Every week it seems more and more people are asking me how they can run DotNetNuke on Windows Azure. Last year David Rodriguez released the DotNetNuke Azure Accelerator which aims to simplify the process of installing DotNetNuke on Windows Azure. It was a great alternative to manually deploying DotNetNuke but it required the user to know how to use the Windows Azure Management Portal for setting up their Azure account. The original version of the accelerator also included the DotNetNuke installation package within the download. This meant that the accelerator was closely tied to the DotNetNuke version and had to be updated with every DotNetNuke release.

This year’s DotNetNuke World conference is just around the corner and we are once again looking for speakers. DotNetNuke World will be October 10th through the 12th in lovely Orlando, Florida. Registration will be opening soon, and like last year we will be offering great early bird pricing. This year’s event is shaping up to be twice as large as last year. More speakers, more sessions, and more attendees.

Much like past years, we are accepting session submissions that focus on Development, Design, Administration and Business. We have expanded the number of rooms this year so that we could accommodate more sessions with a broader appeal to business decision makers and end users. This year’s conference will focus on the “Social Revolution” but other topics are equally welcome.

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.

I recently came across a new hoster who has taken a unique approach to providing hosting services. Traditionally, if you were a web hosting company, you would purchase a bunch of servers and provision them in a data center. As virtualization technology matured, hosters began to shift their high end accounts from dedicated servers to virtual servers. With the advent of cloud services like Amazon EC2, some hosters are completely doing away with the capital costs of owning their own servers.

In Part 1 of this series I discussed the basics of data binding in KnockoutJS. In this post, I’ll dive a little deeper in the the binding behaviors of KnockoutJS and show how you can build really responsive web apps using client side development techniques.

While data binding is an important part of KnockoutJS development, it is only part of what makes KnockoutJS so attractive. KnockoutJS is a JavaScript based implementation of the MVVM design pattern which is a derivation of the Presentation Model as described by Martin Fowler. Martin Fowler sums up the Presentation Model like this:

The essence of a Presentation Model is of a fully self-contained class that represents all the data and behavior of the UI window, but without any of the controls used to render that UI on the screen. A view then simply projects the state of the presentation model onto the glass.

As Fowler explains, the Presentation Model class should represent both the data and the behavior which are then bound to the view. Let’s dive into how KnockoutJS handles binding behaviors to your HTML.

Recently I started using KnockoutJS as a key component in my web development toolset. KnockoutJS has simplified my code while also allowing me to create richer web UIs. I have always disliked the amount of postbacks I was doing using a more traditional ASP.Net development approach. KnockoutJS eliminates many of the pain points associated with ASP.Net development and lends itself to a more modern AJAX based style of development. In this series of articles I’ll discuss some of the basics of developing ASP.Net applications using KnockoutJS. In future articles I’ll walk through some of the more advanced features of KnocktoutJS and show how you can use it in your DotNetNuke development.

 

 

After working with ASP.Net Webforms for the past decade, the time has come to move on. I have enjoyed using Webforms and I was pretty good at bending ASP.Net to my will. Having recently tried some newer web frameworks I find that I am more productive than ever before. Over the past couple of years I have dabbled with ASP.Net MVC, jQuery and even WebFormsMVP but none of them truly held my interest for long. I never felt like they really offered solutions to problems that I was worried about. Because of my involvement with DotNetNuke, and the fact that it relies heavily on Webforms, I found that I couldn’t justify the use of some of these technologies. Things like WebFormsMVP added too much friction to the way I was used to working. ASP.Net MVC couldn’t really work in any meaningful way with DotNetNuke. And jQuery was a nice add-on, but it didn’t fundamentally change the way I developed modules.

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.