News

Welcome back to the DotNetNuke tips! I started doing this over a year ago, though with getting married last fall and working on my Datsun 240Z lately I haven't blogged near as much lately about DNN topics. So here we go, starting up again with my DotNetNuke Tips.

I'm happy to announce that I've been selected to speak at the OpenForce07 DotNetNuke conference in Las Vegas during this year's fall DevConnections. DevConnections looks to be one of the larger conferences this year now that the PDC has been cancelled for this year. I'll be presenting on "Portal Administration Best Practices".

If you're anything like me, you've been greatly looking forward to Visual Studio Orcas, with its enhanced support for JavaScript.  You might also not know that some of that functionality is available to us currently in Visual Studio 2005.  It's not exactly easy to setup and use, but once you get it going, it can really help out when you're trying to figure out why, for example, all elements on your page suddenly disappear, only in IE.

Last week we were able to release the long awaited new release of Engage: Publish with all new bells and whistles.

I'm proud to finally announce that the DotNetNuke Wiki Project has officially released the first "production" version of the Wiki module. This version is labeled 04.00.01 and can be downloaded from the Project downloads page. You can find out more information for the Wiki module on the Project Page, and some basic instructions, version history and release notes available on the Wiki Example page, which is running the released version of the Wiki module. Thanks to Josh Handel for helping to get this project rolling again by donating his Ktomics Wiki module to be converted and used for the official DotNetNuke Wiki module.

When developing code for .NET, there are a number of attributes that you can define on parts of your code to make your job easier while you are debugging. These are new in .NET 2.0, and part of the System.Diagnostics namespace.

I've had too many clients come to me and ask how they can search through all of their Text/HTML modules on a portal to look for links that point to their development URL rather than their production URL. Instead of telling them they had to manually look at every page to find all instances of these invalid links I created a new module, available from www.engagemodules.com

Yesterday, version four of the Visual Studio 2005 SDK was released (as noted in this blog post, V4 VS SDK Targeting VS 2005 Released!).  While I don't plan on developing any Visual Studio add-ins or extensions, I noticed that the SDK included SandCastle, which is a tool to build documentation based on your inline XML comments.  If you're working with large or distant groups, it can help to compile some of your work into a readable API document, and SandCastle will do that for you.  You'll need to go to http://www.sandcastledocs.com/ to get an automation script or GUI, since this release doesn't include any interface.  Get it here: Visual Studio 2005 SDK version 4.0.

The Rating control from the AjaxControlToolkit has been of use to use as we work on some of our websites that use our Engage: Publish module.  However, we needed to make a change to the style of the container around the Rating in order to change a background image from saying "Please rate!" to "Thanks for rating."  We tried wrapping it in an UpdatePanel to get at the CssClass, but we couldn't get it to react.  Eventually, we got the following javascript to work (which needs to be declared after divRating is declared).

Since the 1.0 release of ASP.NET AJAX Extensions, we've been making use of the new functionality offered us through AJAX, both from the core extensions and through the AjaxControlToolkit.  However, we've run into a road block a number of times when we're tried to use the new UpdatePanel control to add some AJAX responsiveness into our web pages.  In short, we hadn't ever gotten it to work.

Sometimes, you have elements on your webpage (such as a Solpart menu or the greyed-out background of a ModalPopup) that you want to display over an embedded Flash element. And they don't. And it's frustrating.