The 5.3.0 development cycle has been unlike any in our 7+ year history.  In some respects this is good and in others – not so much.  As I explained in my Just Like Clockwork post, we are working hard to make monthly releases a habit and to have release schedules that are predictable.  DotNetNuke 5.3.0 marks the first major release we have attempted since splitting our engineering group into feature development and maintenance groups.  As always, doing anything for the first time can be challenging.

The maintenance group has gotten into a pretty good grove with our monthly releases, but adding an external group into the mix has added an additional level of complexity.  The maintenance group is able to make our changes in a single branch and quickly test, package and release our monthly stabilization releases.  Unfortunately, the feature dev group works in a separate branch which means code merges, integration testing, lots and lots of regression testing and in general a more complex testing and release process.  We certainly have learned quite a bit from this first cycle which we’ll apply to future major releases.

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As I indicated last week, I am pleased to announce the Call for Speakers for the 2010 DotNetNuke Connections conference.  Once again, this years conference will be held at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas from November 1st through the 4th with pre and post-conference training available as well. 

We could not do this show without our speakers and we have been fortunate in the past to have had some great session proposals by many well respected speakers.  Some of those speakers have been selected to present their sessions and unfortunately some of them have not been.  Such is the nature of any conference.  As usual we will continue to look for new speakers to bring fresh new topics to the conference.  So if you have submitted sessions in the past then I would encourage you to submit again.  If you have public speaking experience and some great ideas for sessions then I would invite you to submit your sessions as well.

Remember that all speakers will be required to present at least two sessions.  So make sure you submit plenty of session abstracts to improve your odds of getting selected.

Speaker Benefits

Every speaker at the DotNetNuke Connections conference will receive 4 nights of lodging at the Mandalay Bay Casino and Hotel along with free conference registration. Conference registration will allow every attendee full access to the expo hall, and all sessions at the DevConnections and DotNetNuke Connections conferences. (Pre and Post conference training days are not covered in the complimentary registration).

Over the past several months we have been making some significant changes in our release process.  We have made a commitment to monthly releases, opened up our code repository and in general have made a move to be more transparent.  During this same period we have also made some changes to our development processes to separate our feature development from our bug fixes.  The DotNetNuke 5.3.0 is our first quarterly feature release that is benefiting from this new development process. 

In addition to splitting out our feature development, we are also using a more formal Scrum methodology and have broken down our features into different code sprints.  This process allows us to deliver a set of features that can stand alone  and be tested independent from other features or enhancements which might be delivered in later sprints.  This flexibility also enables us to be a little more fluid with our quarterly releases which are often timed to coincide with major marketing events.  This Alpha release is a merge between the 5.2.3 codebase and DotNetNuke 5.3.0 Sprint 1 development branch and includes the following features:

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We are once again in the heart of the planning season for the DotNetNuke DevConnections and SDC conferences. It is that time of year when we ask all of you to submit your session abstracts for this years DotNetNuke North American conference.  Later this week we’ll be opening up the official Call for Speakers on DotNetNuke.com, but I wanted to take the opportunity to give speakers a heads up so they could start preparing their abstracts so that they are ready once we open the submission form.  Like the last three years, we are accepting  session submissions in 4 different topic areas:  Development, Design, Administration and Open Source.

Development – These are basically session dealing with code.  Whether it is topic on module development or building custom providers or dissecting the internals of DotNetNuke, anything that would appeal to the software coders is fair game.

Design – This topic area is targeted at the web designers.  This goes beyond just talking about skins.  It also includes topics like SEO, and accessibility and can even include Localization.  These sessions should focus more on the aesthetic and usability aspects of building a DotNetNuke website.

Administration – This topic area is where speakers present sessions that address the needs of the end user.  How do they install DotNetNuke, how do they configure it for a Web Farm or to run in the cloud(this is different that writing a module that uses cloud services), how can they improve site performance.  These sessions really focus on the day to day use and administration of running a DotNetNuke website.  This topic area is also a catchall for any business related topics.

Open Source – This final topic area is designed to show attendees how they can incorporate other Open Source tools into their development, design and administration tasks.  It might be a topic on using Watin for testing or using GIMP and Paint.Net for creating your skin elements.  The idea here is to expand the attendees view of the Open Source community and to bring in fresh and complimentary ideas from other Open Source projects.  These sessions should still be relevant to DotNetNuke in a very meaningful way.  A topic showing all the wonders of using Wordpress for blogging is not appropriate.

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DotNetNuke recently moved to an Open Repository that is hosted on CodePlex.  As Phil Beadle recently noted, the synchronization process is now fully operational and is running nightly to ensure that the CodePlex repository mirrors our internal version control system.  Of course, having access to the source code and understanding how to use the source code to get to a working build is two different things.  The source code package that we deliver with each release is slightly modified from our own internal repository in order to minimize confusion for the community.  Over the years the core team has become accustomed to these steps, but for new people, getting DotNetNuke up and running from source code can be a bit daunting.  Hopefully I can help dispel the mystery and make it a little easier to understand why DotNetNuke source code is packaged in this manner.

