After more than 18 months of development, months of testing, and many, many long nights troubleshooting performance issues I am proud to announce the release of DotNetNuke 5.1.0.  This release represents the future of the DotNetNuke platform and is now officially recommended for production use.  While many users have been successfully running DotNetNuke 5.0 and 5.0.1 in production for many months, we feel that this 5.x release is finally mature enough that we recommend it for use in production environments.  This release includes hundreds of bug fixes and dozens of enhancements and new features.  Below is a list of just a few of the highlights from the 5.1.0 release.  As always, you can find a complete list of changes on the

Major Highlights

• Added Content Versioning and simple workflow to the HTML module.
• Added Admin Console module to simplify access to administrator and host pages
• Added publicly accessible skin engine lifecycle events
• Added audit trails to core system tables
• Added built in support for Google Analytics
• Added custom sitemap priorities
• Enhanced the permission system to use the provider model, allowing for custom permission providers
• Enhanced caching to enable access by distributed caching systems
• Enhanced installation and upgrade logic to automatically detect .Net 3.5 and to upgrade the web.config as appropriate.
• Enhanced the extensions pages to show which modules are used and to show the pages where they are currently in use
• Enhanced the Scheduler to show a checklist of available servers in the webfarm where scheduled tasks can be executed.
• Enhanced the Scheduler to support multiple instances running on the same server
• Fixed issue with removing Superuser role from a user.
• Fixed issue with deleting users which was not fully recognized by the rest of the application.
• Fixed issue with upgrades which would fail if .Net 3.5 was installed
• Fixed issue with skins installed using the batch installer.
• Fixed change to GetModulesByDefinition API method which resulted in breaking change from DotNetNuke 4.x
• Fixed CloakText API method which was broken in 5.0.1
• Fixed issue with stored procedure for Dashboard which would fail with an error if database account did not have permissions to the MSDB database.
• Fixed issue where pages added while on a host page will not be associated with a portal.
• Fixed issue where the ReturnURL for the SendPassword and Register links on the Login page were broken.

Security Fixes

• none

Updated Modules/Providers

The following modules and providers have been updated in the 5.1.0 packages.  Please see the specific project pages for notes on what bugs or enhancements were corrected with each release.

Modules

• Forms and List 05.00.02
• Announcements 04.00.03
• Reports 05.01.00
• Events 05.00.01

Providers

• FckHtmlEditorProvider 02.00.04
• AD Provider 05.00.02

During the last several months I have been doing more and more jQuery development and have found a few key tricks that have improved my code and made my development experience much more enjoyable.

1.  Inject the jQuery library reference in the head section.

jQuery does not know about the DNNMenu and the ClientAPI.  It will step all over them if given half a chance.  Of course, DNNMenu and the ClientAPI are aware of possible conflicts with popular JavaScript libraries and will take steps to avoid any conflicts IF the jQuery library is already loaded.  The ClientAPI is loaded at the top of the ASP.Net page form so loading jQuery in the header ensures it is loaded before the ClientAPI. 

If you are building a module that injects a jQuery library reference, add it in the page header and you will be safe.  If you just want to include a jQuery script on a page then you can edit the Page Settings/Advanced Settings to add the script reference to the Page Header Tags.

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DotNetNuke 4.9.4 is a minor stabilization release for the 4.x codebase.  This release is targeted at resolving a major defect with the module caching code and also addresses two minor security issues.  We do not anticipate any further releases of the 4.x codebase.

As always you can see a complete list with all the details of each fix/change in the ChangeLog.

Major Highlights in this release

• Fixed a major module caching issue which resulted in empty content for webcrawlers
• Improved performance of FormatRemoveSQL method

Security Fixes

• Low - Errorpage information leakage
• Low - HTML/Script Code Injection Vulnerability

Updated Modules/Providers

The following modules and providers have been updated in the 4.9.4 packages. Please see the specific project pages for notes on what bugs or enhancements were corrected with each release.

Modules

• Announcements 04.00.03

Providers

• Removed the AD Provider so that it cannot be installed by the Install Wizard. It can still be manually installed.

Yesterday, announcements went out to speakers who submitted sessions for DotNetNuke OpenForce North America.  During the call for speakers we received almost 200 entries and 70 speakers.  Obviously, everyone cannot speak and making the selections was extremely difficult.  We appreciate all of the input we received which made our task both easier and more difficult.  Easier in that there were lots of great topics to choose from so getting good coverage across all the tracks was relatively simple, and more difficult in that we knew that we would have to eliminate many great topics and speakers.

