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Software teams typically include people with a wide variety of skills, including management, software architecture, visual design, UX design, data design, and business insights. A common “money-saving” approach is to have someone with management skills work closely with customers closest to the business goals in order to decide what should be done next, and then that management person will turn those ideas into tasks that the engineers and designers implement. However, the best teams understand that using designers and engineers only for implementation is a waste of their talents, and instead create a virtuous cycle of collaboration by bringing everyone to the table.

Released in 2002, .NET Framework introduced the world to the C# language and came to be a stable, productive foundation for many Windows-based applications, including web sites through the ASP.NET framework. A new cross-platform version of .NET (originally called .NET Core, and now just .NET) was released in 2016, which saw the lion’s share of investment from Microsoft. .NET Framework had its last major release in 2019 (version 4.8), with 4.8.1 coming in 2022. Knowing the level of attention given to the newer cross-platform .NET, why would teams in 2025 choose to start new projects using .NET Framework instead of using the newest platforms and libraries?

How can you know how long a new initiative to build a custom software product will take? What’s a reasonable amount to plan to pay to get started turning your vision into technically excellent software that can go live and start producing value? Once an estimate of the effort has been created, how close should you expect the true cost to be?

We’ve been patiently waiting for the next major release of DNN, and it is finally here (DNN 10.0.0 was published on April 9)! This update will be more disruptive than others in the past, as the maintainers have taken this opportunity to remove features that have been deprecated since DNN 8, going back to January 2016. In addition to clearing some accumulated clutter from years past, DNN 10 offers a number of improvements for both administrators and developers.

A number of us from Engage attended DNN Summit last month in Denver. It was a great opportunity to strengthen our relationships within the DNN ecosystem, share our DNN and development expertise, and get a better understanding of the state of the community. This post provides links and summaries of the sessions I presented at the conference.

We just returned from DNN Summit 2017, where I gave two presentations (I also helped coordinate the Code-a-Thon, and my colleague Anthony Overkamp gave one presentation and led a full day of theme training). I wanted to put together a quick post to let people know where to access the materials from my presentations.

I've written about the high level benefits of using the Elm language, this post deals with the developer experience of using Elm.

At Engage, we've been excited to embrace a new technology for creating web applications that are more maintainable, performant, and reliable. Elm is a programming language that compiles to JavaScript, designed from the ground up for creating web applications, in a way that guides developers towards well-architected code, which we've been excited to explore and have now officially decided to adopt as our primary front-end development language.

TL;DR Install the Security Analyzer module if your DNN website is on a version below 7.4.1 (starting in 7.4.1 this module is included within DNN itself). If you're on DNN 8, make sure you've upgraded to 8.0.3.

I've written a post about using JavaScript Libraries in DNN on the DNN community blog. We're excited about what it will look like for the community to start making use of this feature of the DNN Platform. Check it out!

A couple of weeks ago, Engage shut down our offices for a day so that everyone in the company could work on making DNN better. The primary component that we wanted to focus on was the rich text editor, specifically making some investments in the CKEditor provider, so that it can replace the Telerik RadEditor provider (the community had already decided to migrate to the CKEditor for a number of reasons, so we wanted to ensure that we were migrating to something that we would want to use). I wanted to give a quick rundown of what we accomplished and what's next for the CKEditor in DNN.

Engage is hosting a hackathon in our St. Louis office to work together to better the DNN Platform.