Christopher Hammond
07.01.06
I'm sitting here working on yet another darn domain name that I purchased this afternoon, watching HDNet's coverage of the Shuttle Discovery launch later this afternoon.
Watching this in HD on my 50" Plasma is amazing. Though it makes me which I had a way to get content off of my HD Tivo and onto a PC.
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Christopher Hammond
07.04.06
That's right, DNN 3.3.2 and 4.3.2 are released! Stay tuned for a list of bug fixes for these latest versions. www.dotnetnuke.com
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Christopher Hammond
07.14.06
What happened to the DotNetNuke Daily Tips?Well, short answer, life got in the way. I've had an extremely busy July so far. I hope ot get a new tip out today, so stay tuned!
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Christopher Hammond
07.18.06
After a long haitus over the past few weeks the DotNetNuke Daily Tips are back! Sometimes you want to put a skinobject in your DotNetNuke Skins that you need to act like a module. Inheriting from PortalModuleBase instead of SkinObjectBase. SkinObjects though don't get loaded like regular modules and due to that you may run into issues where you can't easily access the TabId of the existing page. Here's how to get that information easily.Dim objPortalModule As PortalModuleBase = DotNetNuke.UI.Containers.Container.GetPortalModuleBase(Me)thisTabId = objPortalModule.TabIdPut the above code in your skinobject code and you will now have a PortalModuleBase object that you can use to easily access some of the basic DNN properties you're used to using from PortalModuleBase.The above is VB code, any self respecting C# developer should be able to figure out the appropriate C# code. If not, email me and I'll bill you at my hourly rate ;)Stay tuned for another DotNetNuke Daily Tip coming tomorrow!
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Christopher Hammond
07.19.06
DotNetNuke Daily Tip for 7/19/2006
DotNetNuke comes with a lot of functionality out of the box that people don't even know exists. Once of those items that has been overlooked by many with the latest releases of DotNetNuke is the DNNMenu, part of the ClientAPI Framework that Jon Henning has worked on.
The SolPartMenu is by far the most used menu for DotNetNuke, it's been part of DNN since the early days, and really can be quite powerful in its implementation. It's also been a big beef with a lot of skin designers as getting solpartmenu working just right can be a bit tricky, and torturous at times. I'm actually a fan of the SolPartMenu, but for today's tip I want to point you to a few resources on the DNNMenu.
I recently, as in last night, implemented the DNNMenu for my wedding site I've been putting together the past few days, you can see it implemented at www.horsesandcars.com.
The DNNMenu was created by Jon Henning, the same developer of the Original SolPartMenu. Here's a quote from Jon
“A few people asked me, the author of the Solution Partners Hierarchical Menu Control, why I would develop a competing menu control to my own. The answer is simple. The SolpartMenu is old and carries a lot of baggage with its almost 4 years worth of backwards compatibility. It has been a goal for v2 of the solpartmenu to abstract all of the common logic not specific to the menu into separate js files that could be reused by other controls and applications. This is exactly what the ClientAPI is; an abstraction of logic like positioning, DOM access, XML, etc. The script for the menu should contain only code for the menu, thus making it easier to maintain and enhance. So in essence, the DNNMenu is in a lot of ways the solpartmenu v2.0.”
And some of the features for DNNMenuKeyboard NavigationThe menu can now receives focus as the user tabs through the controls on the page. Once it has focus, you can use the arrow keys to navigate its structure. Pressing enter will invoke the menu item's clickaction.
Populate On DemandThe DNNMenu will support POD in the same manner as the DNNTree control. This provide a nice performance boost for those of you concerned with page sizes. I even had time to make the module actions menu support POD. See chart below for comparisons between each option and other menus.
Mouse In DelayOne of the features of the Solpart menu that was continually asked for was a mouse-in delay. This delay allows for people who are navigating to the sub-menus and accidentally move off the parent some grace period to get it right. The DNNMenu defaults this value to a quarter of a second (.25). I believe this is acceptable, however, for users used to the fast response times of other menus, it may look like the DNNMenu is a little sluggish. Note: At this time there is no way of configuring this property in the skin.
