Why you shouldn’t learn MVC Earlier today Rob Connery posted about why he thinks You Should Learn MVC.  Rob is a great guy and we always have lively discussions whenever we meet at conferences.  I was in the middle of writing a long comment on his blog when I decided it might be better as it’s own post.

I have to say Rob, once again, another great post!  Another great use of straw man arguments and red herrings.  Come...

We are once again in the heart of the planning season for DotNetNuke OpenForce. It is that time of year when we ask all of you to submit your session abstracts for this years OpenForce North America conference.  I know that the last 2 years, we have had great response from our community and I expect that this year will be no different.

Like the last two years, we are accepting  session submissions in 4 different topic areas:  Development, Design, Administration and Open Source.

Development – These are basically session dealing with code.  Whether it is topic on module development or building custom providers or dissecting the internals of DotNetNuke, anything that would appeal to the software coders is fair game.

Design – This topic area is targeted at the web designers.  This goes beyond just talking about skins.  It also includes topics like SEO, and accessibility and can even include Localization.  These sessions should focus more on the aesthetic and usability aspects of building a DotNetNuke website.

Administration – This topic area is where speakers present sessions that address the needs of the end user.  How do they install DotNetNuke, how do they configure it for a Web Farm or to run in the cloud(this is different that writing a module that uses cloud services), how can they improve site performance.  These sessions really focus on the day to day use and administration of running a DotNetNuke website.  This topic area is also a catchall for any business related topics.

Open Source – This final topic area is designed to show attendees how they can incorporate other Open Source tools into their development, design and administration tasks.  It might be a topic on using XUnit for testing or using GIMP and Paint.Net for creating your skin elements.  The idea here is to expand the attendees view of the Open Source community and to bring in fresh and complimentary ideas from other Open Source projects.  These sessions should still be relevant to DotNetNuke in a very meaningful way.  A topic showing all the wonders of using Wordpress for blogging is not appropriate.

In 2006, Neal Ford wrote a blog post on the topic of Polyglot Programming which foresaw a future where applications will be increasingly built using multiple general purpose languages and domain specific languages.  Ted Neward has a recent article from MSDN Magazine which follows up on this theme with a discussion of Polyglot Programming in .Net.  Both Neal and Ted address some of the issues with Polyglot Programming, but I think there is one that they have missed.  Polyglot Programming can quickly lead to performance rot in application development.

In DNN Tips and Tricks #10, I presented an example of how you can use the DotNetNuke Report Module to display you data using the advanced capabilities of XSLT.  Greg Lahens pointed out an issue with my SQL code which is really highlights one of the downsides to Polyglot Programming.  As programmers, we often employ a variety of tools to solve a particular programming challenge.  Many of these tools are DSLs – XSLT, SQL, CSS, HTML are just a few of the many DSLs in common use throughout the web development world.