The personal blog of Erik van Ballegoij, DotNetNuke expert

8 tips to make Gemini work for you

Erik van Ballegoij — Sat, 25 May 2013 17:57:00 GMT

Recently we updated our issue tracker to the latest version (5.1.7) of Countersoft Gemini. It seems like the application was built up from the ground up, and we now have a lot of new cool features. I spend a good part of my day in “Gemini”, as it is the truth we live by. I realize though, that if you are just an occasional visitor, it may be less obvious how things have changed.

Securing your DotNetNuke site in 5 simple steps

Erik van Ballegoij — Mon, 13 May 2013 13:05:00 GMT

Securing the login of your DotNetNuke site is very important, but often neglected for the wrong reasons. It shouldn’t be because SSL adds a performance overhead to your site. It shouldn’t be because SSL certificates are expensive either. But most of all, it should not be because it is hard!

DDRMenu Razor Templates in DotNetNuke 7.x

Erik van Ballegoij — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 14:22:00 GMT

One of the lesser known, but very powerful template options of the DotNetNuke DDR Menu, originally created by Mark Allan, is Razor. A while back, Joe Brinkman had a very interesting blog post, combining razor templating with taxonomy to come to very advanced menu layouts. Sadly, DotNetNuke 7.0 introduced a breaking change in the way Razor was supported that specifically impacted the DDR Menu implementation of it. Although the issue had been on our radar for some time, it was not a very easy one to fix… Well.. the wait is over, in DotNetNuke 7.0.4, this is finally fixed.

How To: configure SMTP logging in DotNetNuke

Erik van Ballegoij — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 13:30:00 GMT

Sometimes it is very hard to troubleshoot SMTP issues that occur with your DotNetNuke application. Sure, you can view the SMTP log of your mail server, but that may be either misconfigured, or not even accessible at all (this is especially true in a shared hosting environment).

Luckily, there is a very simple way to enable logging for all network traffic DotNetNuke is generating, which includes SMTP traffic.

(Re-)Announcing the DotNetNuke Announcement Module

Erik van Ballegoij — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 01:11:00 GMT

Creating a good module makes it sometimes very hard to improve upon that. The (still current) old release of the DotNetNuke Announcements module was such a module. Created in an era long forgotten, as a DotNetNuke 4 module, it was quite good at the time when it was released. The announcement module is a fairly simple module that is a useful tool on most websites, while at the same time showcasing important DotNetNuke API features, and thus playing also a role in helping developers understand DotNetNuke module development.

I feel pretty bad when I look at the last release date of the module though. May 15, 2009. More than 3 and a half years ago. The module might have been a good module back than, but it certainly is not anymore right now. What was regarded as using best practices back then, is currently not much more than using legacy code.

Using advanced caching in your own code

Erik van Ballegoij — Sun, 18 Nov 2012 00:25:00 GMT

A long time ago I blogged about the caching enhancements in DotNetNuke 5, and a recent blog post by Mitchel Sellers about using DotNetNuke Caching in Custom Modules triggered me into revisiting my old post.

In his excellent post, Mitchel describes a way to abstract from some of the available methods in the DotNetNuke .Common.Utilities.Datacache class. This is indeed a great way to simplify using the DotNetNuke entity cache in your own modules.

A new beginning

Erik van Ballegoij — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 02:45:00 GMT

After my move to DotNetNuke Corp. I felt the need to make some modifications to my blog site. Having used the original DotNetNuke 4 MinimalExtropy site for quite some time, it was the right moment to move on in this respect as well.

Moving On!

Erik van Ballegoij — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 15:06:00 GMT

Today marks a big change for me. As of today I will be working for DotNetNuke Corporation. There, I’ve said it!

The past couple of weeks have been very exciting for me. Last January I was approached by DotNetNuke Corporation with the question whether or not I was interested in becoming part of a new European office, to be established in Amsterdam. I would be wearing multiple hats: helping out with both support and sales, and also doing evangelism.

Installing DotNetNuke on Windows 2008R2

Erik van Ballegoij — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 13:50:00 GMT

Windows 2008r2 is good in so many ways, I can never list them all. Of course, being the server variant of Windows 7, it means you can use all the nice interface enhancements that are also available in Windows 7.

Both Windows 7 and Windows 2008r2 have IIS 7.5 on board. One of the most interesting enhancements in IIS 7.5 is something called the Application Pool Identity (AppPoolIdentity). In Windows 2008r2 this is the default setting for new application pools. With this setting, IIS can create a unique virtual windows account, using the name of the application pool. Accounts created like this have the same networking capabilities as the well known NETWORKSERVICE account, however, because they are unique, they can also be used to secure physical files in your system.

So, lets see how we can use this to quickly install DotNetNuke in a secure manner.

Tricking Google Mail to receive on postmaster@yourdomain.com

Erik van Ballegoij — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 12:40:00 GMT

For a couple of months now, I am a very happy user of Google Apps premier. Although I am not very fond of Google Docs (I like MS Office too much I guess…), I love Google Mail. The near native support for MS Outlook, great support for mobile devices (especially if you’re on Android), combined with the large, 25 GB inbox, and a very friendly pricing of €40 per year, makes it a very hard to beat offer.

Getting a list of all sites served by IIS

Erik van Ballegoij — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 08:54:00 GMT

In order to prepare for an upcoming move of all sites hosted on our webservers to a new location, one of the tasks was to list which sites are served by IIS, including all hostheaders defined for those sites. The purpose of this list is to identify all domains we are handling.

UPC Zakelijk slechte kwaliteit

Erik van Ballegoij — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 05:05:00 GMT

Net een blog in het Engels geschreven over wat ik allemaal al heb moeten doorstaan met UPC Zakelijk. (Dutch summary of previous English post)

Disappointed by UPC

Erik van Ballegoij — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 04:49:00 GMT

The last 7 weeks or so i have been trying to switch my internet / phone connection to a different provider. Previously i was a client with BBeyond, a business only provider in the Netherlands. UPC had an offer i could not resist: a business level subscription, with a 99.9 % uptime guarantee, and a promise to send a technician within 4 hours in case of trouble. Also, a fixed ip addresses 2 phone lines are included. And all of this for a mere 42 euro per month.

OpenForce Sample Module

Erik van Ballegoij — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 07:44:21 GMT

In my OpenForce session I introduced a sample module that builds on top of the DotNetNuke starterkit compiled VB module template. That template is pretty outdated and contains patterns that have been enhanced long since.

Caching in DNN 5

Erik van Ballegoij — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:19:00 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 18:48:00 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 16:45:00 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 14:05:00 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 09:28:00 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 21:21:00 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 13:25:00 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 18:10:00 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.

Cleaning module data after portal deletion

Erik van Ballegoij — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:14:00 GMT

Yesterday I spent the better part of the day deleting portals from a larger DNN installation, for the purpose of creating a smaller copy of the same installation with a subset of portals. This post is meant to be a note to self to look into multi portal deletion sometime, and to remind me of a script that needs to run to clear out data for a few specific modules...

Creating a DotNetNuke inline skinobject

Erik van Ballegoij — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:59:00 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 13:47:00 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?