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We have a long history of using automation to enable teams to deliver regularly without drama. When we start a consulting relationship, one of our first steps is evaluating the process required to automate deployment of whatever we’re building for them. This process of thinking through how to simply and easily get our work out for testing and production usage pushes the team to think earlier about real value for real customers.

When one of our partners needs a software solution that’s fast, reliable, and easy to maintain, we consistently choose to build its backend upon .NET. We’ve grown to trust its enterprise-minded community to deliver solutions that meet the needs of small prototypes while maturing to support extreme workloads when necessary.

When building a website, the choice of platform to build upon is multifaceted. Traditionally, a platform supplied the visual display of content to end users as well as the editing and management of that content. However, a different approach is becoming more popular and is worth considering for most public-facing sites. This headless approach separates content management from the display of that content, allowing each tool to be optimized, creating a more performant, secure, and flexible result.

If your website is driven by dynamic content, a Content Management System (CMS) is usually a good choice. While there are a lot of viable CMS options out there today, lately we have been more interested in exploring headless options (where the backend is separated from the frontend) which turned our attention to Payload CMS. Payload comes with many advantages, especially catered to developers, giving the team a modern stack (JavaScript, React, Node.js) with a lot of control without sacrificing performance, scalability, and the ability to customize to business needs.

Many developers who try out programming in a functional programming language describe it as an “a-ha” moment and begin to look for and make opportunities to use functional languages. However, CTOs and other technical leaders often approach these languages with trepidation or dismissal. Are the benefits of functional languages truly worth the investment in increased training and costlier hiring?

When faced with building a modern website that is content-focused, Astro is an easy framework choice to make. The features and benefits of Astro make for a compelling option when balancing page performance, great SEO, reliability, and hosting cost considerations.

While we believe technology should never dictate your strategy, the reality of legacy or existing architecture often plays a major part in guiding the direction of designing cohesive software experiences. We build with intention with an aim for organizational growth, collaboration, and operational health, no matter the tech stack.

Elm is a functional programming language, with a focus on the front-end of web applications. It is famous for providing a delightful developer experience, while also providing many useful constraints which allow tooling to optimize it in a variety of ways. These constraints which the language imposes are viewed as either impractical roadblocks or incredible multipliers, depending on the viewpoint of the team involved.

Open source projects come with many pros, such as cost-effectiveness, flexibility and customization, and community collaboration, but they also can run into some challenging cons like lack of dedicated support, strain on maintainers and volunteers, as well as the amount of time it takes to design, develop, and test to release changes and improvements.

At Engage, a handful of us get together once a week as a book club to read and discuss selected titles over the course of a couple months. We recently read The AI Con by Alex Hanna and Emily M. Bender.

DNN Platform is a web application platform for .NET Framework which was started in late 2002 (under the name DotNetNuke). Engage has a long history of supporting and building on DNN and has created decades of connections with businesses that have built web-based solutions upon DNN. When you consider your organization’s investment in DNN, are you concerned about if you’re getting enough out of it? Let Engage’s experts help you explore what DNN is best for, what to expect from DNN in the future, and what other options you may want to consider.

On the heels of a recent string of supply chain security incidents in the JavaScript ecosystem, I thought it might be timely to look at security within the ecosystem of the Elm programming language.

Engage AMS is a suite of tools to manage events and memberships for associations and similar organizations. Its core differentiator is an architecture which encourages flexibility, allowing for both configuration and custom integrations to ensure each organization’s needs are met.

Over the years of delivering working software we have carefully carved a pathway to how we do our best work. Many of these habits and workflows resemble agile methodologies very closely, while others were more ideas that evolved from traditional agile approaches. Like any successful project, our approach is also expected to grow and iterate over time. The following is a representation of how we are currently working together to build software products.

We believe the best solutions come from working together. Collaboration is at the heart of everything we do, including striving for full team discovery. We value diverse perspectives and open communication to achieve the best outcomes, and by working together to plan our work, we can deliver optimal solutions through shared understanding and clarity.

At Engage, a handful of us get together once a week as a book club to read and discuss selected titles over the course of a couple months. We recently read Software Teaming by Woody Zuill and Kevin Meadows and shared our review and a few take-aways at one of our weekly Lunch & Learn sessions. Here is a transcript (lightly edited for readability) of the presentation.

We recently migrated our primary marketing website, engagesoftware.com, from DNN Platform to Astro. This post will cover the technical details of that migration.

Our primary marketing website, engagesoftware.com, has been built upon the DNN Platform for more than a decade. After redesigning the content and flow of the site at the beginning of the year, we realized that we weren’t really using much of the functionality that DNN provided. In concert with some other work to move toward static sites, we started a small project to see what would happen if we migrated off of DNN and onto Astro. This is the story of that migration.