NOTE:  For the remainder of this post I will assume that you are familiar with DotNetNuke and that your system is already configured.  The source code version of is not intended for people who are just getting started with DotNetNuke.  If you fall into this category then I would recommend starting with one of the install packages to better acquaint yourself with DotNetNuke.  If you use the install version with the Web Platform Installer, then it will ensure you have all the necessary pre-requisites installed.  For more information on installing DotNetNuke you should review the Installation Instructions or watch the Installation Webinar which are available on the downloads page.

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Over the last several years DotNetNuke has maintained a policy of providing an upgrade path for users running previous versions of the platform.  Only in rare instances will we intentionally break a feature or an API or do something that would cause 3rd party extensions to break.  Customers have expressed to us over the years how important it is to maintain an upgrade path.  This concept is not unique to DotNetNuke.  Various projects and companies will take a different stance on the topic.  I was reminded of this recently with the Windows 7 launch where XP users were forced to make a tough decision – go through the hassle of installing a clean version of Windows 7 and then installing all of their old software and migrating their data (I hope grandpa had good backups), just stick with Windows XP, or move to a competitor.  Even Apple recognized the problem with the Windows 7 approach as evidenced by their Mac vs PC commercials.

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Another month, another DotNetNuke release.  With each passing month the Quality team continues to get better at building DotNetNuke in a repeatable manner.  Our processes are becoming more and more automated and our QA and maintenance teams are starting to become comfortable with the processes.  It is a marked change from where we were just 12 months ago.  As a stabilization release, we focused this month on closing out the highest profile issues in the issue tracker.  We continued our efforts to solidify the installation experience and have expended additional effort in adding more error handling to the New Module wizard that was added in 5.2.  One major change in this release is that we are moving away from doing any significant enhancements during a stabilization release.  Occasionally we will have a minor change to existing functionality that is aimed at providing better feedback or otherwise resolving a usability issue.  Outside of these issues we will do our best to avoid introducing any new or changed behaviors which are more likely to introduce new defects into the product.  We do have one significant change in this release in the form of support for the PayPal sandbox which was implemented prior to our policy change.  You can see the highlights from this release below.  As usual, you can review the ChangeLog for complete details.

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At OpenForce ‘09 we made a lot of announcements about changes to the DotNetNuke project.  One change that we announced was a commitment to provide more regular releases.  Over the past several years we have always focused on making releases when the software was “ready”.  This policy worked well when the project was staffed by volunteers as planning for fixed release dates is extremely difficult when you don’t know from week to week who would be able to work on the project, or how much time they would have available.

In software development, there are 3 major levers that you have available to manage a release given a fixed set of resources:  Time, Scope and Quality.  In general, we don’t feel that quality is a factor where you can cut corners.  This only leaves time and scope as levers you can use when preparing a release.  In the past we have worked on a somewhat fixed scope and fixed quality philosophy.  We tried to determine the features and bug fixes that would go into a release and keep testing until we felt that the software met the desired quality.  In 2010, we have shifted this approach and are now working to fixed release dates with a desired quality level and will adjust the scope as needed to ensure that we can meet our time and quality commitments.

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This past year I had the pleasure of being asked by Jim Minatel at Wrox to write a Wrox Blox covering the basics of jQuery for ASP.Net Developers.  Having co-authored 2 previous books, I realized that writing a book, regardless of the size, is a lot of work, but something that I also find gratifying once you have a finished product.  Over the last 2 years, I had gotten more and more into jQuery and really loved its simplicity and power, and thought that this would be a great opportunity to share some of the knowledge I had gathered.

For those that are not familiar with the term, a Wrox Blox is a short e-book (30+ pages) which covers a narrow topic.  They are not intended to be an exhaustive discussion of a topic, but rather to cover one particular aspect of what is often a much broader subject matter.  Because of their narrower focus and the fact that they are only available as e-books, Wrox is able to keep the cost of the Wrox Blox very low.  Wrox Blox generally include a lot of code examples rather than being a purely theoretical discussion of a topic.

After a couple of months, several missed deadlines and a page count that greatly exceeded what was originally requested, I finally finished the Wrox Blox which was subsequently published last September.  I am very pleased with the final product which comes in at 66 pages and is a great introduction to jQuery and ASP.Net.  jQuery for ASP.Net Developers  includes sections on the jQuery API and its usage, and on using jQuery with ASP.Net WebForms and ASP.Net MVC frameworks.  I had a great time writing the book and like all writing assignments of this size, it really forced me to dig into jQuery much deeper than I had previously.  It also gave me a greater appreciation for why Microsoft chose to ship jQuery with Visual Studio 2010.

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I don’t know if any else is like me, but occasionally I will run across something on a website and think that if only I could make some little tweaks to the site, that I might be able to make it more suited to how I think.  Maybe it is just a bit of CSS that might clean things up a bit, or maybe if I could just re-arrange things on the page I would have an easier time finding that awesome feature that always seems to get tucked away in a hidden corner of the page, never to be seen again.

I was on the DotNetNuke forums this morning and noticed that Chris Paterra had added a new “Quick Reply” feature.  This is a simple textarea and submit button that was added to the bottom of the forums page.  The nice thing about the quick reply is that I don’t always need fancy html or the ability to pin the post or any of the other features that are on the regular reply page.  Using the new Quick Reply, I can easily post a response without any visible postbacks.  This is a much nicer Web 2.0 experience and something that I am sure many users will love.

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