Keith Elder’s recent post Dear Asp.Net Developers: Stop Making Our Technology Look Bad had a lot of great points but towards the end, I thought he suddenly swerved off the road.  In general, I agree with Keith that developers have a responsibility to provide all of their users with a good experience.  This is not always easy and I give sites lots of slack when I see they made a reasonable effort.  But when I see sites like the CodeZone example in Keith’s post, I have to wonder why those developers still have a job or where were the senior developers on the project.

Where I vehemently disagree with Keith is that his “solution” is for Asp.Net developers to adopt the MVC framework and NVelocity (or other non-webforms or non-Microsoft tools).  To me this is a complete non-sequitur.  You can create perfectly useable, XHTML/CSS compliant websites using WebForms and Visual Studio.  It is not hard.  It is just a matter of caring.  Hundreds of thousands of developers do it every day.  Lazy, uncaring developers will still be lazy and uncaring even if they are using the MVC framework. More...

While catching up on blogs this morning I ran across a little PowerShell gem on Walking Dependencies in Powershell.  Chris outlines a problem that has popped up a few times in DotNetNuke.  Usually it revolves around CountryListBox or DotNetNuke.WebUtility.  Finding the offending assembly is always trial and error.  Chris’s solution should help resolve that issue.  I found a few minor bugs in Chris’s script which I have fixed.  The reflection call is a static method and is missing a “]::” and the Convert-Path is unneeded if you call ReflectionOnlyLoadFrom with $_.FullName (this will become important in a minute).  More...

Over the last several years web developers have moved more and more code to the browser in an effort to improve the overall user experience.  This code is usually in the form of JavaScript libraries which provide advanced functionality and improved performance.  With the widespread adoption of AJAX developers are pushing our JavaScript skills to the limits.  Even with this increased reliance on JavaScript running in the browser, there is still a need for server side application code.  While the split in application logic has brought some improvements in our user experience, it has brought its own set of challenges as well.  Having application code in two locations often requires us to pass values from the server side to our client-side JavaScript and for the JavaScript to be able to pass those values back to the server.

Jon Galloway discussed this issue and provided a generic ASP.Net solution in Getting JavaScript and ASP.Net talking (outside of AJAX).  Rick Strahl followed this up with his own solutions in Embedding ASP.Net Server Variables in Client JavaScript Part 1 and Part 2.  Both of these solutions work just fine for generic ASP.Net development.  The downside to both of these techniques is that they require you to load one more component into your application or to dig into how to implement the necessary IScriptControl interface, which Jon points out “it's a little tough to set up”.  More...

Anyone who has spent much time working with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has discovered that each browser has slightly different support for the various CSS versions.  To further complicate CSS usage, each browser has a different set of bugs and/or understanding of what a particular standard requires.  Internet Explorer is definitely the worst offender and the furthest from fully and faithfully supporting CSS 2.1.  While support has been steadily improving between versions, it is still not on par with other modern browsers.

Typically, designers use a number of different hacks to target CSS at specific browsers in order to work around the inconsistencies.  The process generally starts with a skin design which renders correctly in Firefox and then the designer adds hacks to get it to work in IE.  To make matters worse, Microsoft has made changes in each subsequent version of IE such that a hack that worked in IE5.5 will not necessarily work in IE7. More...

There appears to me to be a recurring pattern I see on many web sites.  Often you will have a JavaScript library that you want to use which requires certain variables be defined in your web page.  I have seen this pattern repeated for many different widgets that you may want to include on your page.  More...

Over the last 5 years I have literally installed DotNetNuke hundreds of times on my local development machines.  During this time installation has gotten easier, but it still takes a few minutes and is still subject to mistakes being made.  Also, because there are several steps involved, I often take shortcuts.  This is ok when I am just throwing up development instances, but it is counterproductive when I am trying to do actual testing of a beta or release candidate.

Last fall I started building a series of PowerShell scripts for simplifying the process.  Although there are installers available for DotNetNuke, they are often out of date and are fairly rigid in how they perform the install.  Using PowerShell provides a lot of advantages over a traditional installation program.  I have complete control over the installation in an interactive environment and can change any one of dozens of parameters that control the installation.

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We are in the final stretch for the 4.9.0 release.  This release was originally going to be the 4.8.5 security release, however, given our slippage on DNN 5.0 we decided to backport a few critical fixes for the 4.x platform and felt that this was a good time to do that.  We think that 4.9 will provide a stable platform for everyone wishing to remain on the 4.x codebase for a while after 5.0 is released. More...

It is time once again for voting to begin in the PacktPub Open Source CMS Awards.  According to the Packt Publishing website:

The Packt Open Source Content Management System Award is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward Open Source Content Management Systems (CMS) that have been selected by a panel of judges and visitors to www.PacktPub.com. Now entering its third year, the Award has established itself as an important measure for quality and the popularity of Open Source Content Management Systems.

So this is your chance to show your support for DotNetNuke and let your voices be heard.  Not only will you have a chance to win an iPod Nano just for making a nomination, but you might also help DotNetNuke win one of the cash prizes for the winners.  Even if you are not a sponsor or benefactor, this is a great way to help the project.