Over the next few weeks you will see a much larger effort for me to get back to this blog and getting new content out. In addition, I have made a few category additions and changes with hopes of expanding the content of this blog a bit more. There will still be plenty of DotNetNuke related content, but I am going to try and get more content in the C# and Visual Studio areas, trying to share some tips and tricks that I use on a daily basis to help speed the development process. The following is a quick list of topics that I am working on, and will be getting posted soon, these are NOT listed in any order, so they could appear in random intervals. If you have other suggestions, please post them to the comments.
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Posted by Mitchel on Thursday, February 18, 2010
In a few of the most recent versions of DotNetNuke, major changes have been completed in the way that a user manually imports a module definition to test a manifest file. This is specifically the process that is mentioned in my book to test a module while developing, before it has been packaged for installation on another portal. From what I gather, the behavior might change back a bit, but for now the process is slightly different that indicated in my book. In this blog posting I'll document the changes, and a workaround solution.
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Posted by Mitchel on Tuesday, February 09, 2010
I was recently given an opportunity to review the Dynamic User Directory module created by the folks at DataSprings. This module is a a great module for creating a user directory from a standard DotNetNuke installation, and works great for individuals that are using the Dynamic Registration module from DataSprings as well. At the most basic level, this module might seem to be a fairly simple module, it displays a list of users on the portal. However, it is important to not over-simplify the task at hand. Due to the nature of DotNetNuke and the data structures used it is very common for a "user directory" module to be a very complex setup, especially if you are looking to work against a large user base, or to support searching on profile values. This review will take a look at the module and provide some insight to some of the key findings from my testing.
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Posted by Mitchel on Tuesday, January 19, 2010
OK, so normally I try to keep the number of personal, non-tech, blog postings to a minimum on this site, since most of my readers are here for the technical content. Well, this time I am going to make an exception. For those of you that follow me on
Twitter you may have already heard bits-and-pieces of my travel fiasco from last night -> this morning. Well for the benefit of others, I thought I would share some details on my two major Expedia failures this year.
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Posted by Mitchel on Saturday, January 02, 2010
As I have mentioned before I am working on a book that covers Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0. So I have been playing with Visual Studio 2010 for quite a while now, and many of the common lines of feedback have been that the product is a great improvement in a lot of areas, however, there has been an overarching performance issue that has been plaguing various aspects of the new release. Late yesterday Scott Guthrie from Microsoft blogged a Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Update announcing that Microsoft is pushing the release date of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 back "a few weeks" to allow for a public release candidate in the February 2010 time frame.
Although I'm anxious to be able to use the new version of Visual Studio as some of the already existing performance improvements have been great. Especially the "Reference Dialog Load Time" improvement, which is just amazing. I'm glad to see that the feedback that all of the beta testers, MVP's and other people that have been testing and working with Visual Studio has been taken very seriously. I think with the additional time, they are going to be able to deliver a product that is that much superior!
Posted by Mitchel on Friday, December 18, 2009
I have talked to many developers that have one common feature request that we would like to see for Visual Studio, Spell Check. As a developer one of the most troubling things can be minor typo's in code after it has been completed. Although simple to fix, it can be embarrassing to have a typo that goes out in a module that a client is reviewing or that you put up for sale on SnowCovered. Well, today I got an email from Chad Nash at DataSprings, and they have a set of tools that are going to help us out on this front from a DNN module perspective.
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Posted by Mitchel on Wednesday, December 16, 2009
After talking with a number of clients since last week, I thought it would be worthwhile to make a post here with a formal warning regarding upgrades to DotNetNuke 5.2. As announced at OpenForce US, DotNetNuke 5.2 contains the Telerik Controls for ASP.NET, which is a very good thing for DotNetNuke as a whole, however, it can cause massive problems for individuals that are already using the Telerik Controls as a site upgrade can end up rendering portions, or the entire site unusable, until DLL versions are restored. In this post I will give a bit of information regarding the scenarios that I have encountered and some guidance on how to protect yourself from upgrade issues.
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Posted by Mitchel on Wednesday, December 02, 2009
Well, it has been a very busy week, but we can now record another OpenForce event in the books. I'm sitting here still in Las Vegas going over various notes regarding various announcements that have occurred through the week and though it would be good to make a blog post with a few "highlights" as I see them from the week. So, without future delay, here are my favorite highlights from the week, in no particular order!
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Posted by Mitchel on Saturday, November 14, 2009
I am proud to announce that an article that I wrote for SQL Server magazine, "Pivoting the Dynamic Way" was included in the November 2009 issue of the magazine. The article was published in both the print and online editions of the magazine, for those of you with subscriptions I encourage you to check it out!
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Posted by Mitchel on Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Back in May of 2008 I wrote an article “Selecting a DotNetNuke Hosting Provider Revisited”. Well, being almost a year-and-a-half later I thought it would be good to provide a 2009-2010 follow-up to the article to update based on new information, updates to hosting plans/offerings, as well as DotNetNuke performance in general. In this article I will talk though the thought process that I use when working with current and potential customers to select their hosting plan, environment and provider. This document has been updated based on current information, in addition, prior to going through the recommendations below I strongly recommend reading my article “Shared, Virtual Private Server, Dedicated of Cloud Hosting” to become familiar with the different levels of hosting.
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Posted by Mitchel on Friday, October 30, 2009
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