As you can tell there has not been much activity on this blog, but not because there has not been anything going on. There has been so much going on that I simply have not had the time to make a post....here. However, we have a new blog that allows all Venexus employees to post that can be found here: http://www.venexus.com/Resources/Blog.aspx

You can update your feeds here:

Feed Title RSS 25 Latest Articles RSS By Category DotNetNuke Error Messages Modules Search Engine Optimization Skins SQL Server

I will make one more post here to sum up the year, but this is definitely the next to last post for this blog. We will move some of the most popular articles from this blog to the new one, but eventually this blog will be shutdown. More later...

We all know that the keyboard is faster than the mouse right? Well here is a quick way to open any application with about 3 keystrokes:

1. Create a new folder anywhere you like. I put mine in c:\utils\shortcuts.
2. Place the folder in your path. You can do this by
   1. Opposite click My Computer and choose Properties
   2. Select the Advanced tab.
   3. Choose Environment Variables
   4. Select Path in the System Variables and choose Edit
   5. At the end of the Variable Value path add “;c:\utils\shortcuts” or the path to your shortcut folder. The “;” may already be there.
3. Create or copy shortcuts to frequently used applications to your new folder. You can also use shortcuts to folder locations.
4. Rename the shortcuts with 2 or 3 letter identifiers for quick typing. Here are a few I use:
   1. mo = Microsoft Outlook
   2. ie = Internet Explorer
   3. ff = Firefox
   4. rdc = Remote Desktop Client
   5. ps = Windows PowerShell
   6. data = My data directory

Now when I want to run a program, I open the Run box by pressing Windows Key + R, type my shortcut name (ex. mo), and press Enter. It’s faster and easier than finding an icon with the mouse

- By Michael Sullivan

Venexus has a job opening for a DotNetNuke Module Developer.

Title: DotNetNuke Module Developer

Skills Required:

1.      VB.Net OR C#

2.      SQL Server

3.      Code Generation Techniques

4.     DotNetNuke (must know architecture of DotNetNuke web application framework)

Skills Desired:

1.      EntitySpaces

2.      Gemini

3.      Subversion

4.      CruiseControl.Net

5.      VB.Net AND C# (Ability to read and code in both)

Location:

We would prefer to find a local candidate (Raleigh, NC), but if you have the skills, it does not matter where you live.

Description:

This position will be responsible for assisting in the analysis, design, development and ongoing support of DotNetNuke and the modules we create and modify for our clients. This position will assist with verification testing, troubleshooting and failure analysis of new versions of DotNetNuke, core modules, 3^rd party modules, and custom modules. The developer must be able to commit and meet deadlines.

The person filling this position will be working in a team environment and may be expected to have on-call responsibilities. The candidate should have excellent verbal and written communications skills with a positive customer support attitude. A person who is flexible and self-motivated will be the selected candidate.

Additional Requirements:

1.      You must love code.

         If you didn’t love it, you wouldn’t be doing it, right? 

Compensation:

Dependant upon experience

Please send salary expectations and resumes to careers (at) venexus (dot) com. No recruiters please!

Venexus has 2 positions open for DotNetNuke Support Specialist.

Title: DotNetNuke Support Specialist

Skills Required:

1.     DotNetNuke (must have previous experience running and managing DotNetNuke sites)

2.     Excellent communication skills

Skills Desired:

1.      Gemini

2.      RDC/RDP

3.      IIS

4.      SQL Server

Location:

Any.

Description:

This position will be responsible for assisting in the support of DotNetNuke for client websites. This position will assist with verification testing, troubleshooting and failure analysis of new versions of DotNetNuke, core modules, 3^rd party modules, and custom modules.

The person filling this position will be working in a team environment and may be expected to have on-call responsibilities. The candidate should have excellent verbal and written communications skills with a positive customer support attitude. A person who is flexible and self-motivated will be the selected candidate.

Compensation:

Dependant upon experience

Please send salary expectations and resumes to careers (at) venexus (dot) com. No recruiters please!

