Learn MS .NET

After discussing a few issues with a client on the phone last night and them talking about how hard it was to find someone knowledgeable enough with DotNetNuke to do the upgrade of their intranet site.  It became clear to me that I needed to start putting my knowledge of the DNN platform out in the public view so that other people would be able to be better informed on how to do things with this wonderful platform. What I will be doing with my DotNetNuke Tips & Tricks will be discussing issues that I have run across and providing solutions.

One of the first things that needs to be done after installing DNN is to configure the Host Settings.  We need to login in with our host account that was configured during the installation.  After logging on the menu bar we will have an Admin drop down menu and a Host drop down menu.

The first configuration changes need to be done for the Host Settings.  These settings are global for all the portals that will be created on this installation of DNN. 

Today's Tip is going to allow us to see what information is available to us in the Configuration Section of the Host Settings.  The configuration section of the Host Settings are not actually configurable but gives us important information in the case of issues that may arise while we are working with DNN.

The configuration settings consist of the following:

• DotNetNuke Version: this is the version number of the DNN installation.
• Check For Upgrades: this is a newer feature introduced around version 3.3 and 4.3 if I remember correctly. If this is checked then DNN will query and see if a newer version is available.
• Upgrade Available: If an upgrade is available it will show what the new upgrade version is and provide a link to go and download the latest version.
• Data Provider: This will show us the current data provider that DNN is using normally this will be the SqlDataProvider.
• .NET Framework: This will display the version number of the .NET Framework that we are using with DNN.
• ASP.NET Identity: This field can be useful if you are having permission troubles on the file system as this is the user that needs to have permissions to read and write to files on the system. In our case here it is DEV05\ASPNET which is a  local user on my laptop.
• Host Name: This is the name of the host that is hosting the framework.  Ours is DEV05.
• Permissions: This is a new feature of this section but is very useful because this field can tell us if we have the necessary code level permissions to do certain things within the framework.  In the image I have on this page we do not show any available code permissions because at the time of the image the framework was running in Medium Trust on my laptop.  If the site was running in Full Trust then we would have the following permissions available to us: ReflectionPermission, WebPermission. Reflection Permission would allow us to use reflection within our code to get access to other dll. But the permission i've always ended up having trouble with has been the WebPermission. This stops us from making requests to other hosts to get information.
• Relative Path: This will display the path from the root of the web site in our case our URL to access this instance of DNN is http://localhost/dnn480 so our relative path is /dnn480 of the virtual path of the URL.
• Physical Path: This is always useful for finding out where the site is located on a system.
• GUID: This is the globally unique identifier that is used with the core ASP.NET membership tables to identify this application.  We can use this value to move those tables to another database if it was needed.

That is it for today's post on DotNetNuke. Tommorrow I will start discussing the next two sections of the Host Settings. If there are any questions please leave a comment or if you want to suggest a topic for the Tips and Tricks please leave a comment