The selection committee members each assigned a ranking of 1 to 5 to each of the submitted sessions and the highest ranking sessions were then reviewed and discussed to come up with the final list of sessions.  During this process we had to do a little balancing to make sure we had a good mix of sessions across all the tracks, but given the great list of sessions, that was a relatively painless exercise.

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As many people already know, I spent the past week traveling to California and Canada to meet with the DNN Corp. management and engineering teams.  This was an exciting trip for me as it was a chance to see us reach one more milestone in the growth of DotNetNuke and DNN Corp.  For the last 6 years, DotNetNuke has been a virtual organization with core team members spread around the globe.  This is the norm for most Open Source projects and while it poses some challenges, it is something you learn to deal with if you want to be involved.  When Shaun, Scott, Nik and I formed DNN Corp in 2006, we continued operating in this fashion.  We each had our own home offices along with Charles Nurse and Bill Walker.

Starting in January DNN Corp began hiring additional employees.  It is no longer possible for everyone to work from home or to work from temporary office spaces and we began the search for office space.  As anyone who has been through the process can tell you, it can sometimes take a while to find suitable office space and get it built out and ready for employees.  In April we finally moved into new offices in both San Mateo, California and Abbotsford, British Columbia.  This trip was my first opportunity to visit the new offices and meet some of our new employees.

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Once again the DotNetNuke community will be heading off to Las Vegas in November for the annual DotNetNuke OpenForce North America conference.  We are looking for a handful of people who want free hotel accommodations and conference admission.  All you have to do is get selected to be a speaker.  You know you have a lot of great insight and knowledge of DotNetNuke and would love to share it with the DotNetNuke community.  Well today is your last chance to turn in your speaker submissions for the North American conference.  Just go to the OpenForce homepage at http://www.openforce09.com and follow the directions but you better hurry before time runs out.

Why you shouldn’t learn MVC

Earlier today Rob Connery posted about why he thinks You Should Learn MVC.  Rob is a great guy and we always have lively discussions whenever we meet at conferences.  I was in the middle of writing a long comment on his blog when I decided it might be better as it’s own post.

I have to say Rob, once again, another great post!  Another great use of straw man arguments and red herrings.  Come on really?  You are going to trot out jQuery as a reason to try MVC?  Why not say “Use MVC because it runs on Windows and works with IIS”.  Come on, at least use real arguments if you are going to make the case for MVC.  I’m sure you know that jQuery works wonderfully with WebForms.  People like Rich Strahl, Dave Ward and others have a ton of great blog posts on the topic.  I even have a few myself.  jQuery is a valid argument if you are trying to sell people on adding more JavaScript, but the argument as framed does not make the case for MVC.

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We are once again in the heart of the planning season for DotNetNuke OpenForce. It is that time of year when we ask all of you to submit your session abstracts for this years OpenForce North America conference.  I know that the last 2 years, we have had great response from our community and I expect that this year will be no different.

Like the last two 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 XUnit 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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In 2006, Neal Ford wrote a blog post on the topic of Polyglot Programming which foresaw a future where applications will be increasingly built using multiple general purpose languages and domain specific languages.  Ted Neward has a recent article from MSDN Magazine which follows up on this theme with a discussion of Polyglot Programming in .Net.  Both Neal and Ted address some of the issues with Polyglot Programming, but I think there is one that they have missed.  Polyglot Programming can quickly lead to performance rot in application development.

In DNN Tips and Tricks #10, I presented an example of how you can use the DotNetNuke Report Module to display you data using the advanced capabilities of XSLT.  Greg Lahens pointed out an issue with my SQL code which is really highlights one of the downsides to Polyglot Programming.  As programmers, we often employ a variety of tools to solve a particular programming challenge.  Many of these tools are DSLs – XSLT, SQL, CSS, HTML are just a few of the many DSLs in common use throughout the web development world. 

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For the last year and half I have increasingly turned to one module as my goto solution when building out new capabilities.  For me the Reports Module is proving itself to be the Swiss Army knife of the DotNetNuke module world.  With some of the features coming up in future releases of the Reports module this will become even more evident to anyone who takes the time to learn how to use the module.

So why do I feel so strongly about the reports module? It is mainly because of the architecture that Andrew Nurse put in place to allow you to create custom data sources and custom visualizers.  This architecture makes it easy to get data from almost anywhere and then to have complete control over how it is displayed. 

For most people the built in DotNetNuke Data Source, and XSLT Visualizer can handle most of your needs.  You can query any data in DotNetNuke and then use XSLT to display that data.  If you have not used XSLT before, you are missing out on a very powerful tool.  Whether it is displaying a blogroll, the MarketPlace Monitor or even building an entire eCommerce site, XSLT gives you a lot of capability to take XML data and transform it into as simple or complex a page as you can imagine.

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