Ready to configure DotNetNuke to use Active Directory for authentication? Here are some basic instructions for configuring AD in DNN that works with DNN 4.5.3:

We have installed and upgraded quite a few sites to the latest DNN version, 4.5.3, that came out last week and most went seamlessly. However, we have found one issue that has raised it's ugly head quite a few times. After upgrading, if you clicked on "Register" you would be redirected to an admin skinned page with no account fields/content. Looking at the url you can see "/ctl/returnurl". Since the site(s) uses a custom page using a 3rd party module for registration for the account info, it is specified in Admin > Site Settings > Advanced Settings > Page Management > User Page.

Here is the error message:

System.Web.HttpException: Could not load type ''. ---> System.ArgumentException: String cannot have zero length. at System.Reflection.Assembly.GetType(String name, Boolean throwOnError, Boolean ignoreCase) at System.Web.Compilation.BuildManager.GetType(String typeName, Boolean throwOnError, Boolean ignoreCase) --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at System.Web.Compilation.BuildManager.GetType(String typeName, Boolean throwOnError, Boolean ignoreCase) at DotNetNuke.Framework.Reflection.CreateType(String TypeName, String CacheKey, Boolean UseCache, Boolean IgnoreErrors)

Luckily we found a post on the DNN Forums concerning the quick fix...

4.5.3 New user registration not working if specific page defined

In the above post someone else was having a similar issue. It looks like there was a bug reported as well:

http://support.dotnetnuke.com/issue/ViewIssue.aspx?id=5746

While there could definitely been a longer or better description of the problem, it was quickly closed with "unable to reproduce in 4.5.3" the next day without any followup. Luckily the thread on the forums gained the interest of other having the issue and vitkoz was kind enough to run it through debugging to find the issue and hence the issue has been reopened in the DNN issue tracker.

Here is his fix:

"In the file admin/skins/user.ascx.vb, line 142 needs to be changed:

 FROM THIS:

Response.Redirect(NavigateURL(PortalSettings.UserTabId,"returnurl=" & ReturnUrl), True)

TO THIS:

Response.Redirect(NavigateURL(PortalSettings.UserTabId, "Register", "returnurl=" & ReturnUrl), True)

You can simply go to that file, make that change, and IIS will recompile it on the next run." - vitkoz

After a brief debut of DNN 4.5.2 on Tuesday, DNN 4.5.3 was released today. Here is a list of changes in 4.5.2:

I am not sure what was changed in DNN 4.5.3 except for the following task in Gemini:

Scott Schecter made a post on his blog about how to disable new search features in DNN 4.5.2. I have not checked to see if these changes still apply to DNN 4.5.3.

Anyone know what else prompted the new release today?

UPDATE 6-1-2007:

Joe Brinkman of the core team commented that it was security related and provided a URL to Sebastian Leupold's post concerning the upgrade. Here is the list:

Here is the SQL that was provided in the log file from the installer:

/* add unique constraint to Files table */
IF NOT EXISTS (select * from dbo.sysobjects where id = object_id(N'dbo.[IX_FileName]') and OBJECTPROPERTY(id, N'IsConstraint') = 1)
BEGIN
  declare @FolderID int
  declare @FileName nvarchar(100)
  declare @FileID int
  declare @MinFileID int

  select @FolderID = min(FolderID)
  from Folders
  while @FolderID is not null
  begin 
    /* check for duplicate Filenames */
    select @FileName = null
    select @FileName = FileName
    from Files
    where FolderID = @FolderID
    group by FileName
    having COUNT(*) > 1
 
    /* if duplicates exist */
    if @FileName is not null
    begin
      /* iterate through the duplicates */
      select @FileID = min(FileID)
      from Files
      where FolderID = @FolderID
      and FileName = @FileName

      /* save min FileID */
      select @MinFileID = @FileID

      while @FileID is not null
      begin
        if @FileID <> @MinFileID
        begin
          /* remove duplicate file */
          delete
          from Files
          where FileID = @FileID
        end

        select @FileID = min(FileID)
        from Files
        where FolderID = @FolderID
        and FileName = @FileName
        and FileID > @FileID
      end
    end

    select @FolderID = min(FolderID)
    from Folders
    where FolderID > @FolderID
  end
  
  ALTER TABLE dbo.Files ADD CONSTRAINT
    IX_FileName UNIQUE NONCLUSTERED
    (
      FolderID,
      FileName
    ) ON [PRIMARY]
END

We have immediate openings for DotNetNuke Module Developers.

