BlogEngine.NET has released a theme pack that is compatible with the version 1.4 and 1.4.5. 

The theme pack contains themes designed and created by the community, and they have been brought together as a downloadable theme pack.  Janko has compiled them together for the community to use.

Download the BlogEngine.NET theme pack here.

With the release of the latest version of DotNetNuke 4.9, there have been some new improvements to things.  Some of these things won’t be apparent unless your paying close attention.  This post will not summarize the changes as I made a post previous to this that eluded to the changes.  This post will center around the new Styles skin object.

Style Skin Object

This skin object is new and allows us as skin developers to make better use of the styles that we use with our skins.  We can now use conditional expressions to insert other style sheets within our skin.  This makes it much easier to build a skin and then tweak it for the different types of browsers that may be viewing the site.

Style Object Properties

Condition This is an Internet Explorer specific condition.  All valid conditional expressions may be used such as “LT IE 7” or “(IE6) | (IE7)”. More information on these and other Internet Explorer conditions can be found at the MSDN Library....

While working on one of my modules I had a request to be able to sort the items in my DataList alphabetically. This seemed to be a trivial thing as far as I was concerned so off I went.  I was using a DataTable to bind to the DataList control for viewing the links I was building.  So with a quick search on Google I came up with some sample code to give me the basics of what I wanted to accomplish.  So in the following I will present both a C# and VB version of the code for anyone to use in their applications.

VB.NET Version

1: Private Function AlphabeticSort(ByVal dtTable As DataTable, _ ByVal sortOrder As Integer) As DataTable 2: Dim dsSorted As New DataSet 3: Dim columnKey As String = "TabName" 4: Dim sortDirection As String = "" 5: Dim sortFormat As String = "{0} {1}" 6: Select Case sortOrder 7: Case 0 8: sortDirection = "ASC" 9: Case 1 10: sortDirection = "DESC" 11: Case Else...

I figured since I have been blogging about DNN heavily that I should be  including a resource page for finding out things about DNN.  So I have started adding some pages which will store all things DotNetNuke.  My first page to add within this structure will be the inclusion of a page of free DNN Modules.  As I review them or use them on sites I will also provide some reviews of what I think of these modules.

I think that this will only be a good resource if I continue to provide this to my readers.  After having written many modules and worked with many other free and commercial modules. I will provide my expertise and hopefully make building your DNN Portal a much easier affair.

The free modules page is available here.

...

On Monday, AjaxDataControls 1.0 was released. This library was developed to work with ASP.NET Ajax Extension. This project's main goal was to develop some rich data controls, to allow replacement of the core ASP.NET controls and provide client-side api calls that were similar to the Server side components.

The current release contains the following controls:

Repeater GridView DataList Pager Click on the above links to see a demo of the controls.

Kazi Manzur Rashid provides some screen shots in his blog post which can be found here....

Microsoft has released Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 to the public for anyone interested in testing out what is coming to developers in the future.

Their download page found here, contains information about the new visual studio as well as downloads for the Standard, Professional, Team Suite and Team Foundation Server.  They have provided installation images as well as VPC images to get you up and running quickly with the product.