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Ashley MacIsaac Royalties

omacdon.nospam@nospam.learnmsnet.com (admin) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:35:24 -0500

Now this is a novel idea. Ashley MacIsaac is 33 years old and is offering 50% of all of his future revenue that he generates till he dies in an auction on ebay. The link below will take you to this offer online. Now that could be a scary proposition or it could be downright profitable for someone in the long run. The opening bid that was setup for the auction was 1.5 million and only open to people from Canada.

Ashley MacIsaac Royalties - (eBay.ca item 220252234598 end time 07-Jul-08 20:22:53 EDT)

So how about someone else sell off half their earnings for a lifetime. I can’t see anyone giving me very much for the future half of my earnings. Unless it’s the ex-wife looking for it.

DNN 4.8.4 Released

omacdon.nospam@nospam.learnmsnet.com (admin) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 20:52:04 -0500

DotNetNuke 4.8.4 is now available for public download:

http://downloads.dotnetnuke.com

This security release contains solutions for 3 low severity security vulnerabilities reported to us since the 4.8.3 release ( DNN 2008-8-L, DNN 2008-9-L, DNN 2008-10-L ). As per our policy, you can read the security bulletins on our Security Policy page:

http://security.dotnetnuke.com

After dogfooding the package over the past week on dotnetnuke.com and experiencing no compatibility issues, we promoted it for public release today.

Quoted from Shaun Walker on DotNetNuke

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DNN 4.8.4 being being tested

omacdon.nospam@nospam.learnmsnet.com (admin) — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 07:23:31 -0500

As we wait for the Cambrian release of DotNetNuke, we have another service release in our imminent future. As you can see from the image DotNetNuke.com is currently testing the next version of the 4.8 release for our consumption. This follows on the release of a few weeks ago of version 4.8.3 that had several security issues that needed to be resolved. Here's hoping that we quickly get access to this new release and that it doesn't hinder the core team's ability to get us the next great major release of the platform.

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DotNetNuke 4.8.3 has been released to the public

omacdon.nospam@nospam.learnmsnet.com (admin) — Tue, 27 May 2008 20:34:40 -0500

With the continued wait for the release of Cambrian, we have been treated to another release of the 4.0 variety.

This release fixes 4 security vulnerabilities that have become obvious over the past couple of weeks. These security concerns can be found at http://security.dotnetnuke.com

This release was tested on the DotNetNuke site over the weekend and then released today. This allowed time for business owners and other users that were on holiday to have the weekend not to worry about performing updates to their web site because of security issues.

The new release can be downloaded at http://downloads.dotnetnuke.com/

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Introducing Waegis : Keyvan Nayyeri

omacdon.nospam@nospam.learnmsnet.com (admin) — Mon, 12 May 2008 23:01:00 -0500

Interesting note for Blogengine.net developers who are looking for some alternate extension ideas. There is a new spam filtering service that is currently being placed out there in the wild in alpha format. This is written entirely in .NET and should be something worth looking at in the next couple of months to see if he can carry through with his ambitious plans for this new service.

Introducing Waegis

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Shancer Software release Encrypt web.config 1.0 for DNN

omacdon.nospam@nospam.learnmsnet.com (admin) — Mon, 12 May 2008 22:50:46 -0500

Shancer Software has released an awesome host module for use with the DotNetNuke framework. This module installs easily and creates it's own host menu item and page with the module already installed.

With the module installed it was easy to encrypt my connection string section and my app settings section of my web.config file. The site's performance was not impacted at all and continued on as normal with all testing.

This module solves the issue of not being able to secure entries within the config file securely. It is a simple module developed in a professional manner to make security of your config file a sure thing. The module can be purchased at Snowcovered. More information about the module can be found at Shancer Software's website.

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Get News and Alerts about BlogEngine.net

omacdon.nospam@nospam.learnmsnet.com (admin) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:29:14 -0500

For anyone who uses the blogengine.net blog for their site and would like to be kept up to date. Check out the following link to get information about vulnerabilites and news about what is happening with our beloved blog engine.

BlogEngine Alerts Subscription

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DotNetNuke Tips & Tricks #5 - Host Settings, Friendly URLs

omacdon.nospam@nospam.learnmsnet.com (admin) — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 07:10:11 -0500

Having been concentrating on projects as of late, I have gotten away from doing timely updates for this blog as well as getting this series of tips & tricks updated regularly.

Continuing from the last one we find ourselves in the Friendly URL Settings section of the Host Settings. This section allows us to define how the Friendly URL's will work within the framework and where to redirect them to be acted upon.