No Hardcoded MarkupProbably the biggest regret I had in the original design of the Solpart menu was the hardcoding of certain tags in the code. This included the NOWRAP attribute added to the menu items, the use of spacer.gif and to obtain the correct spacing, and the worst of all, the hardcoding of the border around the menu items when hovering. None of this hardcoding is present in the DNNMenu. Note: the one exception is the spacer.gif that is used to do the iframe trick. I need a url to point the IFrame to in order to not get the security error when the site uses SSL.
Option to Remove All Use of TablesThe menu supports a property that will completely remove its use of tables. Hopefully this will appease those developers and skinners who think that tableless designs are the way to go. I originally had the UseTables property default to False, but since it was too difficult to keep things lined up across browsers without adding some...
Christopher Hammond
08.04.06
Since I've yet to have time daily to post a new DotNetNuke tip I'm renaming my feature to just be DotNetNuke tips! I'll continue to post them when I have the time to do so.While I was off meeting with a client DotNetNuke dropped a new release! Go out and get it!If you're running any of the recent releases 3.3.* or 4.3.* it's highly recommended you upgrade to 4.3.4, there were some security issues found and resolved with those releases.More DotNetNuke Tips next week.
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Christopher Hammond
10.04.06
Just over a week and a half ago I installed Windows Vista Ultimate RC1 on the newest of my desktop machines. Overall it's been a pleasurable experience, unlike some of the other DotNetNuke core team members have had! So far Vista has worked out well with me for VS 2005, I even got a release out for DnnCart.com last week that was completely written on this VISTA box. I did realize a few things though. I NEEDED to get more RAM. Trying to run Photoshop and VIsual Studio 2k5, as well as a few RDP windows was very taxing on the box. The machine is a Dell, Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz dual core, RADEON X300/X550 Series (Microsoft Corporation - WDDM), 149gig SATA drive. It had 768mb of RAM on it (a mix of 3200 and 4200. With those stats my Windows Experience Index has a base score of 2.0. The limiting number being the Graphics card. Here's a shot of my score This evening I installed 2 gigs of DDR2 4200 RAM, and so far it is flying! Hopefully tomorrow I'll be installing a nVidia GeForce 7900GS 256MB PCI-E x16 Video Card that I got off of www.Woot.com a few weeks back, this weekend I also ordered a Seagate 250GB SATA Hard Drive refurb off of woot. I've gotta pick up a DVI to VGA converter tomorrow so I can use the car, my 19" VGA just won't fit into the DVI plug! I ordered two off Tiger Direct last week, but of course I ordered the wrong ones. I figure once I install this new card my score should go up quite a bit! We'll see how it goes.After I get the score up I'll have to look into getting another monitor up here as well, I'm itching to try my hand in a dual screen setup, though two 19" CRTs will sure take up a lot of deskspace!
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Christopher Hammond
10.14.06
Here's a quick phone shot of Shaun Walker giving his Keynote Presentation at the Tulsa Tech Fest Today.
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Christopher Hammond
11.12.06
If you're a MSDN subscriber Office 2007 is available for download. I'm not the first one to post it on weblogs.asp.net but I had to do it anyways to get the word out to those subscribed to my blog.
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Christopher Hammond
11.13.06
My good buddy Chad Hobson has created his first meaningful technical blog post to help the masses. He had some issues when upgrading to Asp.Net Ajax Beta 2 for his AutoCompleteExtender controls and took the time to create a helpful post on how to make those controls work.
Be sure to drop Chad a comment on his blog as well, tell him how cool he is in that mean looking photo.
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Christopher Hammond
01.04.07
Last week I got started on getting the DotNetNuke Wiki module into a 4.4.0 source solution, so that I could convert the module to ASP.NET 2.0 and debug it in Visual Studio. Normally this wouldn't be anything out of the ordinary, I setup DotNetNuke solutions for a living, I can do it in my sleep, but I decided I was going to do all of this on my main machine running Windows Vista Ultimate edition.
You would think this might not be too difficult, but it sure was. Here's what I was starting with.
DotNetNuke 4.4.0 Source package, available for download from www.dotnetnuke.com.
Visual Studio 2005 w/ SP1
IIS7 Installed
IIS6 compatibility partially installed.
