Conference

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.

The keynotes from Andy Tryba and Shaun Walker really set the tone for the work before the community to take DNN into the future, and continue to thrive for the next year, five years, and ten years. There were a number of spirited discussion about the technical future of DNN, and the right approach to take in embracing Microsoft's new cross-platform, lean ASP.NET Core framework. From those discussions, the DNN Technical Advisory Group has been exploring options for embracing .NET Core within DNN, starting with some great prototyping around Razor Pages module development by Andrew Hoefling.

Training

My colleague Anthony Overkamp led the day of DNN theme training, which I sat in on and assisted with. We had a nice group of folks attend, to whom we were able to give both practical guidance and bigger picture thinking around how DNN themes shape the way you build your websites.

Sessions

I was invited to give three sessions during the conference, all of which have slides and some sample code available:

Using Gulp to create a front-end build pipeline

You can review the slides and play with the sample project. You may also want to checkout nvQuickTheme, a DNN theme starter template which includes Gulp processing.

Git Concepts, Tips, & Tricks

You can review the slides, which also link to a handful of other resources.  If you're interested in getting a better understanding of Git, I'd first point you to the the free eBook Pro Git, which is a great resource that can take you from just using Git to really understanding Git.

DNN on Docker

You can review the slides, and also use my GitHub repository to generate a Docker container for a DNN website. Our general conclusion was that there are some showstoppers with using Docker for development of ASP.NET solutions on Windows, and there are a couple of changes in DNN that could help hosting in Docker be smoother. However, being able to quickly stand up a new DNN site using Docker may be helpful in testing scenarios, so it's still something to play with or keep an eye on.