The personal blog of Erik van Ballegoij, DotNetNuke expert

Caching in DNN 5

Erik van Ballegoij — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:19:32 GMT

One of the hidden gems in DotNetNuke 5.0 is the new caching support in the CBO (Custom Business Objects) class. During the refactoring of DotNetNuke for the Cambrian release, caching was one of the things that was closely looked at, since caching was starting to cause major issues in the DNN 4.x branch.

Selecting profile properties the easy way

Erik van Ballegoij — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:48:29 GMT

Every once and a while you probably find yourself needing to create an overview of DNN users and some of their profile properties. For instance when your client wants to have that data in an excel spreadsheet….

Managing Recent Projects in Visual Studio (part 2)

Erik van Ballegoij — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 16:45:56 GMT

Right after I posted the blog about a tool I found to clear the Recent Projects list in Visual Studio, Maarten van Stam pointed me to a much better tool than that, MRU Cleaner from Bob DeRosa.

How to manage the Recent Projects list in Visual Studio

Erik van Ballegoij — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 14:05:32 GMT

Always when doing visual studio demo’s, I am having issues with a long list of previously opened projects. Not that I mind anyone seeing what projects i am involved with, but the screen gets cluttered, and its a lot harder to pick the right project for your demo.

tweetdeck / twitter search tip: filter your own tweets from the results

Erik van Ballegoij — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:28:17 GMT

As many people that are using Twitter, I am using TweetDeck to manage the information overload. One of the many usefull features of TweetDeck is that you can add a search column to your view. Many DotNetNuke tweeps are using this feature to filter on everything that is tweeted about DotNetNuke.

DotNetNuke 5 Extension packaging

Erik van Ballegoij — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 21:21:23 GMT

Today I released my first DNN 5 module (more about that here). It’s taken me on and off about a week to get the module properly packaged. Partly because of lack of documentation about the new extension manifest. So here are the things i found out during the packaging process… hope someone else is helped by this info as well.

Listing DotNetNuke Database versions in all your databases

Erik van Ballegoij — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 13:25:57 GMT

When you need to upgrade multiple DotNetNuke websites it is sometimes hard to figure out what version a specific site is. Of course, you could logon to all your sites, but that takes quite some time. If you have installed the databases of your sites in one sql server instance, there is another option available. You could open all databases, open the Version table, and check the highest version number in that table. This is still a lot of work though… however, it is something that can be automated with a little effort.

DotNetNuke 5 Tip: give non admins access to any admin page

Erik van Ballegoij — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:10:24 GMT

DNN 5 now has the option to give non admins access to admin modules. You can just put any admin module on a new page and give users access to that. An even easier thing to do is to just give non admins permissions to use a specific admin page.

Creating a DotNetNuke inline skinobject

Erik van Ballegoij — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:59:29 GMT

Last week I was asked to come up with a way to use the Page Icon in DotNetNuke as a source for a multi lingual enabled image on a page. Although this could have been done by creating a skinobject, I decided to pull this one off by creating an "inline" skinobject.. by lack of a better term.

Help! I am being blocked by Google!?

Erik van Ballegoij — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 13:47:21 GMT

Just another day in the live of a (ASP.NET) developer. If you are anything like me that you spend a considerable time of your day researching, and of course... Google is one of the tools of choice here.....Or is it?

Repairing the Search Results module in DotNetNuk 4.x

Erik van Ballegoij — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:54:15 GMT

Just recently i answered a question on the DotNetNuke forums about re installing the Search Results module. This is somewhat tricky as you cannot do it by hand.. it can only be done by sql script

SQL Server 2008 Developer Goodies

Erik van Ballegoij — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:15:02 GMT

Where it comes to using SQL Server features, I am a very late adopter. Not by choice, for all the DotNetNuke modules I create, I'd like to maintain backwards compatibility as much as possible, especially since DotNetNuke also fully supports MS SQL Server 2000.

AJAX extensions not available in fresh VS2008 installation

Erik van Ballegoij — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 18:51:49 GMT

I've spent a few days on a strange issue i had with a new VS2008 install: no available AJAX extensions

The Language SkinObject explained

Erik van Ballegoij — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:23:00 GMT

This blog is long overdue. In DotNetNuke 04.06.00 the language skinobject was beefed up to be much more versatile. Apart from just a dropdown menu, it can also display links to languages. Even though Lorraine blogged about the new appearance, there is much more to the skinobject than meets the eyes! The skinobject supports 2 display modes: dropdown menu and template based repeater (you can even use both at the same time). Apart from that, there is a common header and a common footer available (both templatable). All templates of the skinobject use the DNN core TokenReplace functionality as template engine. This means that you can control visible appearance of the language skin object to a great extent.

Preparing for an upgrade

Erik van Ballegoij — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:00:00 GMT

Today I had to upgrade an old DNN 3.2.2 multiportal installation to DNN 4.8.1. There are 3 major areas that changed in the past DotNetNuke versions: New contstraints and unique indexes on Files table DNN Membership provider Consolidation of http handlers in one assembly

Goodbye UserSwitcher hello IdentitySwitcher ...

Erik van Ballegoij — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 23:00:00 GMT

... or how I learned an old lesson: always check whether the name of the module you release doesnt actually exist somewhere else.

New DNN Forge project: UserSwitcher

Erik van Ballegoij — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:00:00 GMT

A while ago i created a small utility that allowed me to easily switch between users in a portal. This is extremely usefull if you are developing a module or a site and you want to test different permissions for different users. The current version of the module allows you to select whether host users can be switched to as well. Doing this means that you will never have to log on to your site again... NB: Never use this module in a live environment, as it will make your site VERY insecure! You can download this module from http://www.codeplex.com/userswitcher, and vote for it on the DNN Forge Page (cross posted from my blog on...

Define your own e-mail validation in DNN 4.5

Erik van Ballegoij — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 13:03:00 GMT

While DotNetNuke 4.4.x already validates emails in the user profile with a regular expression, this regular expression could not be changed by portal admins. In DNN 4.5, the regular expression used to validate email address can be altered in the User Settings Page

Upgrading DotNetNuke

Erik van Ballegoij — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 18:09:00 GMT

A frequent question in the forums is "How to upgrade my DotNetNuke install".. I thought i'd post a brief guide here for easy ref

HOW TO: Move a DotNetNuke installation

Erik van Ballegoij — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 20:25:00 GMT

A lot of posts in the Install It! forum are from people wonder how to move their DNN installation from their development environment to production. In a nutshell, this is the process:

Migrating databases from one server to the other

Erik van Ballegoij — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 01:30:00 GMT

This night, I had to move a complete set of databases (20 in total) from one SQL server to another. In the past that has always taken me quite some time, so this time I set out to try to do this in a more efficient manner.