After multiple failures, and quite a bit of head smashing (on the wall) I gave up for the weekend. I blogged about the troubles, and a little birdie came to the rescue (If you read this birdie and don't mind me mentioning your name let me know)!
The little birdie pointed out the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista Beta. I believe this update did the trick because after installing the update everything seemed to work!
Here are some of the things I know you have to perform, as well as the update, to get DNN, Vista and VS2k5 to play nicely. I hope I didn't leave anything out.
1. Install IIS7 (found in the control panel, classic view, programs and features, "Turn windows features on or off").
2. Install IIS6 Compatibility, the screenshot below is what my IIS installed features look like
3. Create your web site in IIS, I actually created a new site, not a virtual directory. A benefit of IIS7 on Vista, the ability to create multiple web sites! I just used localhost as the host header, and pointed it to the location of my extracted DNN files.
4. For the Application Pool in IIS I chose the Classic .Net AppPool
5. Under the Authentication section of your IIS web site be sure to enable Windows Authentication
6. Configure the rest of your DotNetNuke installation the normal way. (Setup the proper folder permissions, network service account gets full rights to the web site folder). Setup your web.config file to use the proper connection strings.
7. Open Visual Studio 2005 using the Run As Administrator option if you're using UAC
8. Open up the DotNetNuke.sln file from your extracted files. When you run the site for the first time DNN should run through it's installation procedures, installing the database, extracting a few modules, etc. I did have a problem with the project the first two times I ran it, but on the third try it seemed to install properly. I don't know if it was just a fluke or not the first two times, but all is well now.
9. Now I'm able to run and debug the DotNetNuke 4.4.0 solution on my Windows Vista machine. Hope this helps some of you out in your endeavors.
(All of the screenshots were made utilizing the Snipping tool inside of Windows Vista. Where's snippy? I get to it by clicking on start, and typing SNIP into the search bar, try it out!)
Technorati tags: Visual Studio 2005, VS2005, General Software Development, DotNetNuke, Vista, Daily TipsPosted from...
Christopher Hammond
01.20.07
This past week has been pretty darn busy, actually, so far 2007 has been pretty darn busy. At work we've been cranking away on a pretty large project built upon DotNetNuke. It's like nothing I've seen done successfully with DNN before, so it'll be interesting to see when this latest version goes public how well it does. It's rewarding, but a damn lot of work lately. I can't wait for February. I keep telling myself in February I'm going to start working on my car again, www.project240z.com
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Christopher Hammond
01.30.07
Michael Washington has put out a new module developers guide for DotNetNuke, he's got a link in his latest blog to the documentation page on DotNetNuke.com. Check it out, Michael has been hard at work on these two documents (parts 1 and 2) over the past few months, and they are great resources for getting familiar with DNN development.
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Christopher Hammond
07.03.07
Welcome back to the DotNetNuke tips! I started doing this over a year ago, though with getting married last fall and working on my Datsun 240Z lately I haven't blogged near as much lately about DNN topics. So here we go, starting up again with my DotNetNuke Tips.
Today's tip follows:
When you're doing testing locally with a backup for a Production Database and Website one of the things you need to be sure to do is change your Portal Alias for your local URL, instead of your production URL. If you don't do this you'll hit the local URL and it will most likely redirect you to the production URL. This can cause a bit of chaos if you don't notice that you're no longer on the local/testing URL and start modifying the production web site.
To change your portal alias you can do the following.
Open your SQL Server management tool; SQL Enterprise Manager, SQL Server Management Studio, or whatever you choose to use.
Browse to your local/test database, open up the PortalAlias table. You can either Modify your existing Alias, or you can add a new Alias to this table. test.myurl.com for example, be sure to setup the proper portal ID if you're adding a new alias and you have a lot of different aliases in there. You might also need to setup the aliases for the child portals as well if you plan on using those.
The next step is crucial. You'll want to reset your website before you try to hit the new alias. You can do that in a couple of ways, I always prefer to open up the web.config file, add a carriage return and hit save. This will cause IIS to reload the site, clearing out the cache and loading the new portal aliases.
Look for more DotNetNuke tips coming soon!Posted from...