At Engage, we’ve been making websites since forever. With the resurgence of static HTML websites, we wanted to take a stroll down memory lane and think about all of the ways HTML files have been a part of our website journey through the years.

Custom software can be the difference between a solution that’s adequate and one that’s gamechanging. The upfront investment required for custom software versus off-the-shelf solutions necessitates a clear vision for how to get the best results from the team. Working with a team that is confident in methods to find and amplify value is a shortcut to delivering excellence.

Every custom software initiative is different. If it’s all been done already, just buy a solution off the shelf. If it deserves the investment of custom software, it will be solving unprecedented challenges. Cookie-cutter approaches to architecture, team makeup, or delivery methods can contribute to a lower-than-hoped-for return on investment. Instead, having the whole team explore options allows an optimal solution to emerge.

It’s common to hear business people talk about a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) nowadays, but it’s not always clear if everyone is talking about the same thing, or if what they’re talking about is something that’s valuable and solves a real problem.

DNN Platform is an open source web application platform with a strong security focus. Learn steps to take to ensure it stays secure over the long run.

The Elm programming language is “a delightful language for reliable web applications.” It would be used as an alternative to React, Vue, Svelte, Angular, and other web application frameworks. Elm is an opinionated, niche language and framework that is not for everyone, but those who use it often find it a defining experience that forever changes how they approach building applications.

Brian Dukes, CTO, discusses how DevOps automation impacted the Account Center project with Consolidated Communications.

Associations, colleges, and even telecommunications providers often have member-facing portals which collect information from a wide variety of systems and allow those members to make changes to that information (e.g. by adding a new subscription). Ideally, all of the details of that change are immediately available to the member throughout the portal and any 3rd party they may be redirected to. For example, if their new subscription gives them access to a research platform, they expect to see a new link to that platform show up, and give them the access they paid for.

DevOps is an approach to creating software which works to reduce the gap between coding and deploying, allowing the same team which created the code to deploy and monitor the application, generally through automating much of that deployment and monitoring process. In order to achieve the strong outcomes associated with teams practicing DevOps, the DORA Core model highlights building capabilities in the following categories: Climate of Learning, Fast Flow, and Fast Feedback.

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.

You know your product/business better than anyone else. Working directly with your design and development team helps them to design and build specific features and functionality around your exact needs. When your business needs change, having software built upon a flexible foundation can allow your product to quickly meet the challenge, whether that’s scaling, increased security, or an entirely new integration or product line. By starting with a custom approach to your business’ software, you have full control over the direction and impact of your vision.

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.

The Engage team just got back from attending DNN Summit 2019.  Our Creative Director, Anthony Overkamp, lead the theme session during the day of training, and I presented three sessions during the conference.

Engage offers a primer on sharing DNN modules.

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.

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.

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

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.

A number of big changes have been going on in both the DNN and Microsoft communities.  I provide a run-down on my blog at https://weblogs.asp.net/briandukes/changes-everywhere-we-look

The Engage team just got back from attending DNNCon, where I gave two presentations, Creating URL Providers for Your Custom Extensions and Contributing to Open Source Projects on GitHub and CodePlex.  Jason Stone also presented Enterprise Social Networking - A Primer.

I'll be speaking at DNNCon in October, but maybe you should've been.  A call for more diversity in the DNN community...

For I ♥ DNN, we wanted to bring the barrier to entry very, very low, so that anyone could join the conversation simply and easily, without having to create yet another website account. To that end, we wanted to allow folks to sign in with their existing social network logins: Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Since these are provided with DNN, we assumed it would be fairly simple to achieve our vision. However, we ran into a handful of obstacles that we worked to overcome in implementing the core social login providers, ultimately copying and extending them to better meet our needs.

The Southern Fried Day of DotNetNuke was a very well put-together conference hosted by QCDUG in Charlotte, NC.  I spoke for a couple of sessions, and enjoyed the time with the community, seeing what others are doing with DNN, and enjoying some great southern hospitality.

At Engage, we've really enjoyed using DDR menu for our skins.  It gives us a lot more control than we had before with the DNN menu (or SolPart before it).  One of the great features that we enjoyed was the ability to define a menu template using the Razor template language.  This gives us full access to C# code within the menu template, making it simple to do whatever we want the menu to do.  However, we ran into a snag when we started trying to update our sites to DNN 7.

