AppTheory

DotNetNuke Projects: Lakeland Electric

Ryan Wofford — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 18:03:00 GMT

The City of Lakeland, FL contracted AppTheory to redesign and redevelop their electric utility site.

DotNetNuke Projects: American Society of Newspaper Editors

Ryan Wofford — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:24:00 GMT

This non-profit client's business offers free website hosting and tools to high school, middle school and elementary school newspapers, so student newspapers can easily have an online home. They came to AppTheory for help with severe performance issues and desired functionality enhancements.

DotNetNuke Projects: Team Red Golf

Ryan Wofford — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 15:29:00 GMT

Srixon, the number one golf club manufacturer in the world’s #2 market (Japan), came to us to help build an online presence.

DotNetNuke And The Elusive ‘Cannot redirect after HTTP headers have been sent.’

Scott Schecter — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 20:43:00 GMT

Today I went to log into a clients staging site and received the following error ‘Cannot redirect after HTTP headers have been sent.’ from the YSOD (Yellow Screen Of Death).

IIS FTP Failed to retrieve directory listing

Scott Schecter — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 22:09:00 GMT

Upon trying to ftp some files up to a newly provisioned server I was experiencing some sporadic behavior.

Microsoft Services vs. Google Apps Premium

Max Schneider — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:28:00 GMT

I am currently looking into the possibility of using a hosted email environment. AppTheory has used an internal Exchange server for mail since the company started.

Home From OpenForce

Chris Paterra — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 20:40:00 GMT

As most of you who read this know, AppTheory had a booth at OpenForce ‘09 last week in Las Vegas where we handed out flyers and discussed DotNetNuke with anyone who stopped by and wanted to chat. Surprisingly, there were many people who had tons of questions.

DotNetNuke Project: PolyVision

Ryan Wofford — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:27:00 GMT

PolyVision came to AppTheory to implement its design and ideas for a redesigned and repositioned global site in DotNetNuke.

AppTheory wins the DotNetNuke Best Ecommerce Site

bryan andrews — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:35:00 GMT

AppTheory won the DotNetNuke Open Force Community Choice Award for Best Ecommerce Site!

The request signature we calculated does not match the signature you provided. Check your key and signing method.

Scott Schecter — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:32:00 GMT

You may remember in one of my previous posts I recommended the Affirma ThreeSharp library for interacting with your Amazon S3 storage system.

Scaling Out DotNetNuke Professional on Amazon EC2

Max Schneider — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 02:21:00 GMT

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a set of cloud based infrastructure web services that are offered to developers and companies. These services provide expandable and flexible infrastructure to user. The are several parts to the cloud infrastructure. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides compute capacity in the cloud. This compute capacity is provided by Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs). The machine instances can provide cloud based virtual servers with windows and *nix based operating systems.

Extracting DotNetNuke User Information With SQL

Scott Schecter — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 22:29:00 GMT

It is not uncommon to have a client request a list of site users in a particular role. You can obviously get this information from the DotNetNuke user interface but its very easy to get this directly from the tables in SQL Management Studio and then export to a CSV or Excel file for easy distribution. Below is an example of finding all users for a particular portal.

New Telerik Release

Chris Paterra — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:01:04 GMT

Telerik released their updated set of components for Q3 2009 the today. One of the things I find great about this release is their Visual Style Builder is now capable of producing detailed skins for all of their controls now. If you haven’t heard about the Style Builder, it basically allows you to redesign the user interface of the Telerik controls without having to write a single line of code or HTML code. To checkout the Visual Style Builder, follow this link to create your own set of custom Telerik control skins: http://stylebuilder.telerik.com/. New controls which are included in the release that may appeal to DotNetNuke developers is their new SiteMap control (which allows you to render from the google xml sitemap created by DNN, if you so desire), RadRating control, RadListView (basically a data list replacement), A new skin for all controls, Suite control installer now permits upgrading (instead of a completely re-install) and some performance enhancements. Also worth mentioning is it looks like they are getting about a 30% performance gain by removing some generic reflection use that was done in all controls previously vs. Telerik releases of the past.

You can read the full details for this release here:http://www.telerik.com/products/aspnet-ajax/whats-new.aspx

A Reminder to Vote!

Ryan Wofford — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:33:00 GMT

Today is the last day to vote for us at the OpenForce Community Choice Awards.

DotNetNuke ‘Is Web Farm’ Changes

Chris Paterra — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 04:56:33 GMT

I was on one of our client sites this week and under Host Settings I noticed something odd. I saw that the “Is Web Farm” setting was set to true, the reason this is odd is because I know this particular install is NOT on a web farm as the setting says (shown in the screen shot below). So my next logical step was to jump over to the web.config for the install and turn this off.

Well, as I opened up the web.config and located the “EnableWebFarmSupport” in the appSettings section it was already set to false. At this point, I was puzzled so I decided to reach out to Charles Nurse as I knew DNN Corp. had created a new caching provider offered with DotNetNuke Professional Edition. While this install was using CE, I suspected that the new provider for PE could have required changes in the core itself. Here is what he had to say:

“In 5.1 we modified the “IsWebFarm” detection to detect if there are more than one server in the WebServers table.” Well, it just so happens this particular client we recently upgraded them to 5.1.x from a 4.9.x install which explains why I haven’t noticed this before (as for why we have more than one server in the WebServers table, that is for another blog). Continuing my conversation with Charles, he also informed me of some more details and changes to come. I think it is best to highlight those with a quick bullet list.

In 5.2 this is modified again.
In 5.1.x (All versions, all editions), the setting in the web.config means nothing.
The File Based Caching Provider (shipped with CE and PE) will be switched to, again, rely on the setting in the web.config.
The Web Request Provider (the one with PE only) will continue to rely on the WebServers table (ie. auto detection).

Thanks to Charles Nurse who saved me some discovery time!

Bubbling Up An Unhandled Exception From Assembly to Windows Service Causes Service Stop With No Logging

Scott Schecter — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 01:53:00 GMT

This one was very tricky to track down. We have a windows service that uses an assembly to transcode video files and upload them to a CDN. All of the logging of course takes place in the windows service. In our component the constructors of both the transcode and upload classes take a file full path as a parameter. We do a File.Exists() and if the file does not exist we throw an exception. Normally this is ideal as if an valid object cannot be created with the state given we want to know about it sooner rather than later. In our windows service we instantiate and perform the work of the upload or transcode objects within a for loop that has a try catch. In a non windows service the exception bubbled up will happily be caught and the iteration continues. However, it appears in a windows service it simply stops the iteration at that point. The service is not stopped in the Administrative Tools > Services MMC applet, nor is any information logged to the event viewer.

You spin me right round…

Ryan Wofford — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 20:23:07 GMT

Are you paying your agency to update your flash files on your site? If so, you could be getting taken...

Be Careful Applying Permissions between Security Groups on AWS EC2

Max Schneider — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:38:00 GMT

I have noticed that a couple of tutorials have gone into the basics for setting up DNN on AWS with two separate instances. One instance is the frontend web server and the other instance is a backend SQL server. Two security groups are created one for the Web server (WebGroup) and one for the SQL server (SQLGroup). This is a common setup that we have performed many times at AppTheory.

AppTheory at Open Force ‘09 - Vegas

bryan andrews — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:17:00 GMT

AppTheory will be at The DotNetNuke Open Force event again this year as an exhibitor. Come visit our booth!

DotNetNuke Gold Partner

bryan andrews — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:07:00 GMT

AppTheory has joined the newly formed DotNetNuke Partner program at the Gold Level and is now an official reseller of the DotNetNuke Professional Product.

DotNetNuke, SSL, Wild Card Certificates

Chris Paterra — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:49:08 GMT

In a previous blog I discussed how DotNetNuke can enforce SSL at the page level. Well, going a bit further into the SSL world within DotNetNuke uncovered a few more notes worth keeping in mind. First, you can utilize wild cart certificates using the built in DotNetNuke SSL implementation. To do this, go to Admin –> Set Settings (as host) and locate the SSL section and expand it. What you will see is similar to the screen shot below. You then need to set the SSL URL (the domain the certificate, standard or wildcard, is attached to).

Setting the SSL URL will route all SSL requests to that domain (in the example, www.dnnforums.com). Setting the Standard URL will route all non-SSL requests to the domain (in the example, www.dnnforums.net). Now, the good news here is that with this setup, all my http requests get routed to my .net domain and all https requests get routed to my .com domain. After testing, I have verified it works fine and properly routes domains based on http and https. However, there is one slight issue here. It appears that when doing this the core took only the anonymous use case in here. What that means, if your domains are different you are going to be prompted for a login after a switch depending on which domain you are on (of course, this only matters if the domains are different like our example here). Hopefully, the core can be altered to add a cookie for this domain as well during the login process.

Internet Explorer 8 ‘The XML page cannot be displayed’ When Rendering Image From HttpHandler

Scott Schecter — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 18:40:00 GMT

Recently we noticed an issue on a clients site where images being rendered from an HttpHandler would display the following browser error in Internet Explorer 8 ONLY. The XML page cannot be displayed Cannot view XML input using style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- An invalid character was found in text content. Error processing resource 'http://www.mydomain.com/mypagename.aspx'. Line... The image was rendered as expected in every other major browser we tested (e.g. Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc). I did a quick code review and upon cursory inspection I did not notice anything out of sorts. Since this issue only occurred when the images where rendered via the HttpHandler and it only occurred in Internet Explorer my gut told me it was something in the response object content type that was not quite right. This is usually the kind of issue that takes quite a bit of time to track down and is very difficult to debug, but I guess I lucked out on this one. The issue was the Internet Media Type for the jpeg image format. Allow me to illustrate further, we had a switch that set a string variable ‘format’ based upon the image format.

DotNetNuke, Telerik & Ajax

Chris Paterra — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:47:00 GMT

If you have worked with Telerik you are probably familiar with the “RadAjax” component which is a part of the ASP.NET Controls suite from them. Generally, you throw a RadAjaxManager on your page/control and you are pretty much set to have full Ajax functionality in your application. From here you can include/exclude controls and add a loading panel that can be shared by all panels on the page. Finally, you code your application pretty much like before, adding business logic in Page Load and button click events, and poof you have a full ajaxified application. While this works pretty much the same in any DotNetNuke module, it is important to do two things in your module otherwise you may not get the results you expect. The first is to set the SupportsPartialRendering equal to true. If just starting, this is done from the module definition for the specific control. Otherwise, it is done from a node in your dnn manifest file for your module. Next, the other thing you need to do is on Page_Init of your control you need to place a script manager on the page (if Ajax is installed). You can do this using the following code:

   1: If DotNetNuke.Framework.AJAX.IsInstalled Then

   2:     DotNetNuke.Framework.AJAX.RegisterScriptManager()

   3: End If

OR:

   1: if (DotNetNuke.Framework.AJAX.IsInstalled) {

   2:     DotNetNuke.Framework.AJAX.RegisterScriptManager();

   3: }

Auto Scaling and Elastic Load Balancing with Amazon Elastic Cloud Computing

Max Schneider — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 21:40:43 GMT

Last week I talked about how AppTheory uses Amazon CloudWatch to help monitor our DNN instances on AWS EC2. CloudWatch also allows AWS EC2 users to enable Auto Scaling. Auto Scaling allows for the seamless scaling of Amazon EC2 instances “during demand spikes to maintain performance.” Auto Scaling also allows for an application to gracefully scale down “during demand lulls to minimize costs.

How can DNN promote sustainability?

Ryan Wofford — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:29:04 GMT

Can a website save the world?