1. VB.Net or C#
2. SQL Server
3. Visual Studio 2005
4. Code Generation Techniques
5. DotNetNuke

1. EntitySpaces
2. Gemini
3. Subversion
4. CruiseControl.Net
5. VB.Net AND C# (Ability to read and code in both)

1. You must love code.

         If you didn’t love it, you wouldn’t be doing it, right?

1. The weak shall not apply.

Request for more information and resumes can be submitted to careers (at) venexus (dot) com. No recruiters please!

If you didn't catch it, DotNetNuke announced the first officially sponsored DotNetNuke conference in Las Vegas November 5-8, 2007. Last year was the first time I had been to Vegas, when we went to a modular software development conference last September. It was fun meeting some of the guys in the DNN community and I look forward to meeting them and others again this year. According to Joe Brinkman's blog, DotNetNuke is actively seeking speakers to submit session proposals and selected speakers will receive "3 nights of lodging at the Mandalay Bay Casino and Hotel". While I probably will not be giving a speech, Michael, Scott and I have already marked our calendars, and we may have to twist the arm of a couple more staff to go with us, depending on development schedules. Sounds like fun, see ya there!

Continuous integration is a software development term describing the process that completely rebuilds and tests applications frequently. We recently implemented a continuous integration environment to “publish” our DotNetNuke modules to our development/staging DotNetNuke sites.

The main advantages of a continuous integration environment are:

• Issues are detected and fixed continuously!
• Enhancements and new features are published continuously!
• You are warned about problematic code before it is published.
• Immediate unit testing of all changes.
• Constant availability of a "current" build for testing, demos, or releases.
• Bragging rights for developers who have the least number of broken builds.
• Huge conservation of time when considering the normal administrative process of Build > Package > install in DNN > Test.
• Did I mention this is continuous?

How Our CI and DNN Environment Works

Below is a picture to show you the basics of how our continuous integration environment works.

Disclaimer:

1. If you are running Visual Studio 2005 Web Developer Express, our setup will not work for you. You can stop reading here, or upgrade, unless you are just curious, then read on…
2. There have been long discussion on Web Site Projects (WSP) versus Web Application Projects (WAP) and this post is not one to argue about which is better, rather than to say this is what we do, and the basics of how it works.
3. You are free to comment and collaborate with others on this post. Feel free to even argue about WAP versus WEP, or that you may know of a way to integrate CI with DNN and WSP, we really do not care. However, we do not have time to walk you through setting any of this up, so please do not ask…unless you are interested in one of our DNN support packages, then by all means we can help
    

Basics of the process:

1. A developer “commits” the DNN module code to Subversion.
2. The commit triggers CruiseControl.Net to “build” the DNN module using a “Trigger” for the project.
3. CruiseControl.Net can be configured to unit test the module before publishing.
4. An “ExecutableTask” is used with our custom assembly publisher application to send the .DLL file to the DNN website.
5. A “BuildPublisher” sends the code from the source directory to the DNN site (D:\DNNSites\ClientDevSite\DesktopModules\CustomDNNModule as example).
6. Results of “build” are visible in the CruiseControl.Net Web Dashboard.
    