I just got back from presenting at DNN World 2012.  It was a good time to see all of the folks in the DNN community who love DNN and are working to move it forward.  DNN 7 is shaping up to be a wonderful major release with some well thought-out user experience changes, some great professional features, and developer productivity features, and the introduction of the forth-coming Nebula product is one to keep an eye on. I started off the conference by presenting on developing functionality using the Knockout JavaScript library. I've embedded the presentation below, and used some demos which are now hosted on jsfiddle: Demo 1, Demo 2, Demo 3, Demo 4, Demo 5 Responsive Views with Knockout from Engage Software In addition to presenting, I was able to walk away from the conference with a couple of awards. I was presented with one of ten DotNetNuke MVP awards for community contributions, which was very special. I've heard the sentiment from a few others, but it really is humbling and surprising to stand on the stage with folks whose work and dedication you respect. I don't see myself belonging with that group, but I'm pleased that the kind folks at DNN Corporation have a different view of it. I'm excited to see who joins the MVP ranks in the spring (they indicated that there will be MVPs names twice a year), as there are still quite a few folks who really deserve the title. So, in addition to that award, I was able to get up on the stage again (with the rest of the crew from Engage) to help accept the Site-of-the-Year award (non-profit category) for Visit Yellowstone. This site was a lot of work, and we're really proud of how it came together. It's great to be recognized for that work. We were also really proud of Clint for winning the DNN SuperFan award (as well as being a fellow MVP). We were all rooting for him at the office; he is, without a doubt, the biggest, most active and genuine fan of DotNetNuke that I know. Overall, the conference was a really enjoyable and gratifying experience that we're looking forward to for next year.

We’re on the plane flying back to St. Louis from DNN World 2011. I gave a presentation titled DNN 6 UI/UX Patterns, discussing the form patterns introduced in the administrative modules in DNN 6 (the new look and feel that you immediately noticed after logging into your new DNN 6 site).  Many folks asked about seeing the examples that I presented, and they are available as a repository on github, at https://github.com/bdukes/DNN-World-Demos.  This includes a series of small, one-control modules that demonstrate the various parts and pieces introduced in DNN 6.  I’ve also placed the slide deck on SlideShare, (though the vast majority of the content was just demonstration, don’t be expecting a wealth of information there).  Feel free to let me know if you have any questions, and I’ll do my best to give clarifications.

We’ve just released an update to our popular survey and form building module, Engage: Survey...

We recently published an update to our jobs listing module, Engage: Employment.  With version 1.9, we’ve focused on the administration of the module, and worked to help you analyze your jobs’ applicants more quickly and easily.

Saturday, October 2nd was the Day of DotNetNuke in Chicago. A number of us from Engage attended and spoke.

I’m really excited to finally be able to introduce version 1.4 of Engage: Events.  This release addresses, in my opinion, the biggest missing feature of the module, event categorization.

We recently released a new version of Engage: Rotator which featured four new templates to display rotating content on your DotNetNuke site.

With the advent of 2010, we at Engage took some time to reevaluate our products business (Engage Modules and Engage Skins).  The last six months or so of 2009, we were swamped with client work and were unable to make any substantial enhancements or fixes to our DotNetNuke modules.  We recognized that this was unacceptable, and have been working to restructure our business and commitments so that we can maintain a consistent support, maintenance, and enhancements for all of our products.  As a result, we've made some internal changes to make sure that work on our product lines cannot be ignored because of client work, however pressing it may seem.

We've just released updates to Engage: Events and Engage: Employment.

Engage: Rotator is our content rotation module for DotNetNuke.  We just released the 2.0 update with full templatability and a huge number of new rotation and animation options.

We just released Engage: Events, and realized that our DNN 4 compatible package might not work exactly as we'd like when used in DNN 5.  If you're a DNN module developer, you probably already know that there have been a ton of changes to the module installer in 5.0.  It will still accept the old module packages, but you'll miss out on a lot if you don't provide an updated package.

The first major update for Engage: Events has been released!  Engage: Events is the event management module for DotNetNuke from Engage Software.

I had finally had it. I was no longer accepting the lack of tool support while editing the .SqlDataProvider scripts for DotNetNuke modules. I needed to figure out a way to make Visual Studio treat those files as if they ended with .sql instead of .SqlDataProvider so that it would give me syntax highlighting for my SQL scripts.

Have you heard of our Engage: Employment module for DotNetNuke? I'm talking about our module for posting job listings on your website and allowing folks to apply for them. We have today released a new version of the module to fix a number of bugs that have been discovered, while completely revamping the administrative experience.

When building DotNetNuke modules, a number of times I've run up against the issue of trying to instantiate a ModuleInfo instance with only a module ID. However, the GetModule signature on ModuleController takes both a module ID and a tab ID. In this latest instance where I've come against this issue, I was actually trying to get a tab ID based on the module ID, so I obviously didn't already had one to provide.