Christopher Hammond
07.12.07
Henry has put together a video tutorial covering DotNetNuke Membership providers, sort of as a follow up to his original blog post a few months back discussing the topic. His blog post and subsequent forum posts have generated a lot of questions.
If you're looking for how to get started with creating your own DNN membership provider be sure to check it out.
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Christopher Hammond
07.20.07
Sometimes you just have to take a break at the office and play with toys! I must say, our office environment is great, everyone is under 40 (except for Grandpa Henry), and we get to enjoy our days. We are always looking for experienced or willing to learn DotNetNuke developers at Engage Software. Below is a link to some of the fun we had yesterday. (right click and download the file before trying to watch it, it is a 350mb file, as it's in HD)
http://www.christoc.com/video/7-19-07/7-19chopper.wmv
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Christopher Hammond
07.23.07
Over the weekend (I missed it because I was working on my car all weekend www.project240z.com) DotNetNuke 4.5.4 dropped, you can get it from www.dotnetnuke.com
You can see a list of changes on the Gemini site at http://support.dotnetnuke.com
I've cleaned up the list a bit and posted it here as well.
Admin / Host Functions Bug DNN-5075 Adding/deleting security roles - notification/date format. Admin / Host Functions Bug DNN-5239 Issue with "required" profile properties. Admin / Host Functions Bug DNN-5433 Redirect after login Admin / Host Functions Bug DNN-5616 Core code should not reference external images... >Admin / Host Functions Bug DNN-5646 last lock-out date incorrect Admin / Host Functions Bug DNN-5765 Sitemap.aspx Including Link to DotNetNuke.com Admin / Host Functions Bug DNN-5614 Page Quota Not Working in Demo Portals Admin / Host Functions Bug DNN-5771 Profile Definition Required Needs to be Tied to Visibility Admin / Host Functions Bug DNN-5715 Install wizard runs when database is missing Admin / Host Functions Bug DNN-5727 Can't delete default home page after installation/yellow screen of death Admin / Host Functions Bug DNN-5803 Save stylesheet in site settings clears selected logo Admin / Host Functions Bug DNN-5855 Upgrade Status Indicator Admin / Host Functions Bug DNN-5787 Account Login module is not visible to logged in users Admin / Host Functions Bug DNN-5847 Add Existing Module no longer allows settings change to original Admin / Host Functions Bug DNN-5862 Module Cache Expiration Admin / Host Functions Enhancement DNN-5805 short circuit check for known account defaults Admin / Host Functions Enhancement DNN-5854 Google Adsense Support Control Panel Bug DNN-1579 Misleading Tooltips General Bug DNN-5754 Profile Property Names that contain spaces raise js errors Installation / Upgrade Bug DNN-5853 *.ZIP Packages should be installed automatically Installation / Upgrade Bug DNN-5605 Password length error string Installation / Upgrade Bug DNN-5606 Possible incorrect description text Localization / ML Bug DNN-5835 typo in manage users localization file Localization / ML Bug DNN-2612 XML Error in Resource Verifier Localization / ML Enhancement DNN-5778 Inconsistent on page help text on the Account Login module Help buttons Performance Bug DNN-5852 Add Tab Hangs on Site with large volume of Pages Performance Task DNN-5714 unneccesary call in BuildDiv method of FieldEditorControl Security Bug DNN-5802 ReturnUrl - Cross Site Request Forgery Vector Security Bug DNN-5829 DNN Membership Preventing Active Directory Login Security Bug DNN-5746 New user registration not working if specific page defined Security Bug DNN-5734 Roles duplicated on "Global Roles" due to list values Security Bug DNN-2593 Custom module permissions not deleted Security New Feature DNN-678 SSL Support Skinning Bug DNN-4590 DNN not rendering link to skins CSS file Skinning Bug DNN-5618 FixImagePath routine trashing APPIMAGEPATH Skinning Bug DNN-5672 Pagingtable class made ineffective by hard-coded styles Templates Bug DNN-5549 CS1010: Newline in constant error after creating new CS module using template UI / Usability Bug DNN-5628 Assignment issue in HelpButtonControl UI / Usability Bug DNN-5708 Wrong CSS class specified for "Manage User Credentials" tab
I'll be updating my sites today! Also, check out the "New Feature" of SSL support in the Core! Sweet!
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