Implementing CI for DNN Development

Development:

We started DotNetnuke 4 development using the WSP methodology for all of our DNN projects. This has been successful for us for quite a while, especially when using EntitySpaces for the Persistence Layer and Business Objects (it's so easy using ES to generate the DAL. You must check this out if you are not using it). However, we found that to make this work we have to use WAP projects. I have a very fast laptop, but using WSP and doing a build of all of DNN to compile a module can be quite time consuming, taking several minutes sometimes. But, building a WAP project is FAST, saving some development time when debugging and testing builds, especially when doing those final little tweaks. One could argue that WSP is better, but for our setup with one to many developers working on a single module, WAP is the best decision. So, it did not take much to twist our arm to changing our methodology. It is unfortunate that in order to use this for our existing clients and projects, we will need to convert our WSP modules to WAP. But, we have started developing all new modules as WAPs and converting WSP modules to WAP is not a difficult task.

To read about the great WSP versus WAP debate, see the following links:

Shaun Walker’s post on WAP

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Blogs/tabid/825/EntryID/434/Default.aspx

An interesting debate between Michael Washington and Vladan Strigo

http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Projects/ModuleNews/Forums/tabid/953/forumid/111/threadid/91268/threadpage/6/scope/posts/Default.aspx

WAP Methodology

“Web Application Projects provide a companion web project model that can be used as an alternative to the built-in Web Site Project in Visual Studio 2005. This new model is ideal for web site developers who are converting a Visual Studio .Net 2003 web project to Visual Studio 2005. (Released May 8, 2006)” - http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/asp.net/aa336618.aspx

Michael Washington has a great post on creating a DNN WAP Module:

http://www.adefwebserver.com/DotNetNukeHELP/DNN4_WAP/

Once the module is ready for testing on our client development site, we use TortoiseSVN to “commit” code to Subversion (http://tortoisesvn.tigris.org/).

Source Code Version Control:

We use Subversion for our source code repository and version control system (http://subversion.tigris.org/). We have tried Visual SourceSafe and CVS, but have been using Subversion with success for quite some time now. CruiseControl.Net integrates with Subversion easily. It is also nice that there is a plugin for Subversion that allows us to send our comments directly to Gemini (project management/tracking application) when we commit new code.

Continuous Integration Software:

We use CruiseControl.Net, a .Net port of the Java based CruiseControl 

Continuous Integration Server using CruiseControl.Net

The CruiseControl.Net Server automates the integration process by monitoring the team's source control repository directly. Every time a developer commits a new set of modifications for the DNN module, the server will automatically launch an integration build to validate the changes. When the build is complete, the server notifies the developer whether the changes that they committed integrated successfully or not.

CruiseControl.Net allows for several different types of “Tasks”, such as:

• EmailPublisher (for emailing of build details)
• ExecutableTask (for kicking off executables, such as our custom assembly publisher)
• NAntTask (for unit testing)
• NUnitTask (for unit testing)
• RSSBuildsPublisher (for generating a RSS feed with details)
• VisualStudioTask (for running something in VS)
• Etc.

Here is an example ccnet.config:
<!--<ccnetconfig><configurationVersion>1.2.1</configurationVersion></ccnetconfig>-->
<cruisecontrol>
  <project name="BPLWantList">
    <workingDirectory>D:\cibuilds\ProjectName\ModuleName</workingDirectory>
    <webURL>http://ourCIdomain.com/server/local/project/ModuleName/ViewProjectReport.aspx</webURL>
    <sourcecontrol type="svn">
      <trunkUrl>svn://localhost/ProjectName/ModuleName</trunkUrl>
    </sourcecontrol>
    <triggers>
      <intervalTrigger name="Quarter Hour Build" seconds="900" />
    </triggers>
    <tasks>
  <exec>
      <executable>VenexusAssemblyPublisher.exe</executable>
      <baseDirectory>D:\</baseDirectory>
      <buildArgs>"d:\Source\ProjectName\DesktopModules\ModuleName\obj\Debug" "d:\DevSites\ProjectName\bin"</buildArgs>
  </exec>
    </tasks>
    <publishers>
      <buildpublisher>
        <sourceDir>D:\cibuilds\ProjectName\ModuleName</sourceDir>
        <publishDir>D:\DevSites\ProjectName\DesktopModules\ModuleName</publishDir>
  <useLabelSubDirectory>false</useLabelSubDirectory>
      </buildpublisher>
      <xmllogger />
      <statistics />
    </publishers>
  </project>
</cruisecontrol>

CruiseControl.Net Web Dashboard

The CruiseControl.Net Web Dashboard Application is used for reporting a wide range of information about the builds. At one end of the scale it reports summary details of all projects in your organisation and at the other it can give specific metric output for any specific build.

