Learn MS .NET

The latest release of the News Feeds module has made it through the project release cycle.  Peter Donker made the announcement on 8/24/2008.  He has chosen to completely rewrite the module to provide us in the Community with some very interesting options moving forward with this module.

The first one is Aggregation

The module uses a new version of the RSS Toolkit located at CodePlex.  This toolkit allows the module to aggregate feeds of different types together as one feed.

The next one is Caching

They have made some very interesting choices in how they cache the rss feeds for use within the module.  They now store information on disk in the form of the aggregated feed as an xml document as well as storing information in a SQL table with when the feed needs to be refreshed and other information.

The next was Transformation

Previously the XML/XSL transformation was handled by the standard ASP.NET XML component. Now this module uses the same mechanism as the XML module and allows for parameters to be passed to the XSL style sheet.

The next was Displaying

In older versions the news feed module did not display till it had successfully downloaded all the content to display.  This new version uses AJAX to allow for quicker loading of the page and better management of the experience for the end user.

The last note is on Security

If you turn on caching of the module and you use an internal page to display a feed. It is important to remember that the feed that is cached will display the information for the user that was logged in when the feed was first called, so if that user has higher privileges then you want to display information for that may inadvertently get cached.

More reading

Peter Donker’s Blog post

News Feed Download

News Feed Discussion Forum

Hector Sosa of SystemWidgets has released a Windows Winform application that allows you to modify the User database in DotNetNuke. I’ve checked out the screen shots and it looks interesting and useful.  There is a download for the binary files as well as the source of the application.  More information can be found at his blog.

Hector Sosa Blog

The links module for DotNetNuke was updated today to allow installation on DNN 4.7.  The 4.0.0 release had an issue with installation on 4.7 as well not allowing it to be installed on DNN 4.9 which is soon to be released.  This is the version that will be included with the new version of DotNetNuke that should be released very shortly.   The issue was around the compatibility node of the DNN Config file for installation.

DotNetNuke Links Home

DotNetNuke Links Discussion

DotNetNuke Links Download

I was brought in to work on an asp.net web site recently that had been written by another company.  I was asked to add some features to their current site as well as to fix some bugs that had been left by the previous developers.  Once I had the site ready I moved this web site project to my staging server and then started receiving this error on a couple of pages.  Now I had chosen to publish the website instead of just doing a copy of the site with the code-behind files as well.  This is when this problem started.

I did some searching on the web and came up with the following that the class I had on these pages were duplicates on other pages or other compiled dlls within the published site.  So I started looking for the pages that had the offending classes and I discovered them within the web site.  I wish I had the time to move this web site into a web application project to avoid these issues.  More information can be found here as well.

Mads Kristensen has just announced the release of Version 1.4.5 of the DotNet Blog Engine.  Guess I really have to start getting this blog site up to the latest version.  I’m a bit behind in updating my site and it has suffered for it, but back to the announcement.

The changes that have been implemented in this update:

• File upload improvement – Files and images uploaded will be placed in folders based the year and month. IE /files/2008/07/test.jpg
• Database Support out of the box – With this release the setup folder has support and instructions to get started with Sql Server, MySql, SQLite and VistaDB Express.
• HTML Editor Defaults – There is now a switch to remember to use the TinyMCE editor or to enter your own HTML and now the engine remembers your choice.
• Enhanced Metaweblog API – You can now publish for any user from within Windows Live Writer as well as support for SSL now as well
• Filter by APML – You can now filter your posts of a blog by your own APML file. An APML file is a prioritized list of your own interests in XML.

The latest can be downloaded here.