Entries for October 2009

Selecting a DotNetNuke Hosting Provider 2009 Edition

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.

DotNetNuke Bulk Extension Installation

About two months ago, I responded to a DotNetNuke question on StackOverflow.com with regard to automating the installation of modules within the installation. This is a question that I have seen many times, but with different business requirements and end desires, but the trend is the same, installing extensions one-by-one is an inefficient process, and with a heavily used site can cause performance issues that would impact regular traffic for an extended period of time. This is simply because there is a delay between each install, and with each install and update to the /bin directory the application recycles. Thankfully there is a method built into DotNetNuke that easily allows you to bulk install extensions, the rest of this article will show you how.

Using LINQ to Aggregate and Group

Recently when I was presenting at Tech Days Canada I was preparing some examples of how LINQ could be used to do in-memory manipulations of data to help avoid repeated database calls. In the presentation I showed some quick code samples, and I thought that I would follow this up with a few simple examples here in a blog post. Before I start I wanted to share that the code shown here is actual production code that is being used to run the reporting on MyWebKeepAlive, the keep alive service offered by my company IowaComputerGurus.