Here is an example of a simple DNN Module being used in our CI environment:

Notice the failed build notification. While we have not setup unit testing, you can see in the left menu in the image, there are quite a few different options.

Conclusion

For long term DotNetNuke module projects, setting up a continuous integration environment will save a tremendous amount of time in the long run. All of the tools to implement CI are free, lowering the total cost of DNN module development. With a little bit of time setting up your environment, you can provide continuous updates to your clients, all while forcing good coding practices among your developers. 
 

• Scheduled Task

• Search Admin

                    The search admin is for setting the maximum word length, minimum word length, option to include common words, and the option to include numbers. 

• Search Input Module

• Search Results Module

• Scheduled Task

• Search Engine Admin Module

• Search Input Module 

• Search Results Module

• Seamus Module

• Search Module

Feature Comparison Matrix:

Below you will find a list of features for DNN Search, Open-SearchEngine, Venexus Search Engine Standard, and Venexus Search Engine PRO.

 

DNN 4.5 was released today after a small delay last month. 

"A highly focused three month release cycle results in DotNetNuke® 4.5, a new release with integrated Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX support, a web-based installer, and a variety of other high value enhancements designed to improve the user experience." - DotNetNuke Enriches User Experience

I decided to try out a new install, before we perform any upgrades. So, after creating a new database, creating a new directory on the webserver for the site and changing permissions, setting up new site in IIS, and changing the web.config for the connection string, I tried loading the site. I had heard about the new installation wizard and was presented with the following:

I decided to do a custom installation so I could see all of the options.

One of the most common issues people have trying to install DotNetNuke is setting the file/folder permissions. It is nice to see the wizard test these.

Another big issue people have installing DotNetNuke is making sure the connection string is valid. The wizard also supports a database connection test.

Easy install so far....

Nice! You can now configure the host account instead of relying on the defaults.

You can also filter which modules get installed during installation.

And set admin user account and portal porperties instead of using the defaults.

You can also have optional skins and containers to be installed, if available.

And language packs if needed.

And done!

I am very impressed with the new installation wizard. It is good to see checks being performed that will undoubtedly decrease support issues for people who have not setup everything correctly.

After logging into the new site, the first thing I noticed was the different icons.I like the new and clean look of these icons. I also LOVE the new "Show Control Panel" dropdown option.

Something new too is the "Solution Explorer":

This is a convenient interface to the DNN Marketplace. The "DotNetNuke" and "About" tabs still appear to be in beta mode however. It should be interesting to see how this piece develops.

It is very exciting to see this new release, and I will post later how the upgrades go.

We did a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign for a client a while back that required us to setup a few new domains with blogging software. We used a variety of different blogging software  and noticed something very interesting...sites that performed pinging were crawled within 1-3 days and indexed within 2 weeks. All of the domains we used were brand new. In some cases, keywords that we were focusing on were in top 10 search results in 2 weeks as well. Needless to say, the client was happy.

So, we added a pinging feature as part of our DotNetNuke search engine module. Seamus, our search engine aggregation module, generates a RSS feed for the entire DNN portal. Anytime a tab/page is added or updated and Seamus finds this change, if the "Pinging Service" is enabled, it will ping 14 different blog and feed aggregation services.

So you are probably asking how does this work. Well, we send a "ping" to these aggregation services using XML-RPC. It simply tells these services that there is new content available on your site and to check the RSS feed. These services then will consume the feed and add it to their index. This provides a contextual link (assuming you actually use good titles for your pages) from these service sites directly to the content on your site. Pretty cool, huh?

