DotNetNuke 5 development, and the need for black magic

26. January 2010 22:02

I first started to work with DotNetNuke at the end of its 4th edition era. We had tried a couple of other systems after putting our in-house developed platform to rest at last. That was a really great system, which we (of course) were very fond of, but maintenence and development of new functionality simply was not cost effective enough. What finally landed us on DotNetNuke was its pretty large developer community and the number of modules available.
When the 5th version was released it brought a couple of welcome changes. Unfortunately the documentation part of the new version kind of slipped behind. There is pretty much docs describing the workings of the 4th version and older, but for the 5th there is really not much. In the forums you find people that really know what they're talking about, but it gets kind of scattered when you want to read up on something.

Tutorials for older versions of DNN are plentiful, but for some reason there doesn't seem to be very much for the 5th there either. I admit that the differences in how you do a lot of things in version 4 and 5 aren't very big. But if you're in need of a tutorial you are probably not very familiar with what you are doing, so even small differences can easily put you off track.

This documentation shortage makes it kind of slow to get started. To get to know the system you're left to the dark arts of code crawling, which, as we know, is only for us true code freaks...
I thought I might write up some tutorials in coming posts to see if there is anyone interested in reading them. Think I'll start off with modules, but who knows, I might change my mind...

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DotNetNuke

Comments

5/19/2010 4:08:55 PM #

Al Stoughton

I just read your " . . . need for black magic" article and want to say thanks in advance of moving on to your tutorials.   I'm a long-time VB developer pre-VB3) and am well into using .NET.  But I'm a DNN newbie (www.boatinginfousa.com). I have several custom modules in mind, have just installed VS2010 and am working with DNN5.  I've been looking for something to get me started.  
Your comments and reasoning really hit the mark with me and, I'm sure, with others too.  You're absolutely correct, it's often the little differences that can be the biggest distractions.  As I said, I'll move on to your tutorials and thanks in advance for the effort.

Al Stoughton United States |

5/19/2010 9:39:17 PM #

Johan

Al, So glad to hear that! I hope you find some interesting reading in the module tutorial, even if it is in C#. A VB version of the tutorial is planned and hopefully isn't too far away.

Johan Sweden |

6/8/2010 10:31:05 PM #

Johan

...and at last the Visual Basic version of the tutorial is available.

Johan Sweden |

7/31/2010 2:41:01 AM #

SDRoy

This is an excellent article. Saves a lot of time to jump start the end-end DNN module and package creation. Thank you for this excellent documentation.

SDRoy United States |

8/10/2010 4:08:28 PM #

Tom

Just spent 6 hours messing around with this.  I think I might have missed the point of this tutorial.  Was I supposed to see something on the screen?

Tom United Kingdom |

11/23/2010 4:14:46 AM #

Christian Caspers

Thanks Johan for throwing together the module tutorials. I've been coding for over 20 years and .NET for about 3 years. I have a full time job, but do some websites on the side. I've recently decided to go with DNN for my night time coding sessions. Anyway, I found it difficult to find good information. Your tutorials are a good start. Thanks!

Christian Caspers United States |

11/23/2010 1:33:18 PM #

Johan

Happy to hear you found the tuts useful! I'm sure you'll make something great of it. I wish you many nights of coding pleasure ;)

Johan Sweden |

Comments are closed

About the addict

Johan Seppäläinen lives in Uppsala, Sweden. He spends most of his days working as a systems architect/developer, specialized in solutions built on Microsoft platforms.
Occasionally there is time for some recreational coding, when he pursues optimal solutions and code zen, mainly in C#. When he is not writing in this blog, that is.