 GMT

Now that DotNetNuke 6.x has been out for a while and with the recent release of DotNetNuke 6.0.1 while I was on vacation I thought I'd take the time to write a must requested blog post regarding my thoughts on the DotNetNuke 6.x platform and performance. Keep in mind, these points are my own personal opinion and should be considered that only, so without further delay.

Improving the C# Debugging Experience - DebuggerDisplay

Mitchel Sellers — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 23:40:00 GMT

In an effort to start blogging more about the "helpful" items that I have encountered over the years this is one of my first "Quick Tips" related to improving the life of the developer. We all have had those times where we are tracking down a complex problem within an application and all along the way we have to spend endless time mousing over individual classes to find out what their values are when most commonly we just want to know about one or two key values. Well in this post, I'll show you a neat trick using the "DebuggerDisplay" attribute to help make this process easier.

Calling Table Valued Parameters from DotNetNuke Modules

Mitchel Sellers — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 04:26:00 GMT

Recently I was working on a DotNetNuke module that had a need to communicate to a database using a Table Valued Parameter to do some advanced reporting functionality. Researching this resulted in a number of times that I chased my tail and I thought I'd share here the way I got this working.

DotNetNuke 6.0 Extensions SnowCovered Integration

Mitchel Sellers — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 23:09:00 GMT

In my earlier blog post I mentioned that one of my favorite features of the new DotNetNuke 6.0 release is the ability to download and automatically install purchased extensions from SnowCovered within the installation. In this posting I'll walk through the functionality as well as give my disclaimer and recommendation in regards to using this process.