Currently the following services are pinged with our module:

1. BlogDigger.com
2. BlogFlux.com
3. Blogsearch.Google.com
4. BlogRolling.com
5. Bulkfeeds.net
6. Feedburner.com
7. Feedster.com
8. IceRocket.com
9. Pingomatic.com
10. Syndic8.com
11. Technorati.com
12. My.Yahoo.com
13. Weblogs.com
14. Weblogalot.com

As a test, we dropped our search engine module on a new domain on 3/16/2007. With no links from external sites pointing to this domain, most if not all of the traffic was from our development at this point, averaging about 3-5 unique visitors a day (probably me, the client, and one or more of our developers). As of yesterday, the site had almost 150 unique visitors. Not bad for 2 weeks, considering we have done nothing else to this site other than add 10 total pages of content. This site is off to a great start and we have not even started a linking or submission campaign. See the graph below:

Also, checkout the following post on Marketing Pilgrim about faster indexing through pinging Google blog search that collaborates our results.

Ready to see the power of pinging blog and feed aggregators? Add a pinging service to your DNN site and watch the traffic roll in.

We issues a patch release today for the Venexus Search Engine, a DotNetNuke search engine module. This release has a few minor bug fixes and tweaks:

• Catalog creation in SQLDataProvider file moved to Search module (you still have to run the VenexusSearch module SQLDataProvider file through Host > SQL during new installation, but not for those who are upgrading).
• Queue Importance added to allow some URLs to be crawled sooner than others. If you are running a global search engine, we now give preference to certain domain extentions (.gov and .edu).
• Stores single Robots.txt file for domain instead of historical. Previously we stored a new robots.txt for each weekly check if it was updated. Now we only store one.
• Feed Title is now the portal/site name.
• Added XML-RPC ping for BlogFlux inclusion in our blog/feed aggregator pinging service. We had to remove one aggregator and added BlogFlux to the list (14 total)

Get the free version of our DNN search module.

There is nothing better to start off the day than having a client running into a 100% CPU utilization issue on their production SQL Server. Every few minutes, the server would spike up and hang there for a variable amount of time (15 seconds to several minutes). You can only imagine the flakiness of a website with SQL Server choking to death. There was nothing of value to point any fingers as to the culprit of this issue in the event logs for DNN (Admin > LogViewer)...none that we saw through a brief spot checking and filtering of event types (this was incredibly slow and seeing timeouts so we abandoned all hope of using DNN Admin/Host tools to find the problem).  And, there was not an alarming number of events actually logged in EventLog table. However, we have seen issues with performance that are usually resolved by clearing the Log Viewer. We have seen cases where clients who have high traffic/usage sites, or a broken/problematic module on all pages, have 5 and 6 figure rows of data for EventLog table, especially if all the default settings are used for the DNN Log Viewer settings. We have seen timeout issues just trying to clear the event log when they get that large ("Delete EventLog" as the sql statement does the trick quickly from SSMS). So, we went ahead and cleared it, but the issue persisted.

For those who have not explored much in SQL Server Management Studio (not in SSMS Express), there is now a Database Engine Tuning  Advisor and SQL Server Profiler (under Tools > SQL Server Profiler). Running the SSP, we performed a trace and caught the offending SQL causing all of the havoc. Just a note...we have run DETA to find recommendations from trace files for several large DNN databases and apply the recommendations (it usually creates new indexes for tables that have 6 and 7 figure rows, helping greatly with performance on databases). But in this case, we just started and stopped the trace in SSP before and after a huge and hanging spike. Going through the rows looking for CPU hits, we found the following 2 villians of resources:

I am concerned about why 6000 rows of data would be taking such a hit on cpu resources. However, that it more records than I believe should be there, so lowering the defaults will help. Nothing in the DNN stored procedure for GetSchedule really stands out at me as being problematic, nor at first glance do I see anything that could be changed that may help, but I will ponder on this some more in my copious spare time.

So, if you are having trouble with SQL Server performance and DNN, check and make sure you keep your EventLog and ScheduleHistory purged.

If you need help, be sure to checkout our DNN Support Packages.