In a new installation of DotNetNuke we will have 5 items defined in the site to be acted upon. Under the title for Friendly URL Settings we have are asked the question "Use Friendly Urls?" with a checkbox. If this checkbox is checked then this tells DNN to use the following types of urls: http://localhost/dnn482/home/tabid/36/default.aspx this looks better than http://localhost/dnn482/default.aspx?tabid=36. Plus has the added benefit that search engines are much more appreciative of the first one and allows your site to be indexed better.

Under the checkbox 5 items are listed with edit and delete buttons and an Add New Rule link under them. These are the current rules that have been defined for use within your site. Lets take a look at them.

Match: .*DesktopDefault.aspx(.*) - Replace with: ~/Default.aspx$1
Originally the older systems use DesktopDefault.aspx as the main start page so this allows an old search results or favorites to be redirected to the new Default.aspx page.
Match: .*EditModule.aspx(.*) - Replace with: ~/Default.aspx$1
Same basic thing old sites used an EditModule.aspx page to allow the editing of a module this has been changed to allow redirection through the default.aspx page.
Match: .*/TabId/(\d+)(.*)/Logoff.aspx - Replace with: ~/Admin/Security/Logoff.aspx?tabid=$1
This redirects any logoff requests through the admin logoff.aspx page.
Match: .*/TabId/(\d+)(.*)/rss.aspx - Replace with: ~/rss.aspx?TabId=$1
This redirects any rss feed requests through the main rss.aspx page with the tabid attached.
Match: [^?]*/TabId/(\d+)(.*) - Replace with: ~/Default.aspx?TabId=$1
This redirects the request back through the main default.aspx page.

These five are the most common ones that anyone will ever need but gives us the ability to add new types of extensions or to re-map old links to new pages within the site if this was replacing a static html site. As you can see from the above the friendly urls are created using regular expressions.

This feature when it was introduced greatly expanded the capabilities of DNN as well as improving the adoption by web developers. Previously to this feature being added search engine rankings were not very good for sites using this framework because the search engines didn't like the querystring being used with the pages.

Hope this article helps with the understanding of Friendly Url Settings within the Host Settings of your DotNetNuke site.

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DotNetNuke 4.8.1 has been released

omacdon.nospam@nospam.learnmsnet.com (admin) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 08:00:42 -0500

For those that don't keep a close watch on the DNN site this release has been apparent for a few weeks. While checking on the status of a couple of projects in the release cycle I had noticed the testing of the HTML/Text Module Version 4.8.1. This was the first clue that we had a new version coming down the pipe.

Then for the last week we've had the DotNetNuke home page testing RC1 so the writing has been on the wall. DotNetNuke has released a press release about it at their website called DotNetNuke® embraces Visual Studio 2008. This explains that this release makes DotNetNuke fully Visual Studio 2008 compliant as well as embracing the latest version of Windows Server 2008 and IIS 7.0.

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Visual Studio 2008 Web Development Hot Fix Available

omacdon.nospam@nospam.learnmsnet.com (admin) — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 19:23:21 -0500

Microsoft has released a hot fix for Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Web Developer Express 2008 that fixes several issues with the HTML Editor within Visual Studio.

This fixes some of the following issues:

Source editor freezes for a few seconds when typing in a page with a custom control that has more than two levels of sub-properties.
“View Code” right-click context menu command takes a long time to appear with web application projects.
Visual Studio has very slow behavior when opening large HTML documents.
Visual Studio has responsiveness issues when working with big HTML files with certain markup.
The Tab/Shift-Tab (Indent/Un-indent) operation is slow with large HTML selections.

This fix can be downloaded from Microsoft here.

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How to sort a DataTable

omacdon.nospam@nospam.learnmsnet.com (admin) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 16:50:12 -0500

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

  12:              sortDirection = "ASC"

  13:      End Select

  14:      dtTable.DefaultView.Sort = String.Format(sortFormat, columnKey, sortDirection)

  15:      Return dtTable.DefaultView.Table

  16:  End Function

C# Version

   1:  private DataTable AlphabeticSort(DataTable dtTable, int sortOrder)

   2:  {

   3:      DataSet dsSorted = new DataSet();

   4:      string columnKey = "TabName";

   5:      string sortDirection = "";

   6:      string sortFormat = "{0} {1}";

   7:      switch(sortOrder)

   8:      {

   9:          case 0:

  10:              sortDirection = "ASC";

  11:              break;

  12:          case 1:

  13:              sortDirection = "DESC";

  14:              break;

  15:          default:

  16:              sortDirection = "ASC";

  17:              break;

  18:      }

  19:      dtTable.DefaultView.Sort = string.Format(sortFormat, columnKey, sortDirection);

  20:      return dtTable.DefaultView.Table;

  21:      }

As you can see the code is very familiar between the two. This works excellent for doing an alphabetic sort and very fast as well.