Starting in DotNetNuke version 4.9.0, only the module.css in the main folder of a module is referenced, regardless of where the control being loaded lives (unless there isn't a module.css there). Therefore, you only need one module.css to control the styles of all of your controls.

It shouldn't be hard to get started writing a module for DotNetNuke, but it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of help especially when you are wanting to use C#. At Engage, we have created a Visual Studio project template which will get you started developing a C# DotNetNuke module, using a Web Application project (rather than the, in my opinion, much more cumbersome Web Site project). It is available for free on our downloads page after registering on the site.

Sometimes a simple change and all of a sudden your module is mysteriously showing errors in strange places. Here's are a couple of tips to keep some of these scenarios from affecting your modules, and how to recognize them if they do.

After three public pre-releases, and weeks of wrestling through user-submitted bugs and those we found (so that you don't have to!), we are now ready to release Engage: Events to the eagerly awaiting public! After we cemented our feature-set in the Beta release, we have hunted down no less than 15 bugs, ranging from grammar to complete show-stoppers. We are very thankful for the support of the community as we worked together to create a DotNetNuke module that fits your needs, from the ground up, based on your suggestions.

We've released the next Alpha release of the Engage: Events module for DotNetNuke. Try it out and let us know what you think and what you'd like to see from this module.

We've been hard at work to create a new DotNetNuke module to manage your website's events. Take a look and let us know where you want us to go with it.

 

We at Engage Software have just released the latest update to our DotNetNuke Jobs Listing module, Engage: Employment, version 1.3.  This is a module you can use on your company's DNN site to list the job openings you have available at your various locations, and accept and sort applications and applicants.

Have you ever used the DefaultButton property on an ASP.NET Panel, only to find that it doesn't work in Firefox? Here's an easy way to use DotNetNuke's ClientAPI to achieve the same result for more than just IE.

As a developer, and specifically as a DotNetNuke developer, there are a number of directories that I have to navigate to regularly.  In particular with DotNetNuke, I'm going to C:\inetpub\wwwroot\DotNetNuke\Website\DesktopModules quite a bit.  So, instead of having to try to type that in all the time, or navigate through the folder structure, I've defined an environment variable "dm" that is defined as that path to my Desktop Modules folder.  I can just type %dm% into an explorer prompt and be there without any hassle.  I've also setup a %wwwroot% shortcut, though it gets used much less often.  It's a lot like keeping a shortcut around in your dock/quick launch toolbar, but you can also use it in dialogs.  Hopefully this can help you trim off a few more seconds/minutes of monotony throughout your day.

We have released a major update for Engage: Employment, our DNN job listing module.  In version 1.2, we have added a number of new features and fixed all known bugs from version 1.1.

Best practices for developing DotNetNuke modules dictates that we use the development.config as our web.config, which includes running our development sites under Medium Trust.  This is necessary so that we don't inadvertently introduce code that requires Full Trust into our module and thereby restrict it to customers running in Medium Trust.

We have just released a minor update to Engage: Rotator, our content rotating module for DotNetNuke.  This fixes issues some folks were seeing where content would "jump" a bit when it was rotating.  If you don't already have it, pick up a copy from our Buy Now page on Engage Modules.

Version 1.1.2 of Engage: Employment has been released to the web.  It is currently available from EngageModules.com, and will be available from SnowCovered before too long.  See the Downloads page of EngageModules.com for instructions on how to get access to the new version there if you have purchased from another website.

Last weekend most of us from Engage went down to enjoy the Tulsa Tech Fest.  While the individual sessions were hit or miss, the keynotes were excellent and got us all excited to start using Silverlight, and we all definitely had fun together.

On Wednesday of this week, we made our first public release of Engage: Rotator on Engage Modules.  If you've wondered about that snazzy looking rotating banner on the front page of Engage Software, this is it.  This is a product that has evolved over the last few months from the needs of various clients, and has now come to the point where we've invested a lot of time in making it user friendly and configurable.  Have a look on our demo site and see if this could help add a nice touch to your site.

Have you ever wanted to change what DotNetNuke says on it's controls? Change "Register" to "Join Us" or "Terms of Use" to "Member Agreement"? It's easier than you think.

It often happens that I would like to know the size of an image so that I can smartly resize it in various situations. Until today, I had never been quite able to get everything that I needed to get it done.

Using a DropDownList, RadioButtonList, CheckBoxList, or other similar control as a trigger of an Update Panel (rather than in the Update Panel itself) will cause the initial value not to fire a SelectedIndexChanged event.

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.

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.

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.

With the 1.0 release of ASP.NET AJAX, we have started integrating controls from the control toolkit into some of our DotNetNuke modules. We've come across a couple of issues with the ModalPopup control in the (admittedly still Beta) AJAX control toolkit.