The DotNetNuke community is composed of individuals and organizations that serve a wide range of needs for DotNetNuke users. Whether it is the skin designer, module developer or web hoster, every part of the DotNetNuke ecosystem helps make it easy for our users to take full advantage of the DotNetNuke platform to run their website. In this series of posts I’ll be focusing on the hosters in our community and looking at some capabilities that make each of them unique.

PowerDNN has made quite a name for themselves in our community and like any good business they look for ways to solve customer problems. To simplify management of customer accounts, PowerDNN developed the PowerDNN Control Suite. In addition to using the tool internally, PowerDNN makes the Control Suite available to their Enterprise cloud customers.

From time to time I run across some great development resources on the web that are worth sharing. The below list of blog posts by Troy Hunt is a great starting point if you want to find out about the biggest threats to the security of your websites and the techniques you can use in your development and site administration efforts to prevent such exploits. While we take every effort to ensure that the core framework remains secure, there is still a lot of control that is left in the hands of module developers and site administrators.

If you have downloaded and installed DotNetNuke 6.1 you have probably noticed that the core modules are “missing” from the DotNetNuke packages. This is a large change from every previous version of DotNetNuke. Ever since Shaun first released DotNetNuke in 2002, we have included a number of modules in the core platform. How these modules have been packaged has changed over the years, but customers have become accustomed to seeing them.

In DotNetNuke 6.0 we provided a great new capability that integrates the DotNetNuke Forge and DotNetNuke Store (SnowCovered) into the core platform. This feature means that every module in the Forge can be quickly discovered and installed into the platform in just a couple of clicks. If you haven’t tried this feature, I definitely recommend you give it a try. It is definitely one of the great new features in the DotNetNuke 6 platform.

DotNetNuke has undergone many changes over the last 8 years in the way the product is developed and managed. Having been part of the main engineering and product teams from the early days of the Open Source project I have had a number of roles on the team. Last year I moved from being focused on application development as part of the Engineering team to being more focused on product management. A big part of my role on the product management team was handling release management.

I am pleased to announce that DotNetNuke 6.0.2 is officially released. This maintenance release further solidifies DotNetNuke 6.0 and resolves a few outstanding issues which were not addressed in the 6.0.1 release. Like with the 6.0.1 release, our goal was to continue providing quick resolution of outstanding issues to ensure that customers could upgrade to the 6.x platform with little difficulty.

I am pleased to announce that DotNetNuke 6.0.1 is officially released. This maintenance release was focused on resolving a number of issues that were found in the 6.0.0 release. Given the extensive set of changes in DotNetNuke 6.0 we recognized the need to quickly identify and resolve issues discovered by our customers as they tried the new release in production environments. This maintenance release further improves what many customers have already told us was a pretty stable release.

Late last year, I began work on getting DotNetNuke to run on Windows Azure. After a few months of research and numerous dead-ends, I finally had a fully working prototype. During this same period, David Rodríguez, was also doing some work with DotNetNuke and Azure as well.

After working through a few dead-ends of his own, David found the Azure Accelerator project from Slalom Consulting and decided to use this as a base for developing a DotNetNuke version.

I am pleased to announce the launch of DotNetNuke 6.  This release marks a significant milestone in the history of DotNetNuke platform.  Keep reading to find out all that DotNetNuke 6 has to offer both seasoned users and those just seeing the platform for the first time.

After 8 months of effort the finish line is in sight. With almost 3000 code checkins touching more than 2000 individual files, this release has been monumental in it’s scope compared to most DotNetNuke releases. Not since the days of DotNetNuke 2.0 and 3.0 have we accomplished so much in a single release. In spite of the sheer number of changes we have made, DotNetNuke 6 is one of the most stable platform versions in quite a while. That is not just my opinion but the opinion of the vast majority of people participating in our beta testing.

The clock is winding down on the DotNetNuke 6 release. All of the features have been integrated and we are now focused exclusively on polishing the app before we ship later this month. At this point we have identified all of the issues we plan to resolve for the initial launch and are working through final phases of the testing process. In order to assist people in planning for a smooth upgrade process for 6.0 we are providing a second beta release so that people can retest upgrades and installations which may have had serious issues with Beta 1. If you find an issue we ask that you enter it in the bug tracker so that we can evaluate whether it a showstopping issue or whether it is something that could be held for our first 6.x maintenance release which we expect to be about a month after the DotNetNuke 6.0 launch.