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New Blogengine.net extensions available

omacdon.nospam@nospam.learnmsnet.com (admin) — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 23:01:07 -0500

I'm going to be creating a page of extensions that are available for BE very soon. But until then I thought it would be beneficial for me and also for all my readers that are using BlogEngine.net to have an archive of the extensions as I find them on the Internet. Here will be the first round of posting for everyone to enjoy.

Simple BlogEngine.net Download Counter Extension - Al Nyvelt has released his simple counter into the wild. This counter is designed to simply count the downloads of files that are handled by the file handler and not simply by downloading them from the site itself. This is just a basic one and does not display the counter to the public only once you login do you see the results with the file link.
Download Counter Extension - This download counter provides more detailed information in the admin section about the files that were downloaded and by what host.
Google Tracker Extension - Chris Blankenship has released a basic Google Analytics tracker extension that simply allows you to insert the tracking id for your account.
Track file downloads - BlogEngine Extension and Control - And not to be outdone Chris Blankenship has also created a file download counter that not only does the file downloads but stores the information into an xml file with the ip address, date and number of times the file was downloaded. So this brings the count up to 3 so far on the download counter extensions.
Updated DotNetKicks button - Chris has also released an updated DotNetKicks extension for us. It has a couple of improvements over the original one written at Flawless code's website.
Page Load Time - BlogEngine.Net Control - This one is not an extension per se, but is a control for displaying the time that it takes for a page to load within the BlogEngine framework.
CommentRelish - BlogEngine.Net Extension - Chris has created an extension based on the Wordpress plugin of the same name. This extension is developed to increase the readership of your blog by sending out an email to first time commentors on your blog.
New BlogEngine.NET Extension - Toolbox - This extension by Danny Douglass allows you to save links and manage them through an admin page on your BE site.

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Free Windows Server 2008 E-Book From Microsoft

omacdon.nospam@nospam.learnmsnet.com (admin) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:55:22 -0500

Microsoft has released a new e-book that includes excerpts from two Microsoft Press books.

1. Introducing Windows Server 2008 by Mitch Tulloch
Take a first look at the next generation of Windows Server—with insights direct from the popular author and Microsoft MVP Mitch Tulloch and the Microsoft Windows Server team. With this insider’s introduction, you will get to preview and evaluate Windows Server 2008. You will learn how to use new features that help you improve security, performance, reliability, and operational efficiency, as well as how to automate deployment and administration.

2. Microsoft Windows PowerShell Step By Step by Ed Wilson
Learn Microsoft Windows PowerShell —one step at a time—with practical, hands-on instruction from Microsoft’s leading scripting trainer, Ed Wilson. Work at your own pace and build practical system administration skills as you learn how to use Windows PowerShell to administer Microsoft Windows®, Microsoft Exchange, and other Microsoft technologies.

Free Windows Server 2008 e-book offer and Microsoft Press newsletter to get access.

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DotNetNuke Introduction found at Tech Republic

omacdon.nospam@nospam.learnmsnet.com (admin) — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:29:05 -0500

Tony Patton provides a nice introduction to DotNetNuke for anyone who is not familiar with the framework. It does not go into great depth about DNN, but gives a brief overview and may get a few more people to at least check out this great application.

The article is called Develop a fully functional site with DotNetNuke and can be found on the Tech Republic blog site.

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Microsoft bids $44.6 Billion for Yahoo

omacdon.nospam@nospam.learnmsnet.com (admin) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 07:57:50 -0500

Well now if this isn't a breaking story now what is? Having been part of the Internet community and working online now for over 12 years myself. It's amazing to see the #1 web site on the Internet getting an offer to be bought out like this.

But as usual for Microsoft, if they can't get to be #1 in a market lets buy ourselves that position. So with the look of Yahoo being in trouble with them laying off people over the last week. Microsoft has taken it upon themselves to try and buy them out. Microsoft has placed a bid of $31 per share which is a 62% increase on the closing price Thursday of $19.18/share. This purchase would be done through stock and cash. As more news comes available I will update this blog post.

Update - 8:11 atl

This announcement came today unexpectedly and was a follow up of to a letter that Microsoft received from Yahoo last February. And is a direct attempt by Microsoft to position themselves better in their fight for dominance in the Search and Online advertising areas against competitor Google.

Under the terms of the proposed deal, Yahoo shareholders would have the option of receiving cash or Microsoft common shares as compensation for their shares with the total purchase being a 50/50 split between cash and stock.

Microsoft intends to offer significant compensation packages to maintain Yahoo engineers, key leaders and employees. It believes the the takeover could receive approval and close in the